Gang mayhem grips LA
Pastor Dale Morgan
Gang mayhem grips LA
*
A bloody conflict between Hispanic and black gangs is spreading across
Los Angeles. Hundreds are dying as whole districts face the threat of
ethnic cleansing. Paul Harris reports from the epicentre of America's
new urban warfare
Sunday March 18, 2007
The Observer
Father Greg Boyle keeps a grim count of the young gang members he has
buried. Number 151 was Jonathan Hurtado, 18 - fresh out of jail. Now the
kindly, bearded Jesuit mourns him. 'The day he got out I found him a
job. He never missed a day. He was doing really well,' Boyle says.
But Hurtado made a mistake: he went back to his old neighbourhood in
east Los Angeles. While sitting in a park, Hurtado was approached by a
man on a bike who said to him: 'Hey, homie, what's up?' He then shot
Hurtado four times. 'You can't come back. Not even for a visit,' says
Boyle, who has worked for two decades against LA's gang culture.
Boyle's Los Angeles, where daily slaughter is a grim reality, is a world
away from the glamorous Hollywood hills, Malibu beaches and Sunset Strip
- the celebrity-drenched city that David Beckham and Posh Spice will
soon make their home.
Boyle's Los Angeles is where an estimated 120,000 gang members across
five counties battle over turf, pride and drugs. It is a city of
violence as a new race war escalates between new Hispanic gangs and
older black groups, each trying to ethnically cleanse the other. Mayor
Antonio Villaraigosa, who has referred to his city as 'the gang capital
of America', has launched a crackdown on the new threat.
The latest front is the tiny strip of turf known as Harbor Gateway, a
nest of streets between malls and office blocks. It was here, just
before Christmas, that Cheryl Green, a 14-year-old fond of junk food and
television, died. At school she had just written a poem beginning: 'I am
black and beautiful. I wonder how I shall live in the future.' She never
found out. As she stood on a corner talking with friends, two Hispanic
members of the neighbourhood's notorious 204th Street gang walked up and
opened fire, killing Green and wounding three others. They were targeted
because they were black. Traditionally the outside view of LA gangs has
been of black youths like the Bloods and the Crips and their countless
subsets. It focused on the streets of Compton and South-Central and the
culture of gangsta rap. But Hispanic gangs are in the ascendant,
spreading across America.
They have names such as Mara Salvatrucha, La Mirada Locos and Barrio Van
Nuys, and now the 204th Street gang - who made it clear that they will
kill innocent girls to force black families off their turf.
Last year there were 269 gang-related killings in LA. Gang-related crime
leaped 15.7 per cent last year, as most other types of crime fell. Hate
crimes against black people have surged. With a rapidly growing Hispanic
population, LA's gang culture is shifting. It means that being black in
the wrong neighbourhood can get you killed.
Green's murder was the latest in a line of killings by the 204th Street
gang. In 1997, 11-year-old Marquis Wilbert was killed on his bike. In
2001, Robert Hightower, 19, was killed. In 2003, Eric Butler, 39, was
shot dead trying to protect his daughter from being harassed. There are
streets that blacks have been forbidden to cross.
Green's death brought the gang war between 'brown and black' to public
awareness. Next week a summit will be held called the Black and Brown
Strategy Meeting which aims to head off a race war. 'All of the signs
are there that a racial war is going to explode in this city,' says
Khalid Shah, director of Stop the Violence, one of the groups organising
the meeting. Memories of the 1992 Rodney King riots, which claimed 53
lives, remain fresh, but Shah believes that worse is ahead. 'It will be
10 times bigger than what happened after King. You are looking at an
event which could not only paralyse an entire city but an entire state,'
he warns.
Green's death sparked Villaraigosa's crackdown. The police took the
unprecedented step of publishing a list of the 11 worst gangs, including
204th Street. They vowed to go after them with police, FBI agents and
injunctions to prevent members meeting. An extra 50 police were assigned
to anti-gang duties in San Fernando Valley. In south LA, a team of 120
detectives and 10 FBI agents has been set up. An extra 18 officers have
been put into Harbor Gateway. But Angelenos have seen it all before. The
city's history is littered with anti-gang initiatives, and what the new
effort shows is just how widespread the gangs have become. They have
spread into the San Fernando Valley, an area previously famed for
suburban prosperity. Last year one area of the north Valley saw a 160
per cent rise in gang crime.
Publishing the 'hit list' could backfire. In the warped gang
sub-culture, being on the list is a badge of pride. The lesson of the
204th Street gang seems apt. They number only a few dozen members in a
tiny strip of city that was open fields half a century ago, but killing
blacks has propelled them from obscurity to enviable notoriety.
'Putting out a list was a bad idea. Groups that don't make the list will
want to be on it. They don't exactly think rationally,' said Alex
Alonso, a gang historian who has testified in more than 100 court cases.
Yet there is hope. Alfonso 'Chino' Visuet, 23, was sucked into the gang
life as a teenager. There was the lure of excitement and riches, the
push of a difficult home life. 'People who join a gang are always
running away from something. They flee to the gang,' Visuet says.
Visuet is not running any more. He works for Father Boyle's Homeboy
Industries (homeboy-industries.org), a project that helps people leave
gang life. It provides jobs, an education, pays to have gang tattoos
removed and gives counselling. It aims to remove the circumstances that
lead to crime: poverty, abuse and unemployment. It is staffed almost
entirely by former gang members and has spun off a bakery, a silk-screen
printers and a restaurant. 'You have to address the lethal absence of
hope. I have never seen a hopeful person join a gang,' Boyle says.
It worked for Visuet. He starts college this autumn and wants to be a
probation officer. 'I was on the edge of doing something that would ruin
my life, either by doing violence or having it done to me. That's over
now,' he says.
For the moment it is organisations like Homeboy Industries that pick up
the slack. Father Boyle has a catchphrase: 'Nothing stops a bullet like
a job.' But that can be a hard message to get across in a city whose
political classes see gangs as primarily a police issue. That is not the
way it is on the street.
Visuet despairs at the conflict. 'A brown gang member now just sees a
black gang member. What they don't see is how that person comes from the
same place they do. They might have a mother who is an alcoholic as well
or a father who beats on them. They have the same story,' he says.
Boyle and others have mixed feelings about the crackdown. The road to
LA's problems is littered with failed plans and policing, and
incompetence. Over the past decade the main anti-gang scheme, LA
Bridges, has spent more than $100m yet keeps no record of whether those
it helps leave gang life or return to it.
Then there is political scheming. The list of 11 gangs, critics say, was
drawn up deliberately to present a 'balance' by covering the whole city.
Politicians use the presence of a high-profile gang to act tough on law
and order and police chiefs use it as a way of upping manpower. 'It is a
ridiculous list,' says Alonso.
LA is a city of two worlds - Hollywood and gangs. On a two-lane highway
that roars through the middle of Harbor Gateway, a few hundred yards
from where Cheryl Green was gunned down, there is a billboard for a new
TV show called Sons of Hollywood. It shows three rich young men against
a backdrop of palm trees. It claims to be a 'reality' show, but for most
of the impoverished, racially torn citizens it is nothing more than a
fantasy.