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aa! "9 re. 4-26-83) “Phe Battle ® @ eum to Control 50,000 Gang Members on the Streets of Los Angeles By Matt Lait Special to the Washington Post LOS ANGELES—John (Big Sleepy) Lewis seemed bored as he stood with his hands cuffed behind his back, staring over the heads of the police officers who had stopped him for questioning. Residents of the neighbor- hood east of Culver City watched impassively from the porches of graffiti-covered houses as he was released minutes later. Since joining the city’s oldest black street gang, the Crips, 12 years ago, Lewis says he has been shot three times, has seen several friends killed and cannot recall, all the times he has been taken to jail. At 21, he is older then most of his fellow “gangbangers,” as they calf themselves. He was released from prison a few months ago after serving a year for possessing cocaine and an Ua machine gun. Over the last few years, black gangs in Los Ange- les—particularly the Crips and their archrivals, the Bloods—have grown into well-organized drug-traffick- ing networks, feuding violently over clients and terri- tory. Recently, in search of larger profits, the two major gangs have expanded to cities as distant as Toronto and Seattle, forcing law enforcement agencies to develop new ways to combat them. With more than 50,000 hard-core gang members, mostly black, Hispanic and Asian, in Los Angeles Coun- ty, police are battling what many say is a losing war. A. report released this week by the National School Safety Center puts the estimate even higher at 70,000 mem- bers here, surpassing Chicago with 10,000 and New York with 5,000. “We're not making a big dent,” said Sgt. Alan Thatch- er of the Los Angeles Police Department's antigang unit. “It’s a brush fire effect. A murder happens over there, so we go over there and try to solve it, and then there’s a murder over here and we go here, and on and on....” Compared to the same period last year, gang-related homicides in 1988 have risen 50 percent in the city and almost 100 percent in the county, according to police and sheriff's department statistics. There have been 40 such murders in the city through February and 28 in the county to date. The total last year was 381. In response, the Los Angeles Police Department has launched its GRATS (Gang-Related Active Trafficker Suppression) project that expects to jail as many as 100 gang members a month on drug charges, Many make instant bail with the pocket money they carry, some- times thousands of dollars. The department's Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) unit also has reorganized to fight street violence, and the city attorney has won a court injunction prohibiting certain Crips from loitering, .trespassing and harassing neighborhood residents. Citing increased gang activity, the Los Angeles City Council has voted to add 150 officers to its 7,100-member force by June 1989; Mayor Tom Brad- ley has asked for an additional 250. The annual cost of the new officers would be $26.4 million. On Thursay— the same day that three gang-related shootings left sev- en people wounded—city and county officials received $2.73 million in federal grants to help combat such vi- olence. Now, partly in response to such targeting, many gang members have moved to other West Coast cities, where the drug-market competition is less keen and local law enforcement officers know less about their meth- ods, Police in San Diego, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle report a recent influx of Los Angeles gang members, They also have been reported i in Phoenix, Tucson, Shreveport, La., and Toronto. * “The black gangs have gone to other cities looking for fertile grounds for the selling of fiarcotics where the price is a little more inflated, and have set up McDonald’s-like. franchises throughout the United States and even up into Canada,” Los Angeles Police Cmdr. Larry Kramer said. Officer Neil Cranneil of the Portland Police Depart- ment said the Crips appeared there in 1986 and the Bloods in 1987. “When they first came here, Bloods and Crips were kind of palling around together, and they hung out at some of the same places, but a few months after that, they changed and now they’re separate antagonists, increasing in numbers,” he said. : In Seattle, local authorities sought help from federal investigators, including the Federal Bureau of Inves- Adm. Servs. Cosm. dew, Ideas, hea hepe! Coun. OF. Cong & Poetic atts, Rac. Mgnt, Tech. Secvs. Tearing ~ — Teleghene Am. —_— Orsecter’s Sec'y wom The Washington Post A3 The Washington Times Daily News (New York) The New York Times The Wal! Street Journa! The Cricago Tribune The Los Angeles Times The Christian Science Monitor USA Today Date _B-H2-8E 44 Page