Menace : Gates Urges 2 Approaches to Combat Gang Problem

Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates called Wednesday for sweeping measures to deal with the growing street-gang menace, including a Peace Corps-style program to provide education and job training for young people in inner-city areas.

Speaking at a hearing of the state’s Task Force on Gangs and Drugs, Gates declared that law enforcement alone cannot solve the gang problem. He likened living conditions in some inner cities to those in the most underdeveloped Third World countries.

But he also called for tough punishment of street hoodlums and drug traffickers. He urged, for example, that unused military bases be renovated to house convicted gang members.

“We keep wanting to build these dumb prisons,” said Gates, in his often-emotional testimony. “Take some of those old bases and put some barbed wire around it, some land mines outside of it. Why not?”

Gates said that courts dealing specifically with gang-related crimes could provide more consistent, tougher sentencing of gang members. He also declared that probation violations should be dealt with more strictly and said assault rifles should be banned because they are now “the gun of choice among gangs . . . and police should not have to stand up to them.”

Kept Secret

However, two street gang members, who testified by loudspeaker from an adjoining room in order to keep their identities secret, questioned whether even the harshest of penalties against drug selling or drive-by shootings would curb gang violence.

“I wouldn’t be thinking about the death penalty at the time. I’d just be thinking about getting away,” asserted a 23-year-old Crips gang member, currently in County Jail for possession of an Uzi semiautomatic rifle.

Another street gang witnesses testified that he has sold rock cocaine wholesale to members of rival gangs. When it comes to business, he explained, he does not think in terms of red and blue, the colors associated with the rival Crips and Bloods street gangs.

“Money has one color,” the gang member asserted. “Green.”

In all, more than 20 police officials, judges, community organizers and gang members testified at the first session of a two-day Los Angeles hearing sponsored by the California Council on Criminal Justice. The task force, chaired by former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Robert H. Philibosian, plans to issue recommendations to state officials after a series of six statewide hearings concluding in July.

‘Crisis Proportions’

But with 387 gang-related murders committed in Los Angeles County last year, Philibosian emphasized, the problem of street gang violence “has reached crisis proportions” in California.

Fueling the violence, he added, is the sale of rock cocaine and other illicit drugs, which provides the economic means by which many gang members make their living and are able to purchase high-powered weapons to further their criminal activities.

Philibosian said the hearings, which began earlier this month in Sacramento and Oakland, have already clearly demonstrated the need for anti-gang, anti-drug education programs at the elementary school level statewide.

Sheriff Sherman Block, who is responsible for Los Angeles County’s overcrowded jail system, agreed on the need for both elementary school education programs and the use of military bases.

Block, citing the 1,400 gang-related murders that have taken place in Los Angeles County during the last five years, compared the level of violence locally to that in Northern Ireland or Lebanon.

The sheriff, who must occasionally release prisoners early because of a lack of jail space, said military bases could ease the difficulty of finding sites for new prisons because most proposals are not “suitable and acceptable to the community.”

Problem Mushroomed

Block also called for the creation of a joint federal-local task force in Los Angeles to help fight the gang-related drug trafficking problem, which has mushroomed to cities from Seattle to the nation’s capital.

According to Inglewood Mayor Edward Vincent, street gang members from his city have recently been identified as selling drugs in Seattle, Oklahoma City, Tacoma, Wash., and St. Louis. Last week, he said, members of the Inglewood Family Gangsters were discovered holding a “seminar” on drug sales with members of other gangs in St. Louis.

Meanwhile, police reported Wednesday that 10 people were wounded in five drive-by shootings late Tuesday and early Wednesday in South and East Los Angeles.