Gang Violence Pumps Up L.A. Murder Numbers November 22, 2002 - AP

Pictures of Robert Williams' 17-year-old son sit on the kitchen table of his tidy home in South Los Angeles. In some of them, Ernie Williams is a smiling baby, a skinny 5-year-old in glasses and bow tie, a chubby player on youth football and basketball teams. Still others show a slender, handsome teen embracing friends at his junior high school graduation. Those more recent photos are among the last ones Robert Williams has of his son. The teenager was gunned down by gang members on his way to a neighborhood store Tuesday night, becoming one of the latest victims in an alarming wave of murders that has put Los Angeles on track to finish out the year with the highest death toll in America. "I always preached to him to stay away from trouble. Stay away from trouble, stay away. If you stay away you'll be all right," his father said. "Trouble just found him." Friends and neighbors said Williams, a high school senior and computer whiz, had no connections to gangs, regularly attended church with his father and did chores in the neighborhood. His slaying occurred during a recent surge of primarily gang-related violence that saw 16 people killed in six days. Some of the victims, like Williams, were not gang members but simply people who appeared to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their slayings raised the number of homicides in the nation's second-largest city to 606 -- the most since 1996 -- and up from 587 in all of last year, police said Friday. By comparison, New York, with more than twice the population of Los Angeles, reported 503 homicides as of mid-November, down about 12 percent from the same time last year. Chicago had 571 homicides through Thursday, down from 598 at the same time last year. Many major U.S. cities saw a dramatic drop-off in murders during the 1990s, attributed in part to the strong economy and waning of the crack trade. Los Angeles, for example, went from 1,092 homicides in 1992 to a decade-low of 419 in 1998. But in the past few years, the trend started to reverse itself in many places. The flare-up in gang violence in Los Angeles is attributed mainly to turf wars over the drug trade, but other factors are at play. According to police, gang members newly released from prison are using bloodshed to reassert their positions. Also, some of the violence is generational: As younger gang members join up, they have to prove themselves by way of violence. About 43 percent of the Los Angeles slayings have occurred on the city's gang-plagued south side. Newly installed Police Chief William J. Bratton has promised to go after the gangs. Bratton, who was New York City's police commissioner when the murder rate there dropped 50 percent in the 1990s, said he will do that by enlisting the help of residents and community leaders of areas like the south side. "It is not our intention to go into that community like an invading army," he said this week. "We want LAPD empowered to work in conjunction with leaders in that community." Capt. James Miller, commanding officer of South Los Angeles' 77th Street station, acknowledged that police will first have to bridge a decades-old divide with the community. That distrust has been blamed in part for such episodes as the 1965 Watts riots and the 1992 riots over the Rodney King beating. Distrust was also fueled by a 1999 police corruption scandal in which anti-gang officers in the city's poor Rampart neighborhood were accused of beating, framing and robbing people. Since November 2000 the Police Department has operated under federal supervision. The department accepted a monitor to stave off a Justice Department lawsuit accusing the police of civil rights abuses. Activist "Sweet" Alice Harris spoke up at a recent news conference to thank Mayor James Hahn for hiring Bratton and to plead for an end to the violence. "We are watching our children die like dogs," she said. "We have to stop this. We have to get them some jobs and give them an education." At home in his south side house, Williams, 53, echoed that plea. "Look at what's happening here in America," he said. "It's all happening in black and Latino neighborhoods, and nothing is being done. We have resources, they can go in and knock these gangs out." In the meantime, the single father is left grieving for a son who left him too soon. "That's my buddy," he said, clutching another picture of Ernie and trying in vain to hold back tears. "I don't have him anymore. I have him in spirit and memory, but I can't touch him."