L.A. Gangs Are Back

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Chino is a spoon. (Like other gang members mentioned in this article, he agreed to speak to TIME on condition that his real name not be used.) At 29, he has been a Playboys member for 14 years. Many of his crack-war contemporaries are long dead. Chino, as a battle-scarred survivor, has earned special respect in the gang. In his spine are the fragments of a .38-cal. bullet from a 1994 drive-by shooting. A devil is tattooed on his back. He has shot at least two gang rivals, and he got out of jail this year after serving six years for firing at a cop from a stolen car. Younger gang members love to hear him talk about his time in jail--particularly the way the wardens made him take part in "gladiator" fights with other prisoners, which the guards would bet money on. Chino says he was singled out because he had shot at a cop, but the fights only made him tougher. And his exploits inspire young gang members to head into the night to prove their own toughness.

The second reason for the increase in gang violence is just as basic. As gang members like Chino are coming back to their old neighborhoods, the police--demoralized by scandal--are backing out of them. In the mid-'90s, the L.A.P.D. curtailed gang violence with some hard-nosed policing, spearheaded by tough CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) units. But after Rafael Perez, a rogue cop from the L.A.P.D.'s Rampart division, was arrested in 1998 for stealing cocaine from a police warehouse, he implicated 70 antigang cops, alleging corruption, excessive force, planting evidence and falsifying testimony. In the end, eight cops were indicted; of these, four were cleared, three pleaded to lesser crimes, and one is awaiting trial.

As a result of his testimony--which helped secure Perez a plea bargain and reduced sentence, though its accuracy is a subject of intense debate--some 100 gang convictions were overturned. The city is facing as much as $125 million in liability claims stemming from the Rampart scandal.

Los Angeles chief of police Bernard Parks dissolved the CRASH units in March 2000 and in their place set up Special Enforcement Units, which operate under severely limited rules of engagement. Morale fell to an all-time low, and many cops left for police departments in other cities. It was only a matter of time before the L.A.P.D. began to lose its grip on gangs. "Immediately after the dissolution of CRASH, there was a lull," says detective Chuck Zeglin, a gang specialist who has 18 years' experience in the L.A.P.D.'s detective-support division. "Then a lot of the more hard-core gangsters came to believe we were not going to be as proactive as before, and they went a little crazy."

Chino is as hard-core as it gets. In jail he learned how to make a tattooing needle, and a recent afternoon found him sitting in a small apartment in Highland Park inscribing a bunny design on the shoulder of Guapa, a 19-year-old female gang member. As Chino worked, he talked about the thrill he got from shooting at people when he was younger. "After a while I really wanted to see myself hit someone," he said. "That is how intense it became in my relationship with my gun. So I walked up to some guys and shot them. It was a real rush."