Montebello: February 2008 Archives

Once a month, the Hispanic Outreach Taskforce gets together with the police chief in Whittier to discuss topics of interest to the community at large.

The meeting is a brown bag deal. There are sandwiches, sodas and a lot of conversation.
Topic A last week was a gang injunction the police are beginning to enforce against Whittier Varrio Locos, near Uptown.

Police Chief David Singer said officers are still in the process of notifying 40 gang members that they can’t do certain things in their neighborhood anymore. Among those things: carrying weapons, loitering, throwing gang signs and tagging.

Montebello has a similar ordinance on the books and officials claim that since it was enacted in 2004, there has been a marked decrease in gang crime.

In the wake of recent violence in Monrovia and Duarte, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Capt. David Shaw of the sheriff’s Temple Station, which patrols unincorporated areas of the community, suggested a gang injunction was being explored as a possible way to get gang members off the streets. No action has yet been taken.

While the injunctions in Montebello and Whittier are relatively new, the tool has been in law enforcement’s toolbox since the mid-1990s.

For example, Norwalk used one with great success against a particularly violent Latino gang. Pasadena hoped to duplicate the effort and enjoined the Pasadena Denver Lanes Blood gang.

The move essentially flowed from a community reaction to the Halloween Homicides. On Oct. 31, 1993, Edgar “Eddie” Evans, Reginald Crawford and Stephen Coates were gunned down as they walked home from a friend’s Halloween party.

Herbert “Monster” McClain, Lorenzo Newborn and Karl Holmes, all members of the Denver Lanes gang, were convicted of murder and ultimately sentenced to death.

Enforcement of the order against PDL was fairly effective, and the neighborhood around Summit Avenue became safer for a while.

Nearly a year later, city officials and the District Attorney’s Office came close to taking similar action against the Villa Boys and Krazy Boys Latino gangs.

But when Bernard Melekian took over as chief in 1996, he derided the injunctions and chose to fight gangs with a mantra of “community policing” that was popular at the time. The injunctions faded away from lack of enforcement and Pasadena’s gangs went back to being Pasadena’s gangs.

A few years later, Melekian defended the decision to Daniel Sharfstein, a one-time reporter here, who was writing a piece for a publication called The American Prospect.

The chief, now interim city manager, called injunctions “an intellectual substitute for responsible public policy.”
My guess is that officials in Montebello, Whittier and Monrovia know best what they are up against. They also know what makes “responsible public policy” in their communities.

If a gang injunction works in Monrovia, my guess is there won’t be too many law-abiding taxpayers who will complain.