BATTLE FOR LOS ANGELES

Ruben Gonzalez makes no secret of being a gang member. Tattoos seared
across his back identify him as one of the Langdon Street gang, one of
the toughest in Los Angeles, which controls the drug trade in the
steaming heart of the smog-ridden San Fernando Valley.

A few weeks ago, Ruben (not his real name) got out of prison after a
six-month stretch for possession and went looking for a job. This was
not out of a simple desire to reform; his parole officer had said that
if he didn't find work within a month, he could expect to be locked up
again.

But then Ruben discovered that he had been named in an anti-gang
injunction - the latest weapon of the city attorney's office - making
his Langdon Street affiliation a matter of public notoriety and
severely curbing his ability to walk the streets of his North Hills
neighbourhood or meet his friends in public. Such injunctions - court
orders that effectively subject groups of named individuals to a kind
of martial law within their own neighbourhoods - are growing
increasingly popular in gang-ridden city districts across the United
States, and nowhere more so than in Los Angeles, with its 400-odd
gangs and an estimated 62,000 gang members. They are also chillingly
effective, as Ruben rapidly discovered.

He advertised his services as a gardener, but because of the
injunction nobody would hire him. He applied for a job on a building
site through a company that expressed willingness to hire ex-convicts.
The company said it would get back to him after checking his records,
but it never did.

And in North Hills, he says, he is in effect a marked man. Whenever
the police see him, even if he is obeying the terms of the injunction,
they warn him to stay away. A few days ago he was heading towards a
gym run by the local United Methodist church, when two officers
blocked his path and told him to leave. "They said: 'If we see you
again we're going to take your ass out of there. You don't belong
here'," Ruben recalls.

Another policeman, he claims, stopped him and threatened to arrest him
for having stolen the watch that he was wearing. In another incident,
he and a friend were thrown to the ground and slapped around by police
outside a 7-Eleven store on Sepulveda Boulevard.

All of which poses the question: if, as they claim, the authorities
hope gang members can be persuaded to reform, and respect the rule of
law, is this really the best way of going about it?

Los Angeles has just passed its 10th injunction - against 35 alleged
gang members in the largely African-American Oakwood district, just
inland from Venice Beach - and the LA County board of supervisors is
considering whether to introduce a blanket ban against loitering in
key areas. The city and the police love injunctions because they offer
the chance to be seen doing something concrete to keep miscreants off
the streets. They are also popular with middle-class voters who are
sick of Los Angeles' record of street fighting, drive-by shootings and
murderous revolt among its urban poor.

But civil liberties activists are outraged at what they see as an
infringement of the basic rights of assembly and freedom of movement.
Community groups in the bad neighbourhoods are equally furious,
arguing that branding individuals as gang members will alienate them
further, and increase local tension.

"They just want to pound us with the police," says Rev Jim Hamilton,
the priest at the Methodist Church in North Hills, which provides just
about the only recreational and community-service facilities available
to young people in the area. "We could turn so many kids' lives
around, if only they took our work seriously instead of pushing so
hard to criminalise people."

The terms of the injunctions vary, but generally they prevent known
gang members from standing, sitting or walking together in public,
impose a night-time curfew, and ban them from carrying mobile phones
or pagers.

In North Hills, an impoverished area on the unfashionable eastern side
of the San Diego Freeway, where immigrants from Central America tend
to settle when they first arrive, the injunction imposed at the end of
May has left the community in a virtual state of siege, even though
most of the 37 people named are already in jail.

"The police come and harass the people selling shoes on the street,
and the ice-cream vendors operating out of vans," Rev Hamilton says.
"They make random arrests."

Rev Hamilton's social worker colleague, Evelio Franco, tried to
intervene recently when, according to his account, police slammed the
face of a young ice-cream vendor against the sizzlingly hot bonnet of
his van and held it there. When Franco demanded to know what the
vendor had done wrong, the police first warned him off and then
slapped him in handcuffs.

The authorities have reason to feel frustrated in North Hills, but the
area is hardly a model of community policing. Orion Street, the road
that leads directly off the freeway, is known as "drive-thru drug
boulevard" because doctors, lawyers, estate agents and other customers
from the more affluent western San Fernando Valley pick up their dope
there before speeding back up the ramp on to the eight-lane highway.

The road is flat and empty, making it easy to spot any approaching
police. According to Ruben Gonzalez, the Langdon Street gang leaders
don't even do the selling themselves; they merely rent out spots along
Orion Street to pushers from outside the area, and take a cut of the
profits.

Rev Hamilton and others claim that the police - many of whom are
rookies trying to prove themselves to their superiors - are not afraid
to plant evidence and invent charges to pick up young people who they
feel sure are involved in gang activity, but can never catch in the
act. It's an allegation that is made time and time again across Los
Angeles; one former prosecutor in the district attorney's office,
speaking on condition of anonymity, says that trumped up charges and
police plants were a near-daily occurrence in the drugs cases she
handled in impoverished East LA, and so depressed her that she decided
to leave.

The picture is somewhat less bleak in Oakwood, home of the Venice
Shoreline Crips, which as recently as two years ago was the scene of
13 murders in a bloody confrontation between the African-American
Crips and their Latino rivals, the Culver City Boys. The neighbourhood
borders on some of the most desirable beach-side property in the city,
and has slowly been improving thanks to community efforts and the
creation of community centres and a nursery school by the city council.

Crime in Oakwood, once considered the murder capital of the United
States, is now largely restricted to drug sales - with black gang
members doing the selling but affluent whites doing the buying. Here,
the main complaint about the impending injunction is racism. "How come
the police come to harass us when they leave the white guys alone? If
you're white you can carry rocks of cocaine on you and nothing will
happen. If you're black, you know if you step out of line they's gonna
bust your ass," says Melvyn Hayward, a long-time social activist in
Oakwood, who runs the Vera Davis community centre.

Hayward and others suspect that the injunction is largely aimed at
clearing out the black population altogether, so that Oakwood can more
easily be gentrified. He is also concerned about a possible branding
effect on those who are named in the injunction - in the last two
years he has found jobs for several dozen ex-convicts, but is not at
all sure that he will be able to maintain that success rate if his
proteges are named as gang members.

The situation in Oakwood, meanwhile, has become highly politicised by
the involvement of the Nation of Islam, which has paid for two lawyers
to try to shoot down the recent injunction. When pushed, Hayward even
admitted that the threat of an injunction had been effective in
scaring hard-core gang members away from the area. But the Nation of
Islam appears to be determined to use the issue against the white
establishment in the broadest possible terms.

The white establishment, meanwhile, has its own agenda. It may be no
coincidence that the city attorney, Jim Hahn, has ambitions to run for
mayor of Los Angeles in 2001. The police department, too, wants to
prove its worth, and justify the $12m annual budget that is devoted to
anti-gang activities.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the injunctions is that they offer a
judicial solution to what is a multifaceted issue, rooted in poverty
and social despair. Both Rev Hamilton in North Hills and Melvyn
Hayward in Oakwood point out that even a fraction of the money spent
on law enforcement, the courts and the prison system could go a long
way towards solving the problems, especially in the present economic
boom cycle. "Once you are put in the gang straitjacket, it stays on
for ever," Hayward says.

"That means you are going to be arrested over and over. And prison
just makes people meaner and meaner."