The War On Gangs

Vranicar heads the Los Angeles City Attorney's gang unit. Like Herrera, he points out that the Justice Policy Institute, the think tank that criticizes the use of injunctions, upholds a mission of promoting alternatives to incarceration. Both he and Herrera mention another study, conducted in 2000 by a UCLA professor, that shows violent crime drops by 5 percent to 10 percent inside a safety zone during its first year.

Los Angeles prosecuted some 350 safety-zone violations in 2006. So far, the Oakdale Mob injunction has yielded only three arrests. While Adachi and others continue to describe the Hunters Point neighborhood as a "war zone," citing a July shooting that left a man injured, police estimate the crime rate has fallen by 80 percent. "It's not an incarceration issue," says Capt. Kevin Cashman of the department's investigations bureau. "It's about dissuading people from this kind of illegal activity."

In that respect, Lt. John Murphy, who heads the police homicide unit, compares the city's use of injunctions to federal authorities applying federal racketeering laws against gangs. Three years ago, after the Down Below Gang committed a string of killings to protect its Sunnydale drug enterprise, the FBI arrested a dozen top members on federal conspiracy charges. No murders occurred in the neighborhood over the next seven months.

Similarly, Murphy says, the city's proposed injunctions, by targeting the "shot callers" who direct gang activity, could cool tensions in the Western Addition and the Mission. "It's like with a riot. You have the loudest guy screaming, "Let's break windows!' Then the police take him away and everyone stops and looks around and says, "Why the hell are we breaking windows?'"

Erick Arguello has heard his share of complaints about broken windows from business owners in the Mission. President of the Lower 24th Street Merchants and Neighborhood Association, Arguello relates that insurers, weary of paying claims on storefronts shattered by gunshots, refuse to indemnify proprietors against such damages.

Arguello has lived in the Mission since 1963, when he arrived with his parents from their native Nicaragua. He recalls growing up in the district as a period of relative peace. Times have changed. Two years ago, he saw a man step from a car near 24th and New Hampshire streets, run toward a group of men, and begin firing. Some months later, while walking in the same vicinity, a friend of Arguello's had to crawl under a van to dodge an afternoon shootout between rival gangs. By his unofficial count, in July alone, at least seven people were shot in the Mission.

Arguello extolls grassroots groups that try to steer young gangbangers straight. But he believes creating a safety zone could mute the gunplay and sirens that supply his neighborhood's nightly soundtrack. "We have to try to do whatever we can," he says. "The gangs aren't going to go away on their own."

An apparent drug-turf skirmish in the Tenderloin last month climaxed with a man gunning down Charles Rollins. To most, his death matters less than the five sentences it received in the Chronicle. To Herrera's critics, the episode lays bare an intrinsic flaw in his putative gang crackdown.

The 20-year-old Rollins belonged to the Oakdale Mob. His murder suggests that injunctions, rather than discourage gang members to abandon the streets, simply persuade them to migrate to another corner of the city. So insists Western Addition activist Daniel Landry, a member of the African American Community Police Relations Board.

"You take one neighborhood's problem and you give it to someone else," he says. "How does that help?"

A self-described former gang member, Landry, 38, possesses the body art and rap sheet to prove it. His right wrist bears a tattoo that reads "KO," a reference to King's Originals, a forebear of Knock Out Posse; his time with the gang led to a two-year prison term in the early '90s on a drug conviction.

Landry draws on his street experience in his work with Brothers for Change, a Western Addition advocacy group that preaches violence prevention. As much as he's evolved since his gang days, however, the woes of the city's poorest areas remain the same, he says. "The trouble you have isn't really with gangs. The emphasis should be on getting guns and drugs out of the community. You do that, you take care of your problem."

But for those burdened with the job of gun and drug removal — namely, the cops — Herrera's proposed injunctions represent a chance to reclaim neighborhoods slipping toward entropy. Lt. Ernie Ferrando, head of the gang task force, notes the decline in violence since the Oakdale Mob injunction went into effect. "It's about taking out the worst of the worst, that 1 percent responsible for most of the crime," he says. "That will give you something to build on in that neighborhood."