Rise of Gangs Alarms Orange County : Crime: The members are becoming more violent, police say. Officials fear that unless something is done, the problem could rival Los Angeles’.

SANTA ANA —  The local headlines shock Orange County residents once accustomed to the quiet comforts of living far from the urban chaos of Los Angeles.

Two Vietnamese immigrants are shot to death while kneeling at the graves of two brothers, also the victims of gang violence. A middle-aged woman driving home from the grocery store is shot by a group of teen-agers drinking beer and scrawling graffiti in a normally placid neighborhood.

And last month, in an incident that shook Santa Ana residents, a 31-year-old father of three was shot to death by a group of gang members after an evening game of pickup basketball at a high school.

Such stories have been becoming more common for the past year in Orange County. The number of gang members here charged with murder jumped 65%--from 26 to 43--between 1990 and 1991, according to a report issued by the county district attorney’s office.

The statistics are far lower than those of Los Angeles, where more than 770 gang-related homicides occurred in 1991 and about 400 resulted in criminal prosecutions. But they also belie Orange County’s image and have raised a disturbing specter in the minds of residents beset by an inner-city phenomenon many thought they had escaped. The fear was bolstered dramatically by the gut-wrenching image of a city awash in flames during the riots.

“I’m concerned that we could go the way of L.A.,” said Michael R. Capizzi, the district attorney. “If we just sit on our hands and look the other way, there’s no question that things could escalate to approximating our neighbor to the north.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Douglas Woodsmall, head of the county’s gang unit, said: “We’re at a critical point in the growth of gangs in Orange County. There’ll come a point when, if we don’t stop what’s happening, it will begin to get out of control. You only have to look to the north, to Los Angeles, to see what happens when gangs expand that way.”

The gang phenomenon is not new to Orange County. As far back as the mid-1970s, experts say, some Latino gangs were active. A lot has changed since then. Recent years have seen the rapid development of Asian gangs--mostly Vietnamese and Cambodian--which comprise an estimated 10% to 15% of the county’s 200 gangs, the rest of which are mostly Latino. And the county’s 15,000 gang members are resorting to increasingly violent and deadly means of expressing their animosity toward each other and, occasionally, outsiders.

Some attribute the escalating spiral of violence to the tendency of home-grown gangbangers to be influenced by the actions of their better-publicized peers to the north.

“Whatever leads to high status in L.A. will be copied here,” said Arnold Binder, chairman of the criminology department at UC Irvine and an expert in juvenile delinquency. “They pick it up on TV or they hear it from friends. What they do is emulate each other with the kind of communications we have. The ties to L.A. County are very close; whenever some nut does something, others copy it. I think it’s quite likely that Orange County will go the way of L.A.”

Some experts have noted the disturbing tendency of Los Angeles-based gang members to make forays into Orange County, during which their partying often escalates into criminal behavior ranging from vandalism to violent altercations with rivals.

And some cities, most notably Anaheim, report the increasing localization not only of Los Angeles-type gang behavior, but of Los Angeles-spawned gangs. Sgt. Craig Hunter, head of the Anaheim Police Department’s anti-gang unit, said about 10 of the city’s 51 known gangs have names corresponding to groups in Los Angeles. Many identify themselves by scrawling the kind of graffiti typical of the larger metropolis.

“We find L.A. graffiti around Anaheim and the kids actually live in our town,” Hunter said. “The parents of gang members in L.A. will move to Anaheim to get their kids away from the gangs. But the kids will still be interested in a gang philosophy and will either recruit other kids when they get here, or be joined by (fellow gang members) from L.A.”

The result, Hunter said, is a condition of burgeoning violence that is becoming difficult to control.

“You can get the kid out of the gang,” he said, “but you can’t get the gang out of the kid. . . . The way we look at it is that we’re just a little bit behind Santa Ana and Santa Ana is just a little bit behind L.A.”

Like their counterparts to the north, Orange County residents and authorities have responded by beefing up law enforcement and devoting lots of time and money to creating various preventive programs to reverse a potential gang member’s direction before he becomes hard core.

One well-known civic activist, Katherine Hatch Smith, recently formed a community group aimed at seeking solutions to Orange County’s burgeoning gang problem. The alternative, she said, was to move away from the quiet cul-de-sac in western Anaheim where she occupies a spacious home.

Earlier this year, the city of Westminster set up a special gang task force consisting of a deputy district attorney, clerk, probation officer, Asian-American gang detective and Latino gang detective. The city-funded unit, which operates in cooperation with the county’s gang unit, is considered a model by other Orange County cities.

Santa Ana recently received a $1-million federal grant to help weed out problem-causing individuals in one area and then seed it with job training, crime and drug prevention programs and neighborhood improvements.

And the county--which has beefed up its gang unit from six attorneys and two investigators to eight attorneys and five investigators--recently linked up to a computer system designed to track gang members throughout Orange and three other counties.

“The awareness is there and people are doing things,” Woodsmall said.

One Santa Ana-based anti-gang program has become a model of sorts for programs based farther north. It is Shortstop, an innovative course sponsored by the Orange County Bar Foundation that--with its Spanish-language equivalent, Programa--claims a success rate of 87% in keeping first-time offenders and other would-be gang members, ages 9 to 18, from repeating criminal patterns. Among other things, the program includes a portion during which youngsters are grilled in front of their peers by experienced lawyers or law enforcement personnel. At another point, the potential gangsters are held in a jail cell and confronted by gang felons.

“They can really get in their faces in the cell and tell them what it’s like living in an institution,” said Kathy Bonner, Shortstop’s director.

The program has a fan in John D. S. Allen, assistant head deputy of the hard-core gang unit of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. “I wish we had something like that in Los Angeles,” he said.

Allen’s advice to his Orange County counterparts?

“It’s bad,” he said. “You people have to get on it now, or you will be like L.A.”