Medical Researchers Call Gang Killings ‘Epidemic’ in County : Crime: Skyrocketing street murder rate is described as ‘a major public health problem.’ Study says that social ills and easy access to guns are the chief causes.

Declaring street-gang violence an “epidemic,” medical researchers have conducted the most far-reaching analysis yet of gang killings in Los Angeles County, documenting the slaughter of 7,288 people from 1979 through 1994.

The study, which appears in today’s Journal of the American Medical Assn., charts an astonishing overall rise in gang murders, which amounted to 43% of all homicides last year, up from 18% in 1979.

“We should all be shocked by such numbers,” said Caswell A. Evans Jr., director of public health programs for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. Evans added that the study might help counteract the mood of “acquiescence” to gang violence that seems to have settled over much of the city.

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The urban carnage described by the researchers “points out that what we’re doing to curb the problem is not working,” said epidemiologist Billie Weiss, head of the health department’s injury and violence prevention program.

Among the study’s other findings:

* One-third of the people killed in gang attacks were not involved with a violent street gang.

* The victims’ median age was 21.

* Among African American males between 15 and 19, the gang-related death rate more than tripled from 1980 to 1990. In contrast, among Latino males that age, the death rate rose by 30%.

* Fewer than 5% of gang killings involved the sale of illicit drugs.

* The use of semiautomatic handguns in gang killings has more than quadrupled, to more than 40%.

Emergency medicine specialists led by Dr. H. Range Hutson, formerly of the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, conducted the study, using data from the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The researchers analyzed a representative sample of 5,541 of the killings, which they describe as “a major public health problem in Los Angeles County.”

Hutson, who is now at Harvard Medical School, said that the widely publicized gang killing Sept. 17 of 3-year-old Stephanie Kuhen was merely the latest in a long, grim list of child murders. “Since 1987, there have been 28 African American and Hispanic children 10 and under who have been killed by violent street-gang members,” he said.

Although criminologists have previously released some gang-violence statistics, the medical researchers provide the longest-term analysis to date, in which they view the killings as a sort of deadly disease with complex causes.

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One important factor, the researchers say, is easy access to handguns, the weapons of choice in 95% of deaths, with the use of semiautomatic handguns increasing ominously.

Contrary to gang mythology, in which weapons such as Uzi submachine guns figure prominently, assault weapons were used in only 2.8% of killings, said Hutson. Dr. Deirdre Anglin, an emergency medicine specialist at County-USC and co-author of the study, said that “a ban on assault rifles is not going to make a difference in gang-related homicides.” Restricting access to handguns would be more effective, she said, though she acknowledged that “limiting or regulating firearms . . . isn’t going to get rid of violent street gangs.”

Trauma physicians can play a larger role in checking the growth of gangs, the researchers believe. Because a gang member is most likely to leave the group after he or a cohort has been injured, the researchers suggest that physicians notify youth counselors when gang members end up in the emergency room. “We should be able to have an impact at that vulnerable time,” Anglin said.

Saying that law-and-order efforts “cannot solve the gang problem,” the researchers invoke a tenet of public health: Preventing a disease is not only more humane but cheaper than curing it after it takes hold.

Previous research has found that a gang homicide costs society up to $1 million, including medical services and lost wages, but not counting police and court costs. At that rate, Hutson said, gang homicides have cost the city “many billions of dollars.”

Rather than addressing the problem on the “hind end, dealing all these people killed and injured,” he said, it makes more sense to spend it on the “front end,” trying to prevent youths from joining gangs.

Among the reasons young people join violent street gangs, say the researchers, are “a sense of belonging, protection, status, adventure and illegal monetary gains.”

But those factors are made particularly attractive, they say, by the underlying social problems of poverty, high unemployment, poor education and erosion of family structure.

In the poverty-stricken areas hardest hit by gang violence, Weiss said, “we have to spend money on kids before they get to middle school. We’ve got to provide them with the means to get involved in other things, like after-school programs. Kids often tell us, ‘I can buy drugs on my street, but I can’t find a movie in my neighborhood.’ ”

Sgt. Wesley McBride of the sheriff’s Safe Streets bureau said that the study might help jolt people out of “the apathy that has set in.”

So far, he said, 1995 is “on pace” with last year, when 779 people were killed in gang violence.

There are 1,142 street gangs and 150,000 gang members in Los Angeles County, he added. “We’re vastly outnumbered,” he said, referring to law enforcement. “We need all the help we can get.”

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Trends in Gang-Relalted Murders

In the most far-reaching study of its kind, physicians have analyzed 5,541 of the 7,299 gang- related deaths in Los Angeles County in the past 16 years. The death rate for African Americans has tripled; semiautomatic handguns have proliferated and are now used in two out of five murders; drive- by shootings account forone out of four gang deaths; and one in three victims are not gang members but bystanders.

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Time of gang- related homicides

Unknown: 3.6%

7 a.m. to 2 p.m.: 8.6%

3 p.m. to 10 p.m.: 42.7%

11 p.m. to 6 a.m.: 45.2%

Source: Hutson and co-authors, Journal of the American Medical Assn.