Los Angeles Daily News

Getting tough just isn't enough
By Mariel Garza
Saturday, December 06, 2003 -

"WE gangs of L.A. will never die ... just multiply," rapped Ice-T -- rather prophetically, it turns out -- in the opening scenes of the movie "Colors."

This seminal film about Los Angeles street gangs opened in the spring of 1988 to much controversy, public condemnation and civic soul-searching. After a few scattered incidents of violence that may or may not have been related, some theaters banned the movie, fearful of attracting real gangsters in their blue Crips or red Bloods bandannas. Community groups slammed the depiction of street life, saying it glorified gangsters and their criminal lifestyles.

I saw "Colors" in San Francisco with a college friend, who had grown up in the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles that were the focus of the movie.

It was a slice of real life for him, though with some annoyingly goofy Hollywooding-up. Not so for me. Like many non-Angelenos, I was shocked by the graphic violence depicted in the tale of two Los Angeles Police Department officers, members of the the now-disgraced and disbanded anti-gang, CRASH units, which stood for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums. I was on the edge of my seat.

"Colors" was groundbreaking, defining for the first time to America the truly terrifying levels of gangsterism in Los Angeles -- 70,000 gang members, 387 gang murders the year before, a police force woefully under-equipped.

How quaint it all seemed when I caught the flick on TV the other night, now an Angeleno used to living with entrenched gang activity -- the taggings, shootings and LAPD helicopters waking me up in the middle of the night.

How quaint, and utterly depressing.

Fifteen years after the opening of "Colors," after countless wars declared on the ever-growing numbers of street gang members, after millions of dollars sunk into gang prevention, intervention, detection and prosecution, not only have we not managed to solve the gang problem, but it's grown worse -- much worse.

The Bloods and Crips are still here, as are growing numbers of Latino gangs. There are now more than 100,000 identified gang members in Los Angeles. In 2002, Los Angeles was the murder capital of the country, with 658 killings, 334 of them gang-related.

The firepower used by gang members is even more sophisticated and deadly, and the LAPD remains a very thin blue line. CRASH doesn't exist any more, and the department operates under a federal consent decree after a scandal that exposed the Rampart Division anti-gang unit to be about as criminal as the gangs.

I turned to Los Angeles gang expert Wes McBride to help me understand what's gone wrong. A retired L.A. County Sheriff's Department sergeant, McBride worked gang crimes for years in East Los Angeles, and now shares what he's learned a president of the California Gang Investigators Association.

"There's no easy answer," McBride said. Most of the problem has been a lack of real commitment to prevention programs, he said. We throw money at them for a few months or years, then forget about them. Our enforcement efforts roller-coaster from one extreme to another without any consistency.

But it hasn't stopped people from trying to stop gangs through other means.

At the moment, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein is pushing Congress to adopt the Gang Prevention and Effective Deterrence Act of 2003. It would provide $650 million over five years for anti-gang efforts by law enforcement, much of it likely ending up in California to fund well-meaning programs such as those administered by Sheriff Lee Baca, LAPD Chief William Bratton and others.

While I recognize the need for more gang-fighting programs, injunctions, prosecutions, whatever it takes, I've got some serious doubts that any of it will do much more than fill up the jails with gang members -- for a time.

Hasn't it occurred to someone that perhaps we've been going about this all wrong? When you've spent more than two decades in a losing battle, it might make sense to regroup and re-evaluate, perhaps look deeper at the problem.

"We don't address the social causation factors very well," McBride said. "Parents don't give a damn about kids, for one. You can't legislate that. And we're certainly not solving poverty. No matter what people say, gangs stem from poverty."

Unless we start getting a handle on some of these larger issues, the next 15 years aren't likely to see much of an improvement in convincing kids not to join gangs. They're just an outgrowth of the realities of our society. More and more, law-abiding urban citizens will turn to isolationism, to gated communities and private security, or move to safe suburbs. And the gang-infested neighborhoods will get worse.

It could become like the movie "Escape From New York," McBride jokes, when the law-abiding citizens left town and the urban core was turned into a giant prison with the inmates left to fend for themselves.

It's like a war, you know what I'm saying.

People don't even understand.

They don't even know what they dealing with.

You wanna get rid of the gangs it's gonna take a lot of work,

But people don't understand the size of this,

This is no joke, man, this is real."

Fifteen years, and Ice-T's anthem is more apropos than ever.