LAPD Targets Gang Leaders as Tactics Shift

The commanding officer in charge of the Los Angeles Police Department’s crackdown on street gangs in the South-Central area says a major shift in tactics is under way to bring greater law enforcement pressure on the key members of the city’s largest gangs.

While large police task forces will still be utilized sporadically against all street gang activity, Deputy Chief William M. Rathburn said the new anti-gang policy will be directed at specific gangs and their top leadership.

“We’ll continue to run those task force operations to reaffirm our commitment to the community,” Rathburn said in a recent interview. “But we’ve also begun targeting several gangs and specific gang members.

Going After Leaders

“From now on, as opposed to just throwing out this huge net, we’re going to be trying to get the leaders of the gangs on major violations, including the running of continuing criminal conspiracies.”

Although there is no formal leadership structure to the 260 “sets” that make up the two key black gang groups in Los Angeles, the Bloods and the Crips, Rathburn said that “hard-core” gang members who control some of the most powerful neighborhood gangs have been identified and are targets of the new policy.

The shift in LAPD’s approach to targeting the most violent gang leaders brings its policy closer to that of the county Sheriff’s Department, which has for some time chosen to focus on individual gangs rather than adopt LAPD’s massive task force approach to the problem.

In the early 1980s, when the number of murders committed by gang members dropped each year from 350 to little more than 200 a year, law enforcement officers suggested that one reason had been the jailing of many older and influential gang members. Lacking any reliable theories for why gang-related killings ebb and flow, law enforcement officials and gang experts have often suggested that a typical gang set will at least temporarily fragment if its leaders are eliminated by lengthy state prison sentences.

Rathburn, who commands the five LAPD South Bureau divisions that cover most of South-Central Los Angeles as well as the city’s harbor area, took charge of LAPD’s most gang-ridden area in early March, only a week after police had begun a highly publicized crackdown on street crime in the area.

In a progress report on the first five months of the massive police assault on the 111 different gangs operating in South-Central, Rathburn expressed optimism that the crackdown has begun to pay some important dividends.

“In terms of the level of gang activity, I think it’s peaked,” Rathburn said. “We have forced a change in the trend. In the first four months of this year, all gang-related crime in the South Bureau was up substantially. Since May it has declined significantly.”

Decline Seen

According to LAPD statistics, gang crime was up 9.2% over the previous year in the South Bureau when the police task force operations, twice involving 1,000 officers from all areas of the city, began mass arrests of suspected gang members in South-Central.

By the end of July, police reported an 8.5% decline in overall gang crime in the area for the first seven months of 1988--with a total of 1,447 gang crimes compared to 1,582 during the same period in 1987.

For Rathburn, one troubling exception is the continuing increase in the number of drive-by shootings in South-Central. While other categories have dropped, there have been 741 such incidents this year compared to 716 during the same period in 1987--an increase of 3.5%.

“Some of the major problems have been dramatically reduced,” Rathburn said. “There are, for example, fewer rock houses now operating. Gang robberies are down 26% so far this year and gang-related rapes are down nearly 13% in the area. A lot of that is because we have put a lot of gang members in jail.

“But it’s not all positive,” Rathburn continued. “While overall, homicides are down almost 19% in the area, gang-related homicides are still up for the year, from 68 at this point in 1987 to 73 so far this year. There’s been a decline since March. But the drive-by shootings are sill a problem. That’s harder than taking out rock houses. We simply don’t know when somebody is going to go down the street and start shooting.”

In Rathburn’s view, one of the major benefits of the massive show of LAPD strength in South-Central in recent months is a boost in the community morale of area residents who had given up hope of any solution to the growing gang problem.

“There’s been a tremendous effect on the public perception of the police and of government,” Rathburn said. “The people in South-Central were terribly frustrated by the gangs. They have lived for years as prisoners in their own homes.

“Chief (Daryl F.) Gates promised he would put 1,000 officers in the street, and he kept that promise,” Rathburn added. “The people I meet all say, ‘Thank God you’re here.’ They are much less intimidated now. We are getting more help from the community in locating rock houses and spotting the neighborhood drug dealers.”

Despite the short-term benefits of the task force approach in South-Central, Rathburn said the department has decided that the timing is right to begin moving away from massive gang suppression efforts to more sophisticated investigations of the most dangerous gang members.

“We are really going through a transitional period in the way we’re trying to police the gang problem,” he said. “For a long time our primary focus has been suppression, but it’s much more complicated than we thought. The big task force operations have helped, but that alone is not enough.”

In targeting some of the major South-Central gangs, which he declined to identify, Rathburn said he will rely not only on LAPD’s anti-gang resources but on the investigative and prosecutorial tools recently made available by creation of a federal and local anti-gang task force involving the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

“Our arrests are up about 20% so far this year. That means we have arrested about 12,000 people as a result of the task force activity,” Rathburn said.

Only about half of those arrested in the sweeps were gang members, police have said. “I’m not satisfied that a lot of those arrested are the ones we want the most,” Rathburn said. “We have to be much more selective in our enforcement approach. I think the investigative approach has been overlooked, and that’s in the process of changing.”

Rathburn said he feels strongly, however, that there must be coordination among LAPD, the local-federal task force recently set up by the DEA and U.S. Atty. Robert C. Bonner and a third anti-gang narcotics squad recently organized within the FBI in Los Angeles. He complained that he was not notified of the FBI’s new black gang unit.

Many Agencies Involved

“One thing that disturbs me is everybody is getting into the act now,” said Rathburn. “I think it’s very important to have some federal resources to use against the gangs, but somebody has to be the quarterback.”

One change within LAPD now being implemented, according to Rathburn, is a policy of using only South Bureau personnel in any future major task force operations. He cited logistical problems in recruiting officers from other areas of the city for such duty, adding that LAPD is trying to avoid creating an “occupational army” image in the black community.

The nucleus of the South Bureau’s anti-gang force will be a squad of about 150 officers recently formed by merging the area’s 72-member anti-gang CRASH unit with a slightly larger new gang detail staffed by officers pulled from other assignments in South-Central, Rathburn said.

In targeting key gangs, the police commander said, LAPD will consider the use of federal wiretaps and possible prosecution of gang leaders under federal statutes mandating tough sentences for such crimes as direction of a continuing criminal enterprise.

He did not rule out aggressive pursuit of key gang members on local and federal narcotics charges but indicated that he feels there has been too much attention placed on the drug aspect of gang activity in the South-Central area.

“I believe a lot of people have been misled into believing the gang and drug problems here are synonymous,” Rathburn said. “They aren’t. There are a lot of dope dealers in South-Central who aren’t gang members, and there are a lot of gang members who aren’t drug dealers. Even if they eliminated all drugs, there will still be a major gang problem in South-Central, and hundreds of people killed every year because of it.”

While focusing on short-range law enforcement approaches to the city’s gang problem, Rathburn said the problem can never be solved without more permanent and costly solutions.

“One thing that’s desperately needed here now is an adult criminal justice center, with the Superior Court judges and support personnel needed to deal with the gang problem on an ongoing basis,” Rathburn said. “There are courthouse branches like that all over the city, but nothing in South-Central, and we have to make that a priority.