Crime Prevention

The city of Lancaster is considering adopting stiff penalties for owners of "potentially dangerous" and "vicious" dogs, particularly those that law enforcement officials say are favored by gang members and used for intimidation. The proposed ordinance would also require spaying and neutering of all varieties of pit bulls and Rottweilers, including mutts that have "predominant physical characteristics" of those breeds. "I want gangs out of Lancaster," Mayor R.

In the 1980s and '90s, rising crime, dilapidated streets and a perception that police alone could not keep the streets of Los Angeles safe led a few neighborhoods to take matters into their own hands. In areas as varied as Old Pasadena, Westwood, Hollywood Boulevard and downtown L.A., business and property owners banded together to assess themselves and form umbrella organizations aimed at keeping their areas safe and clean.

The United States does not need to send troops to the border in response to Mexico's drug war, nor is Mexico in danger of becoming a failed state, law enforcement officials told a congressional panel Monday. Witnesses testifying before members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in El Paso urged the lawmakers to bolster law enforcement in the region, increase aid to Mexico and push to reform institutions whose weaknesses had been exposed by the struggle with drug trafficking gangs.

There was a logjam at the door of a makeshift schoolhouse one recent morning, because everyone was being scanned with a metal detector. There was a reason for that. Of the 50 students filing in for class, 45 were once gang members -- in at least 30 rival gangs. It was a swaggering crowd, with shaved heads and baggy pants, gold chains draped around thick necks. Many still used their street names: Brick. Q Ball. The students sat on metal folding chairs.

Los Angeles City Hall officials are preparing to sever ties with one of the more high-profile gang intervention organizations in South L.A., a decision the agency head decried as "an injustice" -- even dangerous because of the agency's success in reducing violence between rival gangs. The city's Gang Reduction & Youth Development office plans to end its contract with Unity T.W.O. Inc. at the end of the month.

Cellphones in prisons have become a big problem, with inmates devising ever more exotic ways of smuggling them in. So federal prison officials have a new plan: If you can't beat 'em, jam 'em. The proposed Safe Prisons Communications Act of 2009 would allow prisons to install wireless jamming systems that would make cellphones useless behind bars. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.

Officials on Monday unveiled a federal bill that would create national standards and accountability for gang intervention workers as part of a Los Angeles-based effort to professionalize the growing and controversial field. The bill, which was introduced by U.S. Rep. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles), is the first such national initiative to regulate intervention workers who act as liaisons between law enforcement and communities. Police and intervention workers have a long history of distrust, but authorities have come to rely on intervention workers for such matters as monitoring street gossip and preventing retaliatory shootings.

The leader of an embattled South Los Angeles gang intervention agency has pledged to press on with his work, even as he conceded that his agency is about to lose its contract in a second pocket of the city, two weeks after City Hall officials severed ties with him. "It's in God's hands now," said Kevin Mustafa Fletcher, a former member of the Swan gang and the executive director of Unity T.W.O., one of the city's more high-profile gang intervention agencies. In an impassioned three-hour interview at his Avalon Boulevard headquarters Wednesday, Fletcher said he had been unfairly targeted -- swept up in politics and abandoned by former allies who are themselves looking to cash in on the flood of public money that the city is setting aside for gang intervention.

Los Angeles County health worker Leonardo Rincon lifts the birth certificate up to the light and expertly scrutinizes it. Do faint watermarks show up? Yes. He rubs his thumb over the official seal to see if it is raised. It is. He checks the number of digits in the document number. Perfect. Ruth Torres, he decides, has brought in valid U.S. birth certificates for her six children, a valid U.S. passport for her husband and a valid green card for herself, a legal immigrant from Mexico.

Long Beach City Councilman Dee Andrews cast a loud, drawn-out groan before describing what the Henderson Avenue neighborhood used to look like. "Henderson was just a bad, I mean, bad, bad street," he said. "That's where everybody came to pick up their drugs." Just a few years ago, two adjacent apartment complexes on the 1900 block of Henderson were havens for drug dealers and prostitutes, according to city officials. Neighbors were leery of leaving their homes, and the complexes drew a high number of police calls.