The consensus is that no more than five to ten people in a hundred who die by gunfire in Los Angeles are any loss to society. These people fight small wars amongst themselves. It would seem a valid social service to keep them well-supplied with ammunition.
The attack on Juan Romero was swift, vicious, and bloody. Details of the assault can be found among a long line of gangster melees and murders that shuffle like a chain gang through the opinions of California's appellate courts.1 The human stories in these cases strike the reader at first as shocking, then as banal, and finally as theater of the criminally absurd. Nonetheless, they are invaluable sources—more reliable than media reports, less passionate than the apologetics of gangsters and youth workers, and more vital than the opaque scribbling of many social scientists. Cops, priests, academics, do-gooders, and moralists pontificate about many issues concerning gangs, including why they emerge, what compels young people to join them, and the precise nature of “gang activity.” But a vein of unalloyed truth runs through these court reports. Here are hard facts, cast in the contest of trial by jury and refined in appellate argument. The plain truth emerges that whatever else Latino street gangs may be or do, they are relentlessly and consistently violent.
Juan Romero suffered fifteen torturous minutes of that violent truth at about 10:30 p.m. on the night of July 14, 2005. Romero was standing on a sidewalk in the city of El Monte, located in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles. The city's only claim to fame is that it was once the site of Gay's Lion Farm, the former home of the MGM lion. White flight drained El Monte's diversity in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, at least 75 percent of the city's population is Latino. Sixty percent of its residents claim to be of Mexican origin. Another 15 percent cite Central American or “Hispanic” descent. The remainder of the population is mostly Asian, leavened by a tiny sprinkling of non-Latino white and black residents.
The court's opinion does not reveal what Romero, a member of the eponymous El Monte Flores gang, was doing on the street that night. Perhaps he was just hanging out, enjoying a pleasant evening. The midday heat, which had reached the high nineties, had cooled by that time. The balmy night turned into hell for Romero when Antonio Carreto Leon and another young man identified only as “Victor,” both members of the Los Angeles-based 38th Street gang, walked up and hurled the standard gangster challenge “De donde eres?”—literally translated “Where are you from?” but meaning “What gang do you claim?”
Words to that effect—or the equivalent in gang “signs” that are “thrown” with fingers contorted into the shape of letters and numerals signifying the gang's name—have been the opening volley in thousands of Latino gang murders. This ritualistic challenge is the human equivalent of dogs sniffing each other with their fur raised, already committed to fight. To back down from the challenge is to disgrace oneself and one's barrio, the inseparable dual identity Latino gangsters carry with them wherever they go.
Before Romero could reply, the two men pounced on him like angry young lions. “Fuck El Monte Flores gang,” they yelled. “38 Street fuck EMF.” Leon produced a screwdriver and stabbed Romero with it. Again and again it fell in a savage arc, slamming holes through Romero's skull. The assailants pummeled their victim to the ground, pounding him with their fists and feet. The scene was pandemonium. Romero was screaming in pain. He tried to get to his feet and defend himself but kept fading out of consciousness. Women were yelling at the assailants, begging them to stop. One shouted for someone to call 911. Suddenly, it was over. The two 38th Street gangsters broke off their attack and faded into the night. Romero crawled to the nearby driveway of a residence, leaving a slimy trail of gore from the puncture wounds in his head. He lapsed into convulsions. The owner of the home applied pressure to the back of Romero's skull, preventing his bleeding to death.
Romero survived the attack. But four months later, at Leon's trial, he claimed that he could recall nothing of that night. Leon was convicted by other testimony. The case of People v. Leon then took its humble place in the archives of gang ritual—challenge, response, mayhem, and death. It stands out only because Romero's assailants used a screwdriver instead of a gun, the most common tool of gang violence. “Each gang will have a certain number of guns, mostly owned by the gang,” Joseph Rodriguez observed while gathering materials for his book of photographs of gang life in East Los Angeles. “They're kept stashed and taken out when they sense the need for protection, or for a party to make a show of bravado by shooting at gang rivals' cars or into the air. The younger kids treat them like toys.”2
The 38th Street gang from which Leon and “Victor” hailed dates from the 1920s and is notorious today in Los Angeles. It has an estimated 350 members in its core neighborhood. They are said to deal drugs, extort money from small businesses, mug passersby, and run a sophisticated auto theft ring.3 The gang's name appears only infrequently in the pages of the Los Angeles Times. However, the opinions of California's appellate courts document years of the gang's violent encounters with its rivals—attempted murders, murders, countermurders, and counter-countermurders. Among its targets are the Florencia 13, Barrio Mojados (BMS), and “All for Crime” (AFC) gangs.4 Innocent bystanders are regularly killed and injured in these incidents, victims of indiscriminate shooting. A 38th Street gang member, Rodolfo Diaz, was added to the LAPD's list of ten most wanted gangsters in July 2007. Diaz was accused of shooting his girlfriend's mother to death in 2002.5 In August 2004, a civil injunction—an innovative Los Angeles antigang tool growing in favor elsewhere—was issued barring the gang's members from associating with each other. It restricted their public activity within a “safety zone” of almost four square miles.6
Things were not always so predictably deadly among the Mexican American gangs of Los Angeles. Early gang fights involved mostly fists and rarely ended in death. But one of the most famous crimes in the history of Los Angeles involved a murder in which alleged members of the incipient 38th Street gang were implicated. The story provides a point of departure for a look into the birth of the Mexican American gangs, their growth into deeply rooted institutions of criminal violence, and the contentious relationship between law enforcement and the Latino community.
At 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, August 2, 1942, Jose Diaz was found lying facedown in a dirt road, unconscious and gurgling blood. The rutted lane skirted a small reservoir as it cut a lazy S shape through an agricultural tract in southeast Los Angeles called the Williams Ranch. The reservoir was nicknamed “Sleepy Lagoon,” supposedly after a hit song recorded by popular bandleader and trumpet player Harry James, released in the spring and later rereleased by a variety of popular artists.
The son of ranch workers who lived in a nearby bunkhouse, the twenty-two-year-old Diaz was raised in the United States. Born in Durango, Mexico, he was exempt from the military draft and had a job packing vegetables at the Sunny Sally Packing Plant. Nevertheless, the young man—like thousands of other Latino immigrants—volunteered to serve. He was to report for induction into the army the next day, Monday, August 3. He never made it. Diaz had been severely beaten and twice stabbed between the time he left a neighbor's birthday party and the time he was found lying in the lane. Taken to a hospital, he died within hours. The evidence was that Diaz had fought furiously with his attacker or attackers. His fatal injury was determined to have come from a blow to the head from a blunt object, likely a wooden club.
Diaz's family were migrant workers. His father and younger siblings were picking prunes in Northern California when he was killed. Ordinarily, he would have been just another stiff in the Los Angeles morgue. But the Los Angeles law enforcement establishment was under heavy public and political pressure to take effective action against what was perceived to be a wave of gang crime. Scarcely two months earlier, on June 12, the LAPD had been unable to control a riot that broke out after a fight between two Mexican American gangs. The incident started after an all-city track meet at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The leader of one gang, nineteen-year-old Frank Torres, was shot in the head by a rival gang member. A melee between the two gangs soon drew in hundreds of other youth and turned into a riot and looting of nearby businesses. Order was restored only when the U.S. Army was called in.7
In what was to become a predictable pattern during its decades-long guerrilla war with gangs, the LAPD responded to media pressure and public outrage by announcing a “crackdown.” The murder of Jose Diaz provided a suitable moment to show the public that the cops meant business. It became a spark that ignited a racial and social fireball, fueled by the pressures of war and a paranoid suspicion that persons of Mexican heritage were no more to be trusted than those of Japanese descent, who were being rounded up in 1942 and sent off to camps. There was even public speculation that the “Mexican gang problem” was part of a Nazi plot to undermine American unity. The investigation of the “Sleepy Lagoon murder” quickly set off a frenzy among politicians, law enforcement, and the news media. Over the next few weeks, the LAPD cast a “dragnet” over the barrios and swept up more than six hundred youth. Most of them were Mexican Americans, indiscriminately labeled “zoot-suiters.” All of them thereafter bore the stigma of an arrest record, albeit on trumped-up charges that went nowhere. Politicians, including the governor, hyperventilated about the “Mexican problem.” A hysterical news media trumpeted concern about the crimes of the zoot-suiter “gangs” alleged to be rampaging through the streets of Los Angeles.
Police soon announced that the Diaz murder had been solved. The deed was pinned on twenty-four young people—all but one of whom were Mexican American—affiliated with what authorities called the “38th Street gang.” Two of the accused hired private counsel and were quickly dismissed from the case. Trial of the rest began in October 1942. The prosecution's theory was that Diaz died as a result of a conspiracy among the gang members. Regardless of who among them struck the fatal blow, the state argued, all the conspirators were equally guilty of the murder. In January 1943, the jury acquitted five of the defendants and found seventeen guilty on several counts. Twelve were convicted of murder.
The trial, however, was deeply flawed. In October 1944, an appellate court reversed the convictions. The court's opinion systematically flayed the prosecution's handling of the case and Judge Charles William Fricke's supervision of the trial. The accused had been held incommunicado beyond the time at which they should have been arraigned, advised of their constitutional rights, and given access to counsel. Incriminating statements at trial had been beaten out of some of the defendants. No properly admissible evidence linked any of the defendants to the fatal assault on Diaz. Judge Fricke ran roughshod over defense lawyers, refused to let them communicate directly with their clients during the trial, and allowed prosecutors to skirt the rules of evidence to slip in damning statements.8
The accused were never retried. Whoever beat Jose Diaz to death that night got away with murder, thanks to the blinkered bungling of the cops and prosecutors. Judge Fricke shrugged off the higher court's scathing criticism and went on to enjoy a successful career as the doyen of tough law enforcement in Los Angeles.
The Sleepy Lagoon case was a turning point in the relationship between Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and the dominant culture, especially the LAPD. One researcher notes, “The absurdity of the case sent shockwaves through East Los Angeles. It was as if the community had been indicted with the boys.”9 Civil libertarians and community leaders organized the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee to appeal the flawed rush to judgment. Orson Welles, Anthony Quinn, and Rita Hay-worth lent Hollywood star power. It was “the first effective mobilization of the Mexican Community in Southern California.”10 The affair is often cited as a civil rights and political landmark. It has inspired books, plays, movies, lay screeds, and scholarly articles.
The two prime corollaries of received civil libertarian wisdom about the case are that the defendants were railroaded and that there was no such thing as a “38th Street gang”—or, for that matter, any real Mexican American gangs—in 1942. The “gang,” it is claimed, was the hyperbolic invention of racist cops and prosecutors, a sinister characterization of a bunch of kids just hanging out together in a loose affiliation. Eduardo Obregon Pagan asks the central question: “Were these young men and women ‘baby gangsters’ who organized for nefarious purposes, as the state of California . . . contended, or were they merely a casual group of acquaintances joined by circumstances?”11 Of the railroad, there can be no doubt. The trial was a travesty by any measure. The “halo effect” of denying the existence of gangs in general and the 38th Street gang in particular, however, is contradicted by the studies of law enforcement and academic experts alike. The fact is that being railroaded and being a gang member were not then (and are not now) mutually exclusive conditions.
No matter how poorly handled or how racist the investigation and prosecution, no matter how innocent the youth were of this particular crime, there was something more than casual encounter going on in 1942 among the youth of the Thirty-eighth Street area. That something was the early incarnation—the embryonic form—of the Mexican American gang. The gangs of the early 1940s were, at a fateful moment, transitioning from youthful annoyances to hard-core trouble.
The Mexican immigrants of the Great Migration from 1900 to 1930 came primarily to work in the fields and orchards of big agriculture. But demand for agricultural labor was seasonal, based on the distinctive rhythms of planting, care, and harvest of each crop. When agribusiness needed labor, it needed it in enormous numbers of cheaply paid and easily dismissed temporary workers. The immigrant families therefore settled down in convenient places where they could find offseason work and from which they could get to the fields when their labor was demanded. For hundreds of thousands of Mexicans—like Jose Diaz's family—this was the Los Angeles basin.
Mexicans who came to Los Angeles were attracted to the tightly drawn insularity of the barrios by both affinity and exclusion. Living conditions there were harsh. Housing, water, power, sanitation, and other public services ranged from nonexistent to marginal. But like other waves of migrants throughout history and the world, Mexican migrants were most comfortable in neighborhoods where the people, language, and culture were familiar. Life in the barrio offered “a multitude of positive features,” including “the kind of security that immigrants and their children could find in no other place.”12 In any case, the migrants were excluded from “white” neighborhoods by the high cost of housing and by restrictive covenants and other legal and extralegal practices intended precisely to keep Mexicans, blacks, and Asians out. The hucksters who were boosting Los Angeles toward status as a world-class city quite openly envisioned it as a white paradise. John Clinton Porter, an Iowa native who was mayor of Los Angeles between 1929 and 1933, called it “the last stand of native-born Protestant Americans.”13 The “greasers” had their place, all right, but it was offstage and out of sight.
More prime real estate was needed as the city grew. The site of the original pueblo—the old central plaza—became the downtown business district. The Mexicans were shoved out, their barrios pushed eastward. Within that general eastward thrust, Anglo developers claimed the better ground (like Boyle Heights) for the more affluent. “When the surrounding bean fields gave way to expensive housing tracts,” notes researcher Joan Moore, “the barrios simply became the lower class part of town.”14 Mexicans and other poor immigrants cobbled their communities together in less-desirable ground—putting up shacks in the flood-prone gullies and ravines between the heights, for example. Black communities took hold in Watts and South Central. Development of public transportation opened more options for the Mexicans, who established barrios at available places along the line and were able to commute to some jobs. The real estate chessboard in Southern California has been in play ever since. Whites have moved west to the ocean, north to the San Fernando Valley, and east to the desert, leapfrogging East Los Angeles, abandoning it to the resurgent Latino tide. In later years, whites fled to exurbs as the brown tide lapped at their suburban refuges in San Fernando and elsewhere.
Although net immigration was effectively suspended during the period of the Great Depression in the 1930s, it resumed as demand for labor rose during World War II, and it has continued almost uninterrupted ever since. The “pipeline” pumping white Protestants into the Los Angeles basin has been replaced by a largely underground line pumping in poor, unskilled Latino immigrants from the south. Joan Moore, who has studied and written about the barrio gangs for decades, observes, “New waves of Mexican immigrants have continued to settle in poor Mexican barrios, as those barrios were vacated by upwardly mobile residents.”15 This continuous flood has had two principal impacts on the barrios of Southern California.
One impact is economic stagnation. While a steady stream of Latinos and their families have climbed out of poverty and its associated effects, the overall Latino community, taken as a statistical whole, remains mired at the bottom of the ladder. Why is this? The “standard explanation,” writes historian Manuel Gonzales, is that “Anglos have consciously kept [Mexican Americans] in a state of subservience.”16 But Gonzales points to “a more basic problem,” namely, “the gigantic influx of Mexican immigrants into the United States.” As long as this immigration continues on “the same massive scale,” he argues, the Mexican American community as a whole “will continue to occupy a position at the lower end of the American socioeconomic spectrum.”17 Joan Moore reaches much the same ultimate conclusion, writing that “the influx meant that [East Los Angeles] continued to be very poor.”18
In addition to economic stagnation, Vigil notes that the “continuous waves of immigrants ensure that there is always a large pool of second-generation Mexican-Americans”—the very group among whom risks of gang involvement are greatest—and have kept the Los Angeles barrios “more culturally distinct.”19 Another researcher observes that, historically, “immigrants living in Southwestern enclaves often found it unnecessary to learn English or to adapt to American customs in food or clothing.”20 Moreover, many Mexicans in the Great Migration “were very reluctant to take on U.S. citizenship, often feeling that they would not gain much in a discriminatory society and would lose the protections that Mexican citizenship afforded them.”21
This milieu of socioeconomic stagnation and cultural inertia—perpetually reinforced by illegal immigration—is the compost in which the Mexican American gangs rooted themselves and, over decades, grew into institutions inextricably intertwined with barrio life. It accounts for their stubborn longevity and immunity to “quick fixes.” Gangs have always been a problem during large-scale immigration. In fact, the earliest youth gangs in Los Angeles were a “mixed bag” of Mexican, Irish, and Russian immigrants.22 In the 1920s, East Los Angeles was a California version of New York's Lower East Side.23 “Within a generation or two,” however, most other immigrant groups “stabilized themselves”: problems like youth gangs “were worked through and became less serious as each group acculturated.”24 The relatively swift acculturation that other immigrant groups experienced in the United States eluded the barrios of Southern California. “Mexican neighborhoods . . . saw gangs grow,” reports one scholar, “while other cultures that began to thrive economically, namely the Irish and the Russian-Jewish, saw gangs dissipate.”25
As early as the 1920s, some children of the Great Migration, the second generation, began to coalesce into informally organized social networks. These prototypical forms can hardly be called gangs in the sense of today's street gang, which is consistently directed toward violence and felonious criminality. They were, rather, “unsophisticated clutches of teens”—the police called them “tomato gangs,” because their fistfights were often preceded by exchanged volleys of fruits and vegetables stolen from vendors’ carts.26 Some of these groups were originally sponsored by churches or social outreach organizations. Others were evocations of a Mexican tradition of male youth hanging out together in groups called palomillas.27 “In Mexico, it's expected that young bucks will hang around and do daring, aggressive things,” Vigil told the Los Angeles Times in 1988. “It's a cohorting tradition . . . common in all classes.”28
Regardless of the impetus or exact shape the protogangs took, they were usually organized around a single barrio (in the 1930s, barrios came to include separate tracts of subsidized public housing) and often in age cohorts. Membership was informal and did not require the violent entry ritual common among later gangs—beating and sometimes commission of a criminal act, including murder, to prove one's steel. Neighbors did not call them “gangs” but referred to them in benign terms as “the boys from the barrio.”29 The 38th Street gang first appeared during the 1920s, along with others, such as the Alpine Street, Dogtown, and White Fence gangs.30
Eventually and perhaps inevitably, fighting gangs emerged in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Their members were drawn from the ever-expanding pool of marginalized youth who were estranged from the culture of their parents, rejected by the dominant society, and often left largely on their own. As communities grew and interacted, youth gangs rubbed against each other. This was often the result of members of different gangs being cast together in “alternative” or “special” schools, to which troublemakers and problem students were transferred. The schools were called escuelas de burro, or “dumb schools” (literally, “donkey schools”), by the kids, some of whom deliberately got themselves transferred to the schools because the curriculum was easy.31 Rituals of marking one's territory and traditions of aggressively defending one's neighborhood and its synonymous gang developed. In some cases, as in the earliest days of the White Fence gang, schoolboys had to fight their way through hostile gang turf on the way to and from school. “Jumping in”—a short but intense beating at the hands of members to prove one's toughness and reliability in a fight—came to mark the moment of passage into the gang.
Barrio and gang became one in the minds of the gangsters, and for many, that merged notional thing also became their only meaningful internal identity. “My gang is my barrio,” thought the gangster, “and my barrio is me.” Joan Moore explains of the gangsters, “They were committed to one another, the barrio, the families, and the gang name in the status-setting fights that occurred in school and on the streets. They were bound by a norm of loyalty.”32
In these formative years, gangs fought within the confines of a code of informal but widely accepted rules. For example, women, children, and families were not to be attacked or involved in violence. If a gang member had a beef with a member of another gang, it was more manly to call him out when he was not with his family, wife, girlfriend, or child and to duke it out man-to-man in what was known as a “fair fight.” One's fellow members provided backup as necessary—for example, if the opponent's fellow gang members tried to interfere. Primary weapons were fists. Moore elaborates, “The fair fight established a pecking order, both within the gang and between groups, and did so in a highly personal tradition that tested the mettle of the fighters in a way that guns cannot do.”33
In the late 1930s, arsenals were expanded to include sticks, clubs, chains, and knives. At this point, use of guns in gang altercations was rare, and those used were usually homemade zip guns.34 The White Fence gang was apparently a leader in escalating the violence and may have been the first to regularly use commercially made guns.35
Gang life was fundamentally changed in the 1940s. For one thing, the violence became more lethal. Teenagers began to be killed in inter-gang clashes or other gang-related violence. Nobody called them “tomato gangs” any more. They became known as “boy gangs,” and they increasingly attracted the attention of the police.36 A deeper force was at work, however, as two widely different cultural streams came together and created a powerfully defiant cultural amalgam. One was the pachuco culture adopted by some alienated Mexican American youth. The other was the jazz culture, particularly the clothing style that grew out of it—the so-called zoot suit. The resultant youth culture—one part fashion and one part personal style—repulsed the “good people” of the barrios, inspired fear and loathing within the dominant community, and eventually provided a powerful role model for young gang members.
Asea change swept over Mexican American society in California in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The population changed from immigrants to children of immigrants. Far-reaching currents flowed beneath this fundamental change. Members of the second generation were more assertive politically than their parents, although it would be a while before they organized an effective voice.37 Families were stressed as the traditionally unquestioned right of the Latino male to rule dictatorially was undercut by the different family mores of the dominant culture and by opportunities for women outside of the home, which accelerated during World War II.38
Most important for gang history, Mexican American working-class youth became “increasingly estranged from a society unable to provide adequate jobs or education.”39 They chafed at the insular barrio bonds of custom and community that had comforted their parents. Were they Mexican, American, Mexican American, or none of the above? One answer for these youth was what Vigil calls “choloization,” a sort of deliberate embrace of marginal style in dress, language, and outlook, neither Mexican nor Anglo-American. A relatively small number of these youths embraced yet another, even more marginal subculture, that of the pachuco. The pachuco subculture was marked by a deliberately confrontational style in dress and mannerisms—indeed, in every way in which the pachuco interacted with both Mexican American and Anglo society.40 “The message,” explains Moore, “was that if the young Chicano was going no place in Anglo society, at least he would not be caught in the dreary grind of the past.”41
Though “never very numerous,” pachucos “exerted an enormous influence on a whole generation” of Mexican American youth through the 1940s and into the 1950s.42 Everything about them was distinctive and a rebuke to the conventional, including personal bearing, hairstyle, language, and clothing. Male pachucos combed their hair smoothly back along the sides and tucked it into a “ducktail” in the rear. Female pachucas favored heavy makeup, short skirts, and exaggerated pompadour hairstyles. Distinctive tattoos came into vogue, most commonly the cruz del barrio (cross of the barrio) on the web of flesh between the thumb and forefinger.43
Pachucos and the mainstream Mexican American society held each other in mutual contempt.44 In the schools, pachucos constantly challenged the masculinity of their “square” male peers by brazen acts, such as stealing lunches.45 The pachucos boldly confronted the norms of segregation and marginalization. This cheeky behavior challenged social compromises that the mainstream Latino community had learned to live with. It also threatened efforts of community leaders to polish up the image of Mexican Americans.46
The cultural rebels adopted a syncretic language, Calo (the roots of which extend back to Spain and the exotic intersection of the worlds of bullfighters and the wandering Roma people), and modified it to their own ends. The use of Calo was partly a natural consequence of a generation caught between lost Spanish and inadequate English-language skills and partly cultural defiance, since “speaking gabacho was viewed as disloyalty” among the pachuco.47 Calo later became a hallmark of the cholo subculture and an underground patois or criminal argot used by Latino gangs as a crude code and counterintelligence screening device to expose would-be infiltrators.
What came to symbolize the pachuco lifestyle more than anything else, however, was a distinctive male outfit called the “zoot suit”—highwaisted pants baggy at the knees; a long, loose-fitting coat; and a broad-brimmed, feathered hat. The entire ensemble was set off by a dangling watch chain. The basic style could be seen in Hollywood movies and high-fashion magazines of the day, but the pachucos pushed it to the extreme. The origins of the zoot suit are unclear. Some Latino chroniclers suggest that the style originated as a native costume in the town of Pachuca, Mexico, and was brought to Los Angeles by a gangster named Mickey Garcia. But this is most likely an ethnic urban myth, since there is neither evidence that such a Western suit was worn by the natives of Pachuca nor that Mickey Garcia was a real person. A more likely and better-documented trail leads to the suit's origins in black culture. It then gained national popularity as it was introduced by touring jazz musicians. The pachucos added their own distinctive flairs to the basic design.
In any case, not every pachuco wore a zoot suit, not every Mexican American who wore a zoot suit was a pachuco, not every pachuco was a gangster, and not every gangster was a pachuco. In fact, the gangsters of White Fence scorned the pachucos. But pachucos, gangsters, and zoot-suiters became conflated, and their numbers were greatly exaggerated. Law enforcement officials estimated that as many as two-thirds of working-class Mexican American young men wore the “drape,” as the zoot suit was called in the argot of Los Angeles.48 But more levelheaded contemporary estimates were that no more than 5 percent actually were zoot-suiters. For one thing, the suit was relatively expensive.49 For another, wartime regulations rationed cloth to amounts suitable for more streamlined forms. This drove the sale of the popular zoot suits into the black market and “bootleg tailors.”50
The reason for the dominant society's conflation and exaggeration of the pachucos, gangs, and the phenomenon of the zoot suit is clear. The zoot-suiter was a tangible, insolently open, and willfully subversive force that threatened everything America the Beautiful stood for in its hour of existential crisis. In a country mobilized for global war, immersed in racism, and awash with propaganda stressing the need for social conformity to advance the common effort, the zoot-suiters’ out-landish garb mashed the dominant culture's rage button and held it firmly down. Conventional patriotic wisdom—expressed in art as well as political bombast—demanded conformity to its vision of “a homogenous nation of hardworking, church-going, white, middle-class people of middle American values.”51 The zoot suit became identified with those who wore it, and they were precisely the opposite of the idealized American patriot. They were brown and black men, perceived as damned well uppity, almost certainly raging criminals, and no doubt draft dodgers to boot. One researcher explains, “Like rock and roll a decade later, and the Panthers and hippies a decade after that, the zoot suiters seemed a direct assault on Anglo-Saxon America, on all that was straight and white and therefore good.”52
The pachuco phenomenon had deep and long-lasting effects on Latino gangs and law enforcement alike in the Los Angeles area. Many of the barrio gangs’ older boys, who had been a moderating influence as they matured, went off to war.53 (Contrary to the period's poisonous myth that Latinos were draft dodgers, they in fact volunteered and suffered casualties in disproportionate number.) This left a vacuum of leadership. The younger gang cadres turned to the coolly in-your-face pachuco as a role model. The pachuco model then developed into the equally composed challenge of the “cholo style” that became associated with California's Mexican American gangs—khaki pants, plaid Pendleton shirt, polished shoes, and watch cap, bandana, or short-brimmed hat.54 Like the pachuco look, the cholo look would be seized upon by many in the dominant Anglo culture as prima facie evidence of gangster involvement.
The police had their own pressures to contend with. Southern California boomed as the aircraft, shipbuilding, and other defense-related industries took off during the war. Police had to deal with a rapidly growing population and chaotic traffic. But they had likewise seen many of their more experienced and moderating officers off to war. Hastily recruited “war emergency officers” were rammed through an accelerated six-week training course and hurried out onto the streets. One researcher observes, “These were men unfit for military duty. It became commonplace for officers with limited physical or mental skills to respond to calls for service.”55 It is little wonder that something fundamental in the way cops looked at and interacted with Mexican American kids changed in this period. The maddening image of pachucos as wanton criminals mocking the war effort, informed through the racist lens of the day, slapped inexperienced cops right in the face. It left beat cops and supervisors alike frustrated, aching for chances to break heads and clean house. They got both, first in the Sleepy Lagoon murder case and then in the Zoot Suit Riots, which followed fast on its heels.
The site of the Williams Ranch is now an industrial area in the city of Bell. The water hole known as the Sleepy Lagoon has long since been paved over. In 1942, the irrigation reservoir was a swimming hole by day for Mexican American kids, who were barred from public pools, and a lover's lane by night. Some time before that, it had been the site of the exclusive Laguna Duck Club, a hunter's haven established by Henry W. O'Melveny, who founded Los Angeles's third-ranked power law firm, O'Melveny and Myers.56
Henry O'Melveny's career is a fine metaphor for the boom days of Los Angeles. He was born in Central City, Illinois, in 1859 and migrated with his family to Los Angeles in 1869. Following his father's professional footsteps, he became a successful lawyer. In 1906, he started a partnership that would eventually become O'Melveny and Myers. When Henry O'Melveny was not out hunting ducks on Sleepy Lagoon with his wealthy pals, he was busy making money with them. The O'Melveny firm prospered by representing the rich and powerful—the flint-eyed businessmen who cannily created the water and hydroelectric power systems that made the boosters’ dream of Los Angeles possible; the farmers supplying factories with sugar beets, who coveted the backs and arms of Mexican laborers; and the bankers who kept the money flowing. Today, O'Melveny and Myers has an international practice. Former secretary of state Warren Christopher is its senior partner. The firm grossed $372.5 million in 1999.57
O'Melveny's world might as well have been on the far side of the moon for the farmworkers who came to celebrate a birthday party on the ranch the night Jose Diaz was beaten to death. The party was at the home of Amelio and Angela Delgadillo, in honor of their daughter, Eleanor. It was a typical fiesta, with a small band, dancing, good food, and alcohol. About twenty youth from the nearby town of Downey—most of them apparently Anglo kids—crashed the party. When the beer ran out around 11:00 p.m., they became unruly and were thrown out. The Downey crowd left angry and vowing to get even.
Meanwhile, an entirely separate group of young Mexican Americans from the Thirty-eighth Street area had driven in two cars out to the Sleepy Lagoon, which lay to the north of the cluster of bunkhouses that included the Delgadillo residence. As the Downey boys drove out on the rutted ranch road, they passed the Thirty-eighth Street group. Epithets in English and Spanish were exchanged. The young men from Downey appeared to move on, and the Thirty-eighth Street group dispersed into moonlit trysts. Half an hour later, shouts and groans shattered the quiet. The boys from Downey were back and proceeded to beat up the hapless Thirty-eighth Street lovers. For the Thirty-eighth Street victims, “there was little question about what they would do next: they drove straight back to their neighborhood.”58
Within an hour, they had assembled a caravan of eight cars and some forty compatriots from the Thirty-eighth Street barrio and headed back to the lagoon. The water hole was deserted, but the youth could hear the sound of the Delgadillo birthday party, which was breaking up by then. About half of the Thirty-eighth Street group headed for the party, purportedly on the theory that their attackers from Downey might be there.
At this point—just as the avenging crowd arrived at the bunkhouse—two women from the Thirty-eighth Street group found Jose Diaz lying in the road. The main body of the group went on to the Delgadillo home, where they provoked a brawl and attacked the remaining partygoers with fists, feet, and sticks. The assault lasted about ten minutes, after which the Thirty-Eighth Street crowd left and repaired to their barrio to savor their misdirected “revenge.” One of their number paused long enough to kick the supine Diaz, giving him a few licks with a stick for good measure. Nevertheless, the appellate court found that there was no admissible evidence linking any of the Thirty-eighth Street defendants to Diaz's fatal blow.
So how did Jose Diaz die? A posthumous confession emerged in the 2002 PBS television documentary Zoot Suit Riots. According to this version, a young man named Louie Encinas confessed early on to his sister that he had been thrown out of the party for causing problems, stayed behind with a few friends, and attacked Diaz as he drunkenly stumbled home. Louie Encinas was swept up in the LAPD dragnet but released. He committed suicide in 1972 during a botched bank robbery. Encinas's sister died in 1991, having never come forth with her brother's confession. But she did tell it to her daughter. All of the principals having passed on, Louie Encinas's niece related the story of the confession to PBS.59 Eduardo Obregon Pagan doubts the credibility of this version. He concludes that Diaz was the victim of a simple mugging.60
Were the events that bracketed the unsolved Diaz murder—the sequence set in motion by the Downey boys’ assault at the former duck pond—an early episode of 38th Street gang violence? Pagan argues that “the young men and women of 38th Street were clearly not a gang.” For him, the persuasive evidence is that they “had no leadership hierarchy to speak of, no cash-flow operations, no initiation rites, uniforms, hand signs, or any other public displays of group membership.”61 But, assuming this was so, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The modern gang indicia that Pagan cites were only just developing in the early gangs of 1942. Historian of Chicano culture George Sanchez calls the group the “38th Street Club.” He writes that it was “one of at least thirty-five ‘gangs’ in Los Angeles during the early 1940s” and that “these gangs differed from the complex east-side gangs that have operated in Los Angeles in recent decades.” He notes that most of the defendants had already been in trouble with the law, although many of the incidents were minor.62
Moreover, the ability of the Thirty-eighth Street group to return to their neighborhood at midnight and assemble a force of eight carloads of youth ready to go back to the Sleepy Lagoon and seek out a fight—indeed, to force a brawl on an entirely innocent party of working people—is strong evidence that something more than a casual relationship existed among these youth. The sequence calls to mind a test for identifying whether a gang exists that is described by Fairfax County, Virginia, juvenile official David Rathbun: “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.”63 The “duck test” can lead to dangerous stereotyping when it is applied to individual appearance (“he looks like a gangster, therefore he must be one”), because subcultures can overlap in dress and mannerisms. The cholo style of dress, demeanor, and even autos that is associated with Latino gangsters is widely popular among many law-abiding Latinos and some Anglos, as “the gang culture is diffusing into the middle class.”64 Vigil warns, “Even among the ducks, you have Daisy Duck, Donald Duck and Daffy Duck.”65 But concerted violent actions are a different matter, and here the deliberate acts of the Thirty-eighth Street group look and sound like the gang “duck,” what has since become the lethal ritual of challenge, attack, and counterattack, often at the expense of an innocent bystander's life. It is beyond dispute that the violent 38th Street gang of today is real: witness the screwdriver rammed into Juan Romero's skull. That gang grew from something, and the trace of that something in 1942 is the embryonic fighting gang.
The Sleepy Lagoon episode marked a turning point in the relationship between the Mexican American community and law enforcement. What followed was a period during which the relationship changed “from one in which neither side had a particular view of the other one to one in which both sides viewed the other with deep suspicions and hostility.”66 This would have serious consequences for how the community and police dealt with the gangs flourishing in their midst. As the gangs got stronger and more violent during the 1950s and 1960s, community cooperation with the police waned.
Before the 1940s, the LAPD was generally not interested in devoting more than a bare minimum of resources to the barrios. “Other than hiring a handful of Mexican American officers to patrol the barrios,” reports one researcher, “the department . . . had no specific policy for handling Mexican crime.”67 Throughout most of the first four decades of the twentieth century, the LAPD was deployed by the city's establishment as a head-cracking blunt instrument to keep organized labor out of Los Angeles and other troublemakers in line. It “protected friends and punished enemies of the machine in power,” while it “gained the reputation of being one of the most corrupt police forces in the nation.”68 Under these conditions, the LAPD's interactions with Mexicans and Mexican Americans often distinguished the police either as head-cracking, strikebreaking enforcers or as shakedown artists. Gang members, like other Mexican American youth, were harassed by police when they ventured out of the barrio into white areas, but police did not routinely engage in mass enforcement actions within the barrios themselves. “All this was to change during the pachuco incidents,” notes Joan Moore, “and there was soon a climate of suspicion and hostility between the barrios and the police.”69
The pachucos and the increasingly visible gangs were not the only factors contributing to tensions. Nationwide, reform efforts to clean up police corruption were changing the very way police saw their role in society. The LAPD and other big city departments were moving from being passive reactors to working as paramilitary units proactively fighting crime. In 1938, reform efforts got a boost in Los Angeles when an investigator working for a reform coalition was seriously injured by a car bomb. Suspicion fell on a red-baiting intelligence unit of the police department. A recall election put reforming judge Fletcher Bowron in office as mayor. He sacked more than 150 corrupt or incompetent cops and nudged the LAPD to take its first sustained steps toward reform. Although the department would not institute comprehensive reform until the 1950s, it did adopt the idea of “police professionalism” that progressive reformers had been pushing nationally since the turn of the century.70
Implementing the progressive police reform agenda nationwide was like herding cats, given the lack of a uniform national police force and the independence of municipal departments. The first wave of reform focused on breaking the control of corrupt political bosses over the police. Reformers argued that police should be professionals, hired and judged on merit, not through patronage jobs doled out by political hacks. Reformers decided that the military, perceived as politically incorruptible, was the ideal model for police agencies. This fit in well with the view, widely accepted by the 1930s, that the country was engaged in an all-encompassing war on crime. “Criminals were the enemy, lawyers were their diplomats, policemen were the main line of defense, and civilians were combatants in the struggle”—under these conditions of total war, “no holds were barred, no tactics ruled out, no rights respected, and no mercy tendered.”71 Although the early reformers also believed that police departments could prevent crime as well as fight it—through such things as assigning police to work with juveniles through welfare bureaus and special courts—the thrust was to get the troops out onto the streets in hand-to-hand combat with the criminals. This push would inevitably lead to the presence of more police in the barrios, where the gangs were ensconced.
Another source of stress—exposed during the Sleepy Lagoon murder investigation—was a vein of raw racism that was apparently widely held within the Los Angeles law enforcement community, although perhaps not official doctrine. In August 1942, Lt. Edward Duran Ayres, chief of the Foreign Relations Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, testified before the Los Angeles County Grand Jury on the causes of the “great proportion of crime by a certain element of the Mexican population” in the United States. His testimony became known as the Ayres Report.72
Lieutenant Ayres, who may have been of Latino descent himself, started his report with the reasonable observation that among a “number of factors” contributing to Mexican American crime were “economics, lack of employment, and small wages.” He also sympathetically noted that Mexicans “are discriminated against and have been heretofore practically barred from learning trades,” and he enumerated “segregation as evidenced by public signs and rules such as appear in certain restaurants, public swimming plunges, public parks, theatres and even in schools.” After half a dozen opening paragraphs in this vein, however, Ayres dismissed them with a rhetorical wave of the hand and turned to the “basic cause that is even more fundamental than the factors already mentioned.” The “biological basis,” he argued, was “the main basis to work from.”
Citing the difference between wild cats and domesticated cats (“while one may be domesticated the other would have to be caged to be kept in captivity”), Ayres opined, “Basically it is biological—one cannot change the spots of a leopard.” The biological taint is the Indian blood in the Mexican, which is essentially “Oriental” in origin. In August 1942, it was not necessary to connect the dots between the evil characteristics of “Oriental” blood and the infamous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor of December 7, 1941. Ayres explained, “The Caucasian, especially the Anglo-Saxon, when engaged in fighting, particularly among youths, resort to fisticuffs and may at times kick each other, which is considered unsportive, but this Mexican element considers all that to be a sign of weakness, and all he knows and feels is a desire to use a knife or some lethal weapon . . . to kill, or at least let blood.”
Ayres's testimony stunned community leaders. Almost a century after the United States conquest, the racist underpinnings of Manifest Destiny were revealed to be deeply imbedded in the police forces of Southern California. Moreover, the Ayres report was the bellwether of a branch of “scientific” criminology that had developed over the several preceding decades. It held that Mexicans were not merely racially inferior but inherently—genetically—criminal.73
In June 1943, whatever fragile remnants of comity remained between the LAPD and the Mexican American community were shattered with the sledgehammer blow of the so-called Zoot Suit Riots. Hostility had been growing for months between Mexican American youth and the thousands of predominantly white servicemen stationed in Southern California. The rancor was punctuated by fistfights and skirmishes between small groups. Such friction between local youth and servicemen is not uncommon where a military base abuts a civilian population. But “it is hard to imagine two lifestyles so completely at odds” as that of the middle-American white boys with short hair and crisp uniforms enduring the rigors of boot camp and preparing for combat and that of the nonconformist brown-skinned Mexican American boys wearing zoot suits.74 One scholar identifies it as “a textbook case of race and loathing rubbing up against each other.”75
On June 3, after a clash on May 31 left a sailor with a broken jaw, a group of about fifty servicemen—mostly sailors and marines—armed themselves with belts and clubs and went to town, looking for Mexican Americans wearing zoot suits. The ensuing riots grew to involve thousands of servicemen and civilian allies. Their targets soon broadened to include any young Mexican American of either gender in the path of the rampaging soldiers, sailors, and marines. Boys wearing zoot suits were beaten, stripped of their clothing, and left bloody and dazed, but other Mexican Americans were beaten up simply on principle. The LAPD deliberately looked the other way while the riots raged, moving in only to arrest the beaten Mexican Americans. The riots were brought under control only when President Roosevelt—under diplomatic pressure from Mexico, which had just declared war on the Axis powers—ordered the military to restrict the servicemen to their bases.
The fallout from the Sleepy Lagoon murder case and the Zoot Suit Riots for the future of Latino gangs was enormous. The gang mythos was inflated from common criminality to the heroic proportions of common defense. “It is difficult to imagine what might have happened to these gangs if the zoot suit persecutions had not occurred,” writes Joan Moore. “The boys that fought the marauding sailors in East Los Angeles were seen by their younger brothers as heroes of a race war.”76 The conduct of the LAPD and the governing establishment it represented was hardly such as to inspire respect for the rule of law in the barrios. The convicted gangsters from Thirty-eighth Street, however, became folk heroes. It was legend on the streets that, even though cruelly abused, they conducted themselves with dignity and stoic resolve while in prison. “This behavior set a new standard for Hispanic gang members who were subsequently sent to jail,” according to Al Valdez, a former investigator for the district attorney's office in Orange County, California. “They demonstrated a type of gang pride and resolve that had never been seen before.”77
By the end of World War II, many barrio kids had the mentality that “gangs were there for protection, although no one could define what that meant.”78 Moreover, community cooperation with police in investigating gang violence began to evaporate as the attitude developed that “the departed's homies would take care of it,” so there was “no need for police.”79 Gang homicides escalated during the 1950s, as drugs and drug trafficking became an increasing part of the gang scene. State and federal drug investigations sent growing numbers of gang members to prison.
A vicious cycle was started as “the larger gang subculture began to incorporate mythologies about coping in prison, and these stories became a part of gang tradition for young gang members.”80 Going to prison became another rite of passage, accepted as a “normal” part of gangster life. In 1953, Deuel Vocational Institute opened as a model for progressive rehabilitation schemes for youthful offenders. The juvenile offenders quickly banded together to protect themselves from adult sexual predators, with whom they were mixed during shower times. A few key members of this informal band were impressed by the methods of the Italian Mafia and the respect its incarcerated members got in prison. They organized their own Mexican Mafia, which later became known as La Eme (Spanish for the letter M), or simply Eme. By 1967, the Mexican Mafia was a powerful force and controlled a number of prison yards. Its bloody command over what happened in prisons enabled it to extend its reach out into the streets, and within a few decades, La Eme controlled important aspects of drug trafficking in Southern California.
At about the same time that the Mexican Mafia was germinating in the California prison system, a new kind of Latino gang was hatching in Downtown Los Angeles, around Eighteenth Street and Broadway. It grew out of the discriminatory policies of the Clanton Street gang, then one of the most powerful gangs in the city. The Clanton Street gang limited its membership to candidates who could prove that they were of 100 percent Mexican ancestry. The youngsters who were turned away by Clanton eventually organized their own gang and called it the 18th Street gang. But organizing was one thing. Solving the problem was another. “They were getting their asses kicked by Clanton,” says LAPD gang expert Sgt. Frank Flores. “So they opened the books to non-Mexicans.”81 The move was dramatic for a Mexican American gang, directly contrary to the temper of the times. It was an era of rising Chicano consciousness, during which the Mexican American gangs developed aggressive hostility toward immigrants from Central America and elsewhere. Opening its books gave the struggling 18th Street gang a massive infusion. One researcher reports, “The lax requirements led the gang to spread like wildfire among immigrant and disenfranchised kids, especially those tired of Clanton.”82
The hybrid 18th Street gang would become the biggest street gang in Los Angeles and one of the most violent in history. Like Mara Salvatrucha, it would also be transplanted to Central America by deported criminal aliens (as Barrio Dieciocho and M-18) and then blow back all across the United States. In 2007, the FBI would add the 18th Street gang to the mandate of its MS-13 National Gang Task Force (although it would not change the unit's name).
While the street gangs of the 1950s and 1960s were mutating into the violent forms of today, the LAPD got serious about reform. It recast itself into a professional model that would be the envy of the police world. The department's first specialized gang squads were sent into the barrios in the 1950s.83 They were dispatched by William H. Parker, whom the department's history describes as its “most distinguished Chief.”84 Parker Center, the LAPD headquarters, is named after him.
Parker was a leader among the “second wave” of police reformers, who rejected the earlier idea that police could prevent crime by attacking its root causes through welfare and recreational programs. He and others argued that the “thin blue line” could “contain but not convert criminals, repress but not prevent crime.”85 A corollary was that police should go on the attack with aggressive measures known variously as preventive patrol, stop-and-search, stop-and-frisk, and field interrogation. Police departments sought quantitative measures to evaluate officer aggressiveness. Everything an officer did was counted, weighed, and ranked. The department valued felony arrests more highly than responding to a radio call, a moving traffic violation more than a parking ticket. Researchers explain that “highly productive officers were the ones who generated the most felony arrests.”86
These ideas were all wrapped up in the LAPD's proactive policing package, which aimed to “stop crime before it happened,” according to Daryl Gates—a controversial chief brought down in 1992 by the Rodney King sociopolitical melodrama. The cops “knew who the troublemakers were” and did not hesitate to put them under close scrutiny. “If someone looked out of place in a neighborhood,” said Gates, “we had a little chat with him.”87 One of the department's sternest critics, University of Southern California journalism professor Joe Domanick, described proactive policing sharply: “You had to hit the street hard and be aggressive.”88
Proactive policing was not merely an academically good idea for the LAPD. It was a necessity. In the words of current chief William J. Brat-ton, “the LAPD is one of the most understaffed police departments in the world . . . half the size of what it should be to police Los Angeles.”89 In 2003, the LAPD had 9,307 full-time sworn personnel, making it the third largest police department in the nation, after New York (with 35,973) and Chicago (with 13,469). It ranks considerably further down a list scaled by the ratio of full-time sworn personnel to hundred thousand residents. The LAPD's ratio was twenty-four per hundred thousand, compared to Chicago's forty-seven and New York's forty-five. Washington, D.C., with 3,632 sworn officers, had the highest ratio, at sixty-five.90 The LAPD also has a larger area to police with its smaller force. The city of Los Angeles covers 498 square miles, New York City 301 square miles, and Chicago 228.91
In comparison, the Miami-Dade County Police Department covers 2,100 square miles—four times the area of Los Angeles—with 3,178 sworn personnel at a ratio of only fourteen per hundred thousand residents in 2003. The force was even smaller in 2008, reporting 2,900 sworn officers.92 The ability of the Miami-Dade department to operate at a much lower staffing level may reflect more than a difference in police administration. It is also likely an artifact of the fundamentally different ways in which the Latino communities in the two metropolitan areas see themselves, their histories, and their relation to their police forces. Patricia Nelson Limerick's observation that “a minority by conquest is not the same as a minority by immigration,” although made with specific reference to American Indians, is, in important ways, just as cogent to the difference between the Latino communities in Los Angeles and Miami.93
Given the LAPD's thin staffing and the sprawl of Los Angeles, backup for an officer in trouble “is likely not around the corner and is probably a long time in coming,” according to Bratton. The LAPD has had two practical choices on the street. It could stay out of trouble by ignoring or dodging it, or it could deflect problems in the first place by projecting an intimidating aura of mastery over every situation—touting the stereotypical street cop with the silvered sunglasses, bulging biceps, and kick-your-ass attitude. Reinforced by the tenets of the police professionalism reform movement, the LAPD in 1950s chose the latter course and has ever since utilized “a uniquely proactive style of police work.”94
But proactive policing had its downside, reinforcing the deleterious effects of the department's historical role as an occupying force deployed to ensure untroubled rule by the white elite. In the opinion of journalist Lou Cannon, the “racist nature of the LAPD reflected the attitudes of the society it served.”95 The LAPD was not alone in this regard. In addition to society's general tenor, police recruiting in the early 1960s favored men with military backgrounds and the sons of police families. These recruiting biases “basically filled America's police departments with fairly well-disciplined white males.”96 The recruits, who often pulled the weekend and night shifts shunned by veteran officers, had little understanding of or sensitivity to the problems of black and Latino communities to which they were deployed. “By the end of the 1960s,” researchers report, “police had basically become an occupation force for high-crime, inner city neighborhoods.”97
The new police patrol practices aggravated racial and ethnic tensions in minority neighborhoods, not only in Los Angeles, but all over America. They rarely caused problems in white neighborhoods, because “few whites used the streets in ways that aroused the suspicion of the patrolmen.”98 But preventive policing ran head-on into cultural conflict in minority neighborhoods where teenagers and young adults spent much of their time on the streets and stoops, sometimes out of tradition and sometimes out of necessity. Aside from whatever biases individual officers had, even neutral attempts at stop-and-search and field interrogations were bound to fall heavily onto a broader spectrum than the criminal element at which they were aimed. “To the dismay of some blacks, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans,” notes one scholar, “these changes seriously threatened their life styles and the values, attitudes, and customs underlying them.”99
In the proactive world of the LAPD, Latinos found “out of place,” in white neighborhoods, were “spotted, circled, checked out and ‘moved’ every few blocks, moved back to where they belonged.” In their own neighborhoods—their own proper place in the suspicious scheme of proactive policing—minority youth were subjected to “constant mind games, hassles, intimidation and shakedown by the cops.”100 Young black and Latino males complained that police—regardless of the officers’ race—often stopped them for minor traffic violations or for no apparent reason at all. They were then made to “prone out”—lie facedown, spread-eagled.101
Gang enforcement programs developed in the 1970s and 1980s inevitably increased the abrasive contact between police and youth in minority neighborhoods. Young blacks and Latinos precisely matched the demographics of the street gangs. From the cops’ point of view, one of the more effective ways to root out the gangsters and understand their networks was to use a technique that the LAPD's CRASH antigang units called “jamming,” a system of deliberately confrontational contact intended to generate intelligence and suppress gang activity. One “jamming” technique was hostile field interrogations—stopping people who looked like gangsters, asking them a lot of questions, and saving the information for later analysis or leads in gang-related crime cases. Another was to confront the ones they knew to be gangsters—the ones who “looked like ducks, walked like ducks, and talked like ducks”—to get across the message that they were being vigilantly watched. According to one CRASH sergeant, “jamming” reminded gangsters that “they don't rule the streets.”102
“We were harassing the gangs,” said former LAPD chief Daryl Gates. But Gates scoffed at suggestions that the harassment violated the civil rights of the targets of jamming: “No one seems to talk about the civil rights violations of the good people out there . . . that are caused by gangs. . . . All we talk about is how we violated the civil rights of these idiot gang members.”103 Thus, for decades, there has been high-voltage tension in Los Angeles between, on the one hand, the thin blue line of iron-jawed cops whose mythos is that they hold back chaos by getting in its face and not yielding an inch and, on the other hand, the sullen pushing back of the underclass against the perceived arbitrariness of proactive authority.
Notwithstanding the LAPD's reforms, gang violence continued to accelerate. Although it moved in fits and starts—up one year, down the next—the overall trend of violence and increased lethality was up. California has experienced three periods during which its overall homicide rate steadily increased to new peaks, fell back briefly, and then rose again—from 1965 through 1988, from 1989 through 1993, and from 1999 to the present.104 Part of this phenomenon reflects similar national trends. Over the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century, the increase in homicides in the United States was so great that it became a major public health issue.105 But a substantial part of the increase in California was driven by gang homicides, especially in Los Angeles County.
By the mid-1970s, “guns were normal, and a fair fight (one person on one person without weapons) was fairly unusual”; the old gang code was junked as gangsters started shooting into houses where mothers and other “noncombatants” lived.106 The practice of drive-by shootings—blasting away with a firearm from a moving car—started in the 1970s, and real guns (as opposed to the old zip guns) were used to kill and maim enemies, rather than scare them off.107 One explanation for the increased gun violence was the tendency for each generation to try to outdo the preceding generation of gang members in locura, or crazy behavior. But another was a significant increase in the number of handguns on the civilian market during the 1970s.
Of 27,302 homicides in Los Angeles from January 1979 through December 1994, law enforcement determined that 7,288 (26.7 percent) were related to gang activity. In 1979, gang-related homicides accounted for 18.1 percent of all homicides in Los Angeles County. By 1994, they accounted for 43 percent. A detailed study of more than five thousand of these gang-related murders found that 56.6 percent of the victims were Latinos, 36.7 percent blacks.108
After a decade of escalation during the 1970s to a peak in 1980, Latino gang murders in East Los Angeles suddenly dropped significantly. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department counted seventy-one in 1980, forty-three in 1981, and twenty-nine in 1983.109 Optimists thought that the key to gang violence had been found in various “outreach” programs and police gang suppression. Other observers were focused on black gangs, such as the Crips and the Bloods. Los Angeles was one of the first cities in which crack cocaine appeared, and it became a national gateway for the drug. Violence soared among black gangs as guns were used to “rationalize” the new drug market and allocate turf among gangs.
For a time, the focus of public and media attention on the crack wars masked the fact that Latino gang violence bottomed and began to soar again in the latter 1980s. The increase was partly caused by the return to the streets of veteran gang members who had been imprisoned under tough new laws in the 1970s. They were hardened and eager to take control again. Younger gang members were willing to start the killing again to prove that they were even more loco than the veteranos. Another factor was the mass marketing of high-capacity semiautomatic pistols during the 1980s. Known as the “wonder nines,” these nine-millimeter guns quickly became gang favorites. The proportion of Los Angeles gang homicides in which semiautomatic pistols were used skyrocketed after 1987.110 Armed encounters were more lethal—more likely to result in death—because more rounds of ammunition can be carried in a semiautomatic pistol (from ten to as many as nineteen) and because rounds can be pumped out faster than through the old-fashioned six-shot revolvers that dominated the century before the 1980s. This amount of firepower dramatically increases the likelihood that someone, not necessarily the intended target, will get hit by one of the rounds sprayed out during the increasingly popular drive-by shootings.
It was during this period that the Salvadoran refugees landed in the midst of territories controlled by the Mexican American gangs. Although some of the Salvadorans joined the “open-book” 18th Street gang, others preferred to form their own gang, Mara Salvatrucha. The leadership of the Mara Salvatrucha gang regarded the Salvadorans who joined the 18th Street gang as traitors. Bad blood quickly developed. A war broke out between the gangs for control of the Rampart area of Los Angeles. The war continues today. Members of both gangs—from San Salvador to Boston—are sworn to attack members of the other gang on sight.
The LAPD reacted with an iron fist under the leadership of Chief Gates as the Latino gang wars spiraled into waves of bloody violence. Meanwhile, the federal government remained deliberately aloof from the bloody fray. The Justice Department, the FBI, and other federal law enforcement agencies regarded gangs as a local “street crime” problem. None of them were about to send their highly skilled investigative agents out into the streets to arrest common hoodlums. But that was all about to change. The Feds were going to be dragged into the fray by the scruff of their necks.