CRIME: Increase in fatal shootings worries residents and overtaxes L.A. police seeking motives, solutions. By Larry Altman
Friday, November 29, 2002
Manu Stibbie was driving home from a pickup basketball game with friends. Rosa Garcia was getting out of her car following a dinner out with her husband and 1-year-old child. Samuel Mendez Ramirez was headed home to change his clothes with plans to attend a dance.
Each died this year in the Harbor Area, struck by bullets apparently fired by gang members. Each became a statistic, one of 34 homicides recorded in the Harbor Area this year and counting.
When Abraham Olazabal Jr., 19, of South Gate and Jose Perez, 25, of Huntington Park were shot dead in a San Pedro alley on Monday, their deaths marked the Harbor Area’s 33rd and 34th homicides of the year, doubling last year’s total.
The sudden rise is worrying residents, overtaxing investigators and sending police administrators scrambling to figure out what to do and to identify a reason for increased violence.
“I’ve been asking everybody I know and I get different answers from everybody,” said Capt. Andrew Smith, second-in-command at the Harbor Division station and in charge of patrol operations. “In the Harbor Area, the majority of homicides are narcotics-related. We are doing everything we can to step up our narcotics enforcement.”
The Harbor Division upsurge mirrors increases in other LAPD jurisdictions. The agency has recorded more than 600 homicides, prompting new Police Chief William Bratton to visit some crime scenes to understand the pain and declare that the city soon will be the “murder capital” of the country.
Experts say the rise in homicides can be linked to a variety of causes, including the sliding economy, gang and drug offenders who have been released from prison following sentences that began in the early 1990s, escalating gang rivalries, and changes in demographics that show a larger population of 15- to 23-year-old men, the group most likely to commit crimes. “Throughout history we’ve seen generational bubbles of kids. When we see these bubbles, we are going to see these crimes go up,” said Tom Mahoney, a University of Phoenix criminology professor and former police chief in South Pasadena.
Capt. Julie Nelson, the Harbor station’s commander, said that among the killings, 13 homicides are linked to drugs, seven are gang-related, 10 are listed as unknown but likely are linked to drugs or gangs, two are related to disputes and one resulted from domestic violence. Another is an officer-involved shooting in Wilmington that will drop the total by one if an investigation rules it justified, as expected.
Three double-homicide cases involve people killed elsewhere and dumped in the Harbor Area, Smith said.
Numbers vary widely
Although the 34 lost lives are alarming, the 100 percent increase might be misleading.
The 17 homicides in 2001 might be the aberration, police officials said. Thirty-four homicides is exactly the average number of killings that occurred in the Harbor Area in the previous 11 years. Nelson said homicides fluctuate in the area, with a low of 17 in 2001 following 45 in 2000. The area’s homicide numbers usually range from the 20s to 40s. The worst year was 1997, with 50 homicides. Forty-five people died in killings in each of 1991 and 1992.
Whatever the numbers, Harbor Division officials are working to curb the violence, some of which has claimed innocent victims caught in the crossfire. Four detectives began the year assigned to the station’s homicide bureau, along with two handling cold cases. Since the increase in crimes starting in March, those two were assigned to handle new cases. Nelson said the department is adding reinforcements from other areas to increase narcotics enforcement in the Harbor Area. Parole sweeps to arrest repeat violators will occur. The Harbor Division’s special enforcement unit, which investigates gang crimes, was doubled from five to 10 officers, and two investigators will work exclusively on gang crimes.
The City Attorney’s Office also is working to continue on gang injunctions, which impose restrictions on gang members’ activities, and Nelson has asked officers at the San Pedro-based station to come up with new strategies to battle gangs and crime.
Officers also will undergo increased training to develop expertise in identifying and dealing with gang crimes, and LAPD officers will join the South Bay Gang Task Force, allowing them to compare information with officers from Torrance, Gardena, Inglewood, Hawthorne, Redondo Beach and other agencies involved, and work together in special operations in the communities.
Bratton, who recently said the city’s 9,000-member force could use an additional 3,000 officers, said one way to combat homicides is to increase the level of police activity, which he said is down. Even before he was confirmed as chief, Bratton said he wanted more productivity from his officers, including getting out of their cars and onto the streets.
Promise of action
He promised over the next several months to reorganize bureaus to focus on fighting crime, which, he said, veered off course when the agency became distracted by the Rampart scandal.
Bratton himself has responded to some homicide scenes, although none in the Harbor Area, an unusual activity for a police chief.
“I want to go to the homicide scene so I can be angry,” Bratton said. “I want to have intimacy with that because when I talk to my cops I want to be able to project to them you need to care, that every one of these individuals has a family.”
Of the 34 homicides in the Harbor Area, only a handful have been solved, frustrating detectives who often identify suspects but do not have enough evidence for a prosecution. Gang and drug crimes are extremely difficult to solve, police say, because gang members do not cooperate and many community members are too afraid to provide information to detectives for fear of retaliation. “We know people have seen these things, but because people are in such fear, the tips are anonymous,” said Harbor Division Lt. Phil Tingirides, who heads the detective bureau. “It gives you some direction to go in, but it restricts you tremendously.”
Detectives continue to jump from case to case hoping for lulls between crimes to investigate. In addition to the homicides, the same detectives have looked into some 30 other dead body cases that were determined to be accidental deaths, suicides or overdoses.SBH Random violence
Detectives say they want to solve as many cases as they can, but particularly want to find the killers in cases involving innocent victims, people going about their lives when hit by gang members’ bullets.
Among them are: the Aug. 18 random shooting attack that killed Stibbie, 22, of Carson as he drove home from a basketball game at a Torrance park when gunmen opened fire on his sport utility vehicle on 223rd Street in Harbor Gateway; the Nov. 17 shooting of Eliseo Rodriguez, 27, when he got out of his car in front of his 204th Street home following a date with his fiancee; the July 26 stray bullet killing of Garcia, who was pregnant, in front of her family in the 1200 block of East Cruces Street in Wilmington; and the July 12 shooting of Samuel Mendez Ramirez, a 17-year-old immigrant shot as he drove on Anaheim Street in Wilmington. “I want to solve them all,” said homicide Detective John VanderHorck, who has investigated killings in Los Angeles for 15 years. “I really want to solve that 223rd Street homicide and I want to solve (Rodriguez’s.) They were just good, law-abiding, taxpaying citizens and got shot for no reason.”
Copley News Service correspondent Rachel Uranga contributed to this article.
How to help: Anyone with information about the homicides in the Harbor Area is asked to call the Harbor Division’s Detective Bureau at, 310-548-7621 or 310-548-2835. Publish Date:November 24, 2002
Harbor Area killings double last year’s total
DAILY BREEZE