Latino Versus Black Gang Violence Reaches New Heights in LA

Latino Versus Black Gang Violence Reaches New Heights in LA

National Attention Spurs New Crime Strategies, Fresh Round of Community Criticism

By Courtney Walker

LOS ANGELES — Gang violence between Latinos and blacks in Los Angeles is hardly new. But last year’s killing of 14-year old Cheryl Green in the city’s Harbor Gateway neighborhood brought the national spotlight and a bevy of FBI-endorsed strategies to curb what police here call racially-motivated gang violence.

Police say Green was targeted because she was black and have described the murder as a hate crime. Following the arrest of two members of the 204th Street gang — a Latino group with 120 members — in connection with Green’s murder, FBI Director Robert S. Muller III joined Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and local law enforcement at a news conference to announce an ambitious campaign to combat gangs in the city.

The news conference was held in Harbor Gateway, a neighborhood of 12-square blocks in southern Los Angeles. On this day, Harbor Gateway was ground zero for Villaraigosa’s war on gangs.

Under the new initiative, the Los Angeles Police Department will share gang intelligence with federal authorities and police departments from surrounding cities. A greater emphasis would also be placed on search warrants, hate crime investigations, curfew laws and other statutes to arrest gang members, police said.

Moreover, Los Angeles authorities would recommend that more gang members be prosecuted in federal courts where there’s no parole and the prisons are far from the city, thus sealing off the gang members from associates and gang activity.

While the new strategies were applauded by City Hall, prosecutors and victim families, some have questioned whether the new strategy goes far enough in tackling the city’s gang epidemic. What’s more, community members and criminologists are skeptical of reports and statistics suggesting that violence between Latinos and blacks, and gang violence overall, has risen.

Aqeela Sherrills of the Watts-based Community Self-Determination Institute says he suspects gang-related crimes have actually declined, but are only receiving more national attention these days from the media and politicians.

“Gang crimes and homicides have been down for five consecutive years,” Sherrills says. “However, you wouldn’t know it with how politicians and law enforcement have been manipulating statistics to justify their increases in funding and the forwarding of their political agendas.”

Sherrills knows all too well the pitfalls of gang life. He was once a member of the Crips gang, engaging in violence and theft on the streets of Watts. He later went to college, turned community activist and brokered a historic 1992 truce between the Bloods and Crips following the Rodney King riots. But in 2004, gangs once again surfaced in Sherrills’ life when his 18-year old son Terrell, a college student, was killed by a gang member in a case of mistaken identity.

At any rate, Green’s killing appears to be lending support for the city’s heightened push for more funding to fight gangs. Los Angeles’ gang prevention efforts typically cost an estimated $82 million a year. But in his proposed fiscal 2007-2008 budget, Villaraigosa requested $168 million to fight gangs, including $53 million for police “gang impact” teams and $34 million for park-based programs designed to deter youth from joining gangs. Dozens of other programs are also funded under the proposal to serve as alternatives to gang life through counseling, job training and placement, mentoring and education assistance. The LAPD would also hire 780 new officers under the budget proposal as part of a plan to add 1,000 officers to the force by 2010.

The gang-related funding requests outlined in the mayor’s budget represent in many regards a reaction to criticism that the city didn’t do enough to prevent youth from entering gangs. One such critique was levied in a City Council-commissioned report conducted by the non-profit The Advancement Project. The report called for a “Marshall Plan” with neighborhood and schools-centered strategies that address public health, parenting, job development and other conditions that are the major drivers of violence and gang proliferation.

The report contained more than 100 recommendations for reducing gang activity. “After a quarter century of a multi-billion dollar war on gangs, there are six times as many gangs and at least double the number of gang members in the region,” said the report, which was presented to City Council members by Connie Rice, a noted civil rights attorney and the group’s co-director. “Suppression alone—and untargeted suppression in particular—cannot solve this problem,” the report said.

Brown on Black Violence

The city estimates that there are 700 gangs and about 40,000 gang members in Los Angeles, which has sought for years to reshape its image as the nation’s gang capital. The portrayal largely stemmed from Hollywood movies, rap songs and books, mostly with Blood-versus-Crips storylines.

The city had become a model for other cities in gang enforcement in recent years. But last year, there were 269 gang-related homicides in Los Angeles, a 14% increase from a year earlier, according to the LAPD. The surge in gang violence comes as the city’s overall violent crime numbers decreased.

There are many theories on why the “brown on black” gang violence appears to be escalating. Some gang experts say Latino gangs are engaged in an “ethnic cleansing” that targets blacks in predominately Latino neighborhoods. Sociologists hypothesize that the anti-violence is a result of the gentrification that occurred when more blacks left the inner city for safer neighborhoods in the suburbs, leaving the remaining blacks vulnerable to attacks from the Latino gangs, who were new to the neighborhoods.

The Harbor-Gateway neighborhood has had a history of racial tension between black and Latinos dating back to the mid-1990s when blacks were moved out of a local housing project to make way for new developments. Many of the displaced black residents, armed with Section 8 vouchers, moved into the Harbor-Gateway area.

Fearing the lost of turf, the violence between Latino and blacks escalated. In 1997, 11-year-old Marquis Wilbert, who is black, became a causality of the violence. Wilbert was shot and killed by a 204th St. gang member while riding his bicycle just blocks from where Green was killed. Since Wilbert’s death, police say there have been three other racially-motivated killings in the area, including Green’s murder.

A 1999 study of Los Angeles County hate crimes conducted by researchers at the University of Hawaii highlighted the city’s Latino versus black gang problem. The study found that of the 57 hate crime-related police incidents filed over a four-year period in Harbor Gateway, 53 of the victims were African American and 42 of the perpetrators were Latino. The study also found that gang-related hate crimes tend to involve a higher incidence of physical violence, including the use of firearms.

“It’s an old battle,” says John Wayne Maioriello, a student at El Camino College in South Bay and a former resident of Lawndale. “When I used to live across the street from Leuzinger High School there was a “race riot” there every year.”

But overall, Maioriello says blacks and Latinos to tend to live in harmony. “Blacks and Latinos get along just fine, and are too busy dealing with life to worry about what color skin the guy across the room has,” he says.

The Latino versus black violence that does occur often stems from longstanding turf wars over drugs. Sherrills, at the Community Self-Determination Institute, says violence between Latinos and blacks results from prison conflicts over the drug trade that have spilled over into the streets of Los Angeles.

Wes McBride, executive director of the California Gang Investigators Association, says while gentrification may have played a role in the racial violence, the tension between blacks and Latinos isn’t new.

“In general, the migration factor makes sense, but I’m not sure that it’s true in all cases,” he says. “Some of the racist feelings go back many years, decades in fact. It is just now getting media attention.”

George Tita, a criminology professor at the University of California in Irvine, says today’s gang violence is still more likely to occur between members of the same ethnicity. “The levels of black-brown violence are not huge, statistically speaking,” he says. “Most of the violence continues to be black-black, brown-brown.”

In other cities, gang violence is also likely to occur between members of the same race or ethnicity. “Generally in other cities, and also in LA, gang violence has tended to be intra-ethnic or intra-racial, especially among minority groups,” says Irving Spergel, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago and expert on gangs. “Black and Latino gangs have been traditionally in nominal alliances.”