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A Friday night on the front lines of L.A.'s gang wars
Los Angeles saw a 14 percent jump in gang-related violent crime last year.
from the March 7, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 4
About half of Colomey's gang enforcement detail is on duty at any given time, so the sergeant is set for a casual tour of "non-frontline" duty with the commissioner.
That plan changes in the first minute of his shift.
They set off first for the scene of an earlier shooting. But the parking lot is still visible in the rearview mirror when Colomey and five other cruisers are summoned for backup in a cocaine bust just blocks in the other direction. That's a sizable backup squad, but Colomey says the extra hands will be needed for crowd control – local residents who often press the perimeter of an arrest scene.
At least 100 locals have gathered in front yards, in fact. Some are taunting the cops and videotaping the onslaught of cruisers. A suspect is already in handcuffs, after an officer felled him with pepper spray. Police say the man is a gang member who was selling rock cocaine in plain view as a cruiser drove by, and that he had ignored police orders to "show your hands." "People from outside the area ask us, is it really that blatant ... the disregard for authority and police?" says Colomey. "I tell them, yes, they are not deterred by us at all."
As Colomey walks between officers at the scene, a woman with a video camera to her eye says, "You don't have no business here. You can't come in here without a warrant. Go ahead, just try to come in here. I've got my eye on you...."
The antagonism is a testament to a long and tense history between the LAPD and Watts, a patchwork neighborhood of single-story, single-family homes, most with manicured front yards but barred windows, too. This is one of the places where riots erupted after police were acquitted in the 1994 Rodney King beating case, and again in 1995 and 1996 after the O.J. Simpson trials.
Now relations are taut again as police try to clamp down on violence they say is rooted in bitter rivalries between black and Hispanic gangs.
"There are four major wars going on right now [within the Southeast Division]," Colomey tells Pacheco, ticking off pairs of combatants.
The Southeast Division is not the only part of Los Angeles that appears to be spiraling closer toward race war. In recent months, altercations between black and Hispanic gang members have spilled from L.A. streets into the county jail and back to the streets, a vicious cycle of revenge and competition that has bred more violence. Even among law-abiding residents here, black-Latino relations have soured, as some feel they are losing out on jobs, affordable housing, and public spaces such as parks.
The result is a thick layer of fear that, some neighborhood activists say, has descended on this city like a pot lid. In all his years of duty, says Colomey, he's never seen the climate so foreboding in so many pockets of L.A., including Watts.
In such a climate, a kind of siege mentality can set in. Driving past a liquor store at 87th Street and Compton Avenue, Colomey points out groups of girls outside and in cars across the street, and he notes that police don't have the luxury of assuming they are as innocent as they look.
"Many, many times we find that it is the women who hold the guns for their gang members, do the shootings, and aid in the escapes," he says.
The shootings, he adds, are always about three things: "drugs, money, guns."
Later, he adds a fourth: respect.
"Some guys might go to a dance and hit on a girl who's a girlfriend of an opposing gang [member], and her boyfriend shoots them. It can be as simple as that," says Colomey. "Then you got a retaliation war going on."
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