Vietnamese Gang Violence on Rise, Officials Say

The slaying of a young Vietnamese man and the wounding of five others in a restaurant shooting has police and others wondering if the violence seen in Vietnamese communities in Los Angeles and Orange counties is spreading to San Diego.

The shooting occurred just after midnight Jan. 12 at the Imperial Palace restaurant on Convoy Street after two youths, one of them armed with a semiautomatic rifle, confronted a patron. An argument followed and several shots were fired, one of them hitting Song Lien Duong, 20, of Linda Vista, who was seated at a nearby table. Duong died at the scene. Two 16-year-old Vietnamese youths were later arrested and charged with homicide.

Officials have been unwilling to label the killing a gang shooting but said it resembles the pattern of gang-related violence that has occurred in restaurants in Orange County in the last several years. Gang violence in the Vietnamese community, especially among young people, is just beginning to surface in San Diego and will probably get worse, they said.

Vietnamese community leaders link the problem to the trend of welfare dependency among the most recent Vietnamese refugees, the so-called “boat people” who arrived after the original influx when South Vietnam fell in 1975.

“To date there has been little known about the (Vietnamese) gangs in San Diego,” said Sgt. John Madigan, who heads the San Diego Police Department’s street gang detail. “We are just starting now to see these problems. But as more people come into the community, the more problems there will be. That’s the nature of the beast.”

Madigan said that those involved in the restaurant shooting were “hanging out in an area known to have suspected gang members frequenting there.” Police have difficulty in characterizing Vietnamese gangs because of language and cultural barriers.

“Our normal criteria for a gang is that of an organized group of people who have given a name to themselves and who identify as a group,” Madigan said. “This is the way we identify black and brown gang members; the members themselves will claim an affiliation. But among the Vietnamese they will not say they are affiliated with a gang and they won’t use a gang name, but they will say that they follow a certain leader and use his name.”

Leonard Sherr, principal of Hoover High School, which has the largest number of Indochinese students in the county, said there’s “no doubt” that there is at least one Vietnamese gang in San Diego. The gang operates primarily in North Park and is made up of high school students, Sherr said, but he could not identify the group by a name.

Hoover High is a source of concern because of the growing level of violent activity among Indochinese students, Madigan said.

“There (are) the beginnings of intimidation by large gatherings of Indochinese students on and off campus,” he said.

There are 18 documented gangs in San Diego (a drop from 24 gangs in 1984) with 1,092 documented members, Madigan said. He would not say how many Vietnamese gangs or gang members are operating in San Diego, explaining that the Police Department is in the process of “characterizing and profiling” suspected gang members. But Madigan did say that San Diego “doesn’t have (a) fraction of the problem they have in L.A. and Orange counties.”

Overall, gang violence in San Diego is down from last year, Madigan said. But the department does not keep track of the ethnic group associated with gang-related crime.

The police gang unit has two Vietnamese officers, and the department has hired five Vietnamese community relations representatives. But officials and community leaders say that these are not nearly enough to serve a Vietnamese population of 20,000 to 30,000.

The Vietnamese themselves traditionally have been hesitant to call on authorities when in trouble. Theresa Do, who arrived in this country from Vietnam in 1975 and is now a county social worker, said that many refugees still operate on the assumption that law enforcement and government in general are corrupt and are not to be trusted.

Most Vietnamese community leaders discount the notion that there are organized gangs roaming the streets, but they do say that Vietnamese from outside San Diego have caused problems in the past.

Kien Trang, a Linda Vista pharmacist who is president of the Vietnamese Business Assn., said that a year or two ago violence in the community was much worse. Trang said there were rumored attempts to extort several businesses, but that the people causing the trouble left the area.

But Madigan said that gang-related robberies, assaults, thefts and extortion are occurring in the Vietnamese community today, and that individuals and businesses have been reluctant to come forward because they fear revenge.

“My suspicion is that this is going on, from what we know is happening in other large communities, and from the exchange of information from other law enforcement agencies in Southern California” Madigan said. “The people in the community have not been willing to come forth with information, at least not to this office.”

Extortion and violence by Vietnamese gangs is widespread in Orange County, which authorities call the center of Vietnamese gang activity. Some Orange County officials have suggested that paramilitary gangs of Vietnamese military and police veterans might be responsible for political assassinations as well, including the slaying in 1984 of a Cal State Fullerton professor who supported normalization of relations between the United States and communist Vietnam. Minh Van Lam, 21, a Vietnamese student, was convicted last year of involuntary manslaughter in the death.

Lt. John Robertson, a spokesman for the Garden Grove Police Department in Orange County, said the character of the Vietnamese gangs has changed over the years, from tightly organized, insignia-wearing groups of former military men to more amorphous and mobile groups of young teen-agers, many of whom entered the country as orphans. Robertson, who just completed a report for the state on the impact of Indochinese refugees on law enforcement in California, said that the same groups that are operating in Los Angeles and Orange counties are also operating in San Diego and as far away as San Jose.

“These groups are very mobile and have contacts in different communities,” Robertson said. “They can go into a community and blend in because they are Vietnamese.”

Robertson said the groups prey mainly on their own communities and get away with it because they know their countrymen are reluctant to inform authorities. The newer groups have also learned from the mistakes of the older “gangsters,” Robertson said, by “staying out of the limelight, wearing no insignia and using no names.”

Most of the Vietnamese in San Diego live in the North Park, Linda Vista and Clairemont areas. At Hoover High School in East San Diego, the Indochinese population--consisting of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians--accounts for more than 27% of the student body, the largest minority group at the school, and the majority of these students are Vietnamese, according to Principal Sherr. Districtwide, Indochinese students account for 7% of the enrollment; the total for other Asian students is 2.2%.

School officials say that, on the whole, Vietnamese students have adjusted well to the traumatic uprooting from their homeland, and to the cultural clash and language barriers faced in a new environment.

Sherr said that, as a group, Vietnamese students understand that “success lies in getting a good education.” But he said that, for some of the students, the adjustment to the freer, more independent American way of life has not been easy, and has led to conflict with parents, antisocial behavior and trouble with the law. Indochinese students have also encountered some resentment from American-born students, Sherr said, and this has fueled tension among different ethnic groups on the campus.

“I suppose there has been some resentment because most of them (Indochinese) are on welfare,” Sherr said. “When people move into a community where they have not been before, it creates some friction in the community because of differences in culture and outlook.”

Sherr said that many of the students are in the country without parents, often living with a brother or sister or other guardian, and that this has contributed to their lack of stability.

“Many of them have guardians that may be only two or three years older than they are,” Sherr said. “And these youngsters have grown up in an environment where they have had to survive by their wits since they were little kids.”

Trang said the adjustment has been especially hard for the newer refugees who are “not from the cities, less well-educated and sometimes illiterate.”

“Many of these youngsters have social problems because the parents cannot speak English. They don’t know how the kids are doing in school or how the kids are living,” Trang said.

Vietnamese community leaders say that, despite the problems of some young people, overall the community has done very well. Nguyen Van Nghi, president of the Vietnamese Federation of San Diego, said the community itself is attempting to cope with problems of language, unemployment and violence.

“The Vietnamese should understand the problems themselves,” Nghi said. “We came to this country, and we have to adapt. Having more Vietnamese-speaking people in leadership positions in the San Diego community will help to identify problems and solve these problems. We would like to see more solidarity between the Vietnamese community and the community at large.”