Officer’s Death in Gang Clash Galvanizes Erie : Crime: Crack-dealing, gun-slinging juveniles are no longer a hallmark of the big city. The plague has invaded Middle America.

Erie’s East Side is the kind of quiet, working-class neighborhood where motorists pay for gas after they pump, not before. It’s the kind of place where churches don’t lock their doors.

It’s also the kind of place where two drug-dealing gangs flourish and are blamed for the death of a police officer.

Gang violence, once a big-city nightmare, has moved into middle America. In this Great Lakes city of 100,000 people, the mayhem has been unleashed by the Hood gang, which wears the colors of several pro football teams, and the less flashy DDTs.

“Where has ‘love thy neighbor’ gone? Where has parenting gone?” asked Walter Salter, a bartender and father of five in the neighborhood.

Gunplay among the Hood and DDTs led to the Feb. 5 shooting death of Patrolman Richard Burchick. Police Chief Paul DeDionisio said Burchick, one of several officers investigating reports of gunfire on the East Side, was shot by someone fleeing a sedan he had stopped that night.

The 18-year-old accused of pulling the trigger, Michael Bibbs, has said the shooting was accidental and has pleaded not guilty to criminal homicide. He told police he and other DDTs members were angry over the Hood’s alleged random shootings and cocaine sales in the DDTs’ neighborhood.

“They both have their turf, and they each take affront when one comes into the other’s territory,” DeDionisio said.

“It took one thing like this officer getting killed to get people to sit up and say, ‘Hey, what the hell is going on?’ ” said Bobby Harrison, director of the JFK Community Center in the East Side.

To be certain, there are links between the much-publicized gang woes of the big cities and those of smaller cities like Erie.

Mayor Joyce Savocchio said that crack cocaine from Chicago and Detroit is feeding the hostility. The Rev. Dwayne Brock, of Victory Christian Center, says the gang scene is nurtured by living conditions: “It is impossible for the city or anybody to provide jobs comparable in pay to the man selling drugs out there,” Brock said.

Some big-city gangs have opened franchises in smaller locales. The U.S. Justice Department says the Crips and Bloods have branched out from Los Angeles to cities as large as Chicago and as small as Sioux Falls, S.D. (where the Bloods supplied a crack house). Nashville police have expanded their gang-crimes division to 48 officers from six, to combat gangs from Los Angeles.

Prosecutors say that Crips and Bloods couriers taped packages of crack to their bodies and brought them to York, Pa., on commercial flights. The Crips persuaded some York residents to open their homes to crack-vending and recruited teen-agers to hold the drugs, the Pennsylvania Crime Commission found.

Of 27 people convicted on drug charges in the York operations, 16 were from Los Angeles, said H. Stanley Rebert, the York County district attorney.

“The last thing we wanted was for a California gang to gain a foothold in little old York County,” Rebert said. “I think their coming here was the result of a visit to someone they knew, and they saw the local drug trade was pretty unprofessional.”

Authorities shouldn’t always be quick to blame gangs from the big city when gangs turn up in smaller towns, said Jackson Toby, director of the Institute for Criminological Research at Rutgers University.

For example, in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Amish country, the local Crack Alley Gang sold the drug “supermarket style” around the clock out of several houses in Lancaster, the Crime Commission has said.

“Some small cities may have ethnic problems conducive to gang formation, with a lot of young people adrift and not encouraged to stay in school. They coalesce, form a gang,” Toby said. “The social forces that produce gangs are not limited to big metro areas.”

Community leaders on Erie’s East Side said the Hood and DDTs evolved from social circumstances such as lack of activities for youngsters, a job shortage and too few role models for black youths. (The father of the accused cop-killer was shot to death on an Erie basketball court in 1976 in a squabble over $2. He was 22.)

“Erie is, in many respects, still a very segregated city. The young black men see that, and they see illegal activity as an avenue for them, an opportunity,” said Fred Rush, a Gannon University administrator who was an aide to late, longtime Mayor Lou Tullio.

The frustration was evident one recent night, when about 300 East Side residents met in a gym to sound off.

Speaker after speaker chastised the police, courts, media, schools, community centers and industrial plants. The city that calls itself “Eriesistible” on billboards was compared to Johannesburg, South Africa.

But not everyone blamed the Establishment.

“What is happening in our community is our fault,” Willie McAdory told the crowd. “We cannot blame the white man. We let our children get away.”

Solutions to the gang problem--and to the larger social problems--could be problematic for an Erie bureaucracy involved in replacing school buses, stopping erosion of the Lake Erie shoreline and halting the growth of zebra mussels on the lake’s piers and ships.

Erie already has a conservation program to put teen-agers to work restoring city structures and collecting litter. A curfew could work, the mayor said, but would be difficult to enforce evenly.

In Los Angeles, Malcolm Klein, director of USC’s Center for Research on Crime and Social Control, said that Erie is reacting much as other small cities facing a similar problem.

Such cities go “through a denial process, first saying the problem doesn’t exist,” he said. “And then it takes some egregious trigger . . . to force the city fathers and the city mothers to face it overnight.”

“I think the key thing to remember,” said Rush of Gannon University, “is that Erie is still salvageable.”