Police are asking for the public’s help today in solving three separate murders in south Los Angeles County.

One person was killed and two wounded about 11:30 p.m. Thursday in a shooting outside a liquor store in the 3600 block of Santa Fe Avenue in Long Beach, according to city police spokeswoman Jackie Bezart. The murder is believed to be gang-related, and the victim’s identity is being withheld pending notification of his family.

[Updated at 11:28 p.m.: The victim was identified as 19-year-old Frank Castro Jr. of Long Beach. A man approached him and the two other victims on foot and shot all three of them. Castro was hit multiple times in the upper body and torso and pronounced dead at the scene. The two other victims, ages 18 and 40, were treated at a local hospital and released.]

At about the same time, a driver in the 6400 block of Rosemead Boulevard in Pico Rivera saw a body in the street and called police, who found a Latino with gunshot wounds in the upper torso, said Dep. Aura Sierra of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The victim, whose identity is being withheld until his family is notified, was pronounced dead at the scene.

Anyone with information on any of these cases is asked to call Long Beach police at (562) 570-7244 or the Sheriff’s Department at (323) 890-5500.

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Gangs in Southern California are using them to orchestra crime, commit fraud and traffic drugs.

The issue is so severe at California Institution for Men in Chino, that Lt. Thomas Goetz said he has assigned two staff members to try to eliminate the use of pre-paid disposable phones in the prison.

“The cell phones have become a communication tool between inside and outside gang members that we can’t circumvent,” he said.

Issues like this were discussed on Thursday by a panel of law enforcement experts at an Assembly Select Committee hearing held at the Ontario Police Department.

The hearing was organized by Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico, D-Fremont, and was joined by Assemblywoman Norma Torres, D-Ontario.

The severity of the problem has prompted Torrico and Assemblyman Curt Hagman, R-Chino Hills, who was also in attendance, to consider co-authoring a bill that would make it a criminal offense to have or sell a phone in a prison.

Currently there is no such legislation. Also, FCC prohibits the state from putting in scramblers to stop the use of phones in prisons, Goetz said.

The main problem for prisons is that there is no way to trace the information that is being relayed in the phone calls, unlike land lines which can be monitored, he said.

It’s getting to the point that gangs are circumventing all our investigations because of these media outlets,” said John Santos, special agent with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Special Services Unit.

And the only consequence to inmates is having 30 days added to their sentence, and that’s only if the cell phone is connected to a crime, he said.

In many cases, those 30 days would be wiped out for good behavior, Goetz said.

In 2007 there were only a handful of throw-away phones confiscated at CIM and only 30 in 2008, Goetz said.

But prison officials have already taken away 147 cell phones this year, he said.

A standard cell phone could be sold at the prison for $300, but one with texting or picture-taking capabilities could sell for $500, he said.

“We trying to find out who’s bringing them in and where they are coming from,” Goetz said.

Some prepaid phones have come in via visitors, others through the mail, and there are cases of staff inside the prison selling them to inmates.

“We have an enormous problem in state prisons, and it is starting to create a huge workload for us,” Goetz said.

But using phones isn’t the only method, gang members are also turning to social media networks to recruit members. They are also using their sites to openly talk about crimes they have committed, Hunter said.

Skipp Townsend, an interventionist, has been involved in the culture of gang violence for years and has noticed the recent trend of technology in gangs.

Youth in the East Coast are finding gang members through social networking sites and getting in contact with them, he said.

“These are groups of children with no guidance. They are reaching out to The Crips, and they want to create a hierarchy and they are doing it via the Internet,” he said.

However, governments are not just sitting back.

Agencies like Ontario Police Department have found ways to use sites like YouTube to their advantage, said Detective Gabriel Gutierrez, who is assigned to the Gang Suppression Unit.

A suspect on trial tried to convince a jury that he was not affiliated with any gang, he said.

The Police Department was able to show the jury a video posted on YouTube of the individual with the gang, and he was convicted, Gutierrez said.

But you can’t solve the issues of gangs by locking them up, said Jerry Hunter, assistant chief of the state Department of Justice, Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement.

In order to adequate combat gangs, there needs to collaboration between politicians and law enforcement as well as community leaders and parents, Hunter said.

“If unchecked, gangs are capable of gripping entire communities with fear, violence, drugs, graffiti, and other crimes,” said Torres.

“When communities are crushed under the weight of these crimes, we cannot sit back and let it happen. Our top priority should be to provide clean, safe environments for our children to grow and our families to live in.”

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Los Angeles County saw an overall 4% drop in hate crimes last year, while crimes against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people increased, prompted in part by last November’s highly charged Proposition 8 initiative, the voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage in California, according to a new report released today.

There were 134 sexual-orientation hate crimes reported last year, up from 111 in 2007, and were more likely to be violent than hate crimes motivated by race or religion, according to the annual Hate Crime Report by the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations.

“I am very sad to be here today because my presence means that my community – lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people – were horribly impacted by hate crimes in 2008,” Lorri Jean, chief executive of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, said at a news conference.

“Anti-gay and anti-transgender hate crimes do not happen in a vacuum,” she said, “they happen in the context of a society that still tolerates and even promotes discrimination against us.”

Robin Toma, executive director of the Human Relations Commission, said the data underscored the importance of the recent passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which extends federal hate crimes protection to victims of sexual orientation crimes.

Much of the overall decrease in hate crimes was connected with a 16% decline in racially motivated crimes. Some of those racial crimes, however, were tied to the presidential campaign Barack Obama.

Across the country there were numerous cases of vandalism, displays of nooses and acts of intimidation, and in Los Angeles eight cases were reported in which homes, cars and other property displaying Obama signs or stickers were vandalized with swastikas or racial slurs, Toma said.

“While hate crimes targeting African Americans decreased, they still remain by far the largest group of hate crime victims,” Toma said. “They are 61% of racial hate crime victims and yet comprise only 9% of the county population.”

Latino victims remained the second-largest targeted group and the percentage of crimes against them remained the same. Crimes targeting Asians, Middle Easterners, Armenians and whites declined.

Although religious hate crimes rose 14%, that increase is attributed to 15 crimes targeting the Church of Scientology, Toma said. Two thirds of those crimes were similar threatening letters sent to various church branches that were likely from the same individual, he said.

“Every year this report provides a startling snapshot of the face of hatred in Los Angeles County,” said Sandra Thomas, president of the commission. She said the report is used by law enforcement officials for training purposes and for directing resources.

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Eight alleged members and associates of the Bloods and Crips street gangs have been arrested on drug and weapons charges by a task force from Bergen and Hudson counties and the Secret Service, authorities announced Wednesday.

Those arrested were rounded up after a four-month undercover operation that began in July, Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinelli said.

The operation revealed that the Crips and Bloods were selling drugs and weapons, Molinelli said.

Marijuana, Ecstasy, cocaine and a shotgun were seized by detectives from the prosecutor’s Gang Unit, the Teaneck and Hackensack police departments, the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office and the Secret Service.

Those charged were identified as:

Kashawn West, 18, and Anthony Drakeford, 28, both of Hackensack and identified as Bloods members;

Michael Feola, 21, of Teaneck and Reggie Sowell, 20, of Hackensack, identified as Bloods associates;

Peter Martinez, 23, of North Bergen, identified as an associate of the Bloods’ Sex Money Murder gang, and Brandon Randolph, 30, of Englewood, identified as a Crips Rollin 60s member;

Ashlin Hayer, 22, of Teaneck, identified as a Crips associate, and a 17-year-old suspected member of the Bloods’ street gang sect Fruit Town Piru.

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Devin Petelski’s BMW had just entered a Venice intersection shortly before midnight Oct. 15, when she was broadsided by a Los Angeles Police Department cruiser. She died two days later in the hospital, where she had been on life support.

In the weeks following the collision, friends and relatives of the dead 25-year-old have accused police officers of causing her death. The two officers, who suffered minor injuries, had been speeding along Venice Boulevard without their headlights, sirens of flashing lights, critics allege.

The accident remains under investigation by the LAPD, but authorities deny allegations that the officers were driving without their headlights on.

Still, the circumstances of Petelski’s death have generated outrage among some local residents.

Tomorrow evening, mourners plan to hold a candlelight march from the accident site at Glyndon Avenue and Lincoln Boulevard to the LAPD’s Pacific Division.

They’ve also created a Facebook page, which has more than 2,600 members, to provide updates on the case and seek witnesses to the crash.

Friends say Petelski was a Santa Monica resident who enjoyed yoga and trips to the beach. She was a graduate of Crossroads High School in Santa Monica and studied communications at UC Santa Barbara, her friends say.

Although she had struggled with alcohol abuse, Petelski had turned her life around, according to friend Sheyla Molho. Petelski was driving home from her job as a substance abuse counselor at a Venice rehab clinic when she was hit, Molho said.

“She had changed her life,” Molho said. “It’s just tragic.”

LAPD Det. Jesus Ravega, who is investigating the incident, said Petelski was driving north on Glyndon. She had stopped at a stop sign before entering the intersection at Venice Boulevard, he said.

Ravega said the officers were responding to a call of a burglary in progress. Another unit had already been dispatched to the incident, he said.

The officers were not using their flashing lights or sirens, and they had not told LAPD dispatchers that they were en route to the reported burglary, Ravega said.

The cruiser smashed the front center of Petelski’s car. The force of the impact caused the police cruiser to spin around and slam into a tree and traffic sign on the sidewalk.

Ravega said investigators had not determined how fast the officers were traveling. The posted speed limit is 40 mph.

LAPD Cmdr. Stuart Maislin, speaking generally, said the department recently enacted a new policy requiring all officers to use their lights and sirens when they are exceeding the speed limit in response to an emergency call.

“If they are going to violate the rules of the road, like speeding or running a light, they would need to use lights and siren,” Maislin said.

The previous policy only allowed for one patrol car to respond with lights and sirens to an emergency. The practice was changed after officers racing to calls without lights and sirens had been involved in collisions that cost the city more than $11 million since 2006.

Christopher Medak, who has been helping Petelski’s family find witnesses, said he spoke with two people who say they saw the officers speeding without their headlights.

Bob Pulone, an assistant city attorney, said the initial police investigation indicates that the headlights were on.

At the crash site, family and friends have created a memorial with flowers, candles, letters and photos of Petelski. “I miss you terribly. I’m praying for your soul,” one of the letters says.

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In the end, despite a sophisticated filtration system, it was the smell that smoked out the marijuana-growing operation located just 25 feet from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Topanga station in Canoga Park.

LAPD officials said officers began noticing the smell of pot Tuesday morning, investigated, got warrants and closed down the indoor farm within eight hours.

Three men were taken into custody earlier Wednesday after officers served a search warrant on the warehouse in the 8400 block of Canoga Avenue.

Growers had built three rooms in the building — one for seedlings, another for medium-sized plants and one where harvesting was apparently conducted, police said. The lights were controlled so they wouldn’t overheat, watering systems were automated and oxygen levels were supplemented by carbon dioxide tanks, according to police.

“It was very sophisticated,” said LAPD Officer Karen Raynor.

She said the growers used insulation material to seal cracks in the building. But about a week ago, officers in the station’s parking lot noticed something out of the ordinary.

“They happened to catch a whiff of it,” Raynor said.

A surveillance operation was launched, and officers obtained the warrant. The names of the three men, who appeared to be in their 30s, were not released because they had not been booked.

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A city-sponsored training academy for gang intervention workers will open at least a year later than Los Angeles officials had hoped after a collision of philosophies and egos — a hitch in the city’s effort to modernize its campaign against street violence.

Officials said this week that an independent panel has selected the Advancement Project, the legal advocacy, civil rights and public policy group, as the winner of a bidding process to run the academy.

But that bid was never supposed to occur. The city’s original plan — to meld the best practices of two gang intervention programs into an “official” curriculum — collapsed, according to interviews with city officials and City Hall advisors.

Now, the academy isn’t expected to open until at least the spring of 2010 — a year later than originally envisioned. And it’s not over yet: The head of a group that lost the bid called the selection process flawed and pledged to appeal the decision into next year, when the City Council will be asked to sign off on the contract.

The dispute might seem like insider politics, considering that the contract is worth just $200,000 the first year, with a possibility of $800,000 over four years. But it means the continuation of the status quo: scores of interventionists fanned out across the city, some skilled and relied upon by law enforcement, but many unregulated, untrained and operating off the books amid dangerous crosscurrents of street politics.

The delay is seen as a particularly acute problem in South L.A., where marked declines in violence have created a rare window of possibility — one that could close if fragile understandings between rival neighborhoods begin to fray, officials said.

“South Los Angeles is in purgatory,” said Jorja Leap, a UCLA Department of Social Welfare adjunct professor, a gang specialist for 30 years and a key City Hall advisor. “There could be life-threatening consequences down the line.”

Gang interventionists act as liaisons between law enforcement and their communities and between rival gangs. They have existed for decades in various forms including missionaries and civil rights advocates.

Among rank-and-file officers, collaboration with interventionists remains controversial; most intervention workers were once gang members. However, senior LAPD officers, particularly in South L.A. — including Charlie Beck, appointed police chief Tuesday by the City Council — have come to view intervention as a messy but vital tool. Many police officials rely on interventionists to do what they cannot: control street gossip, prevent retaliation shootings or contain gang skirmishes before they become full-fledged wars.

Last year, then-City Controller Laura Chick delivered an indictment of the city’s scattershot gang outreach programs. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa consolidated the programs; his Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development now oversees $20 million in annual intervention and prevention contracts.

The city also launched an effort to transform intervention into a professional field. Many interventionists are now subjected to financial audits and drug testing. The opening of the academy, where gang intervention workers would be trained and licensed, is seen as a critical step.

The city’s efforts are being watched closely; federal law enforcement and military officials — the latter wondering if similar tactics might be used in Iraq and Afghanistan — have visited. “There is national interest in this,” said Connie Rice, the prominent civil rights attorney and a leader of the Advancement Project.

The city’s original plan was to combine the best practices of two intervention “schools,” one run by the Advancement Project, the other, the Professional Community Intervention Training Institute, run by Aquil Basheer, a fixture in gang intervention for more than 30 years in South L.A.

From the start of discussions, it was evident there was a philosophical divide.

Rice’s school focused largely on a theoretical and historical understanding of gangs. It was tied closely to the establishment; City Hall had paid the group to deliver a critique of the city’s anti-gang efforts. Students were instructed to make a quiet impact by developing relationships in the community — and not to defuse or even be near violent situations.

Basheer’s school focused on hard-core, practical drills. Operating out of an old fire station, Basheer taught his students how to stage a candlelight vigil without exposing people to gunfire, how to extricate someone from an angry crowd. He demanded that his students devise on-the-spot strategies — what to do, for instance, if a gunman is on the loose in a school cafeteria.

Neither side could agree on how to proceed — or on what portions of the curriculum each group might oversee. Rice declined to comment about the dispute.

“It became extremely clear that there were dramatic differences,” Basheer said. “We all needed to stay in our own lanes. . . . I got tired of talking. I got tired of explaining.” Asked how much of the process was derailed not just by competing visions but by strong egos, Basheer chuckled and said: “Eighty or 85%.”

The city retreated, opening the project up to bidding — “the fairest, most above-board way,” said Guillermo Cespedes, the mayor’s new gang czar.

An advisory panel was assembled, including gang outreach workers from Chicago and the Bay Area. On Friday, the panel delivered its verdict, ranking the Advancement Project’s bid in first place, ahead of Basheer’s organization and a third bidder.

Susan K. Lee, the Advancement Project’s director of urban peace, said the group’s program would begin with a “Basic 101″ course for entry-level interventionists. That would be followed with a series of advanced, 20-hour courses; one, for instance, would teach them how to proceed in a hospital after a shooting, a notoriously tricky environment.

“It’s a high-risk enterprise,” Rice said. “You’re working with people whose backgrounds create a lot of problems — but that’s why you are working with them.”

Basheer said he would appeal to the City Council. He will argue, he said, that the selection process was incomplete because panelists never visited his program — and, he said, he’ll argue that the political aplomb of the Advancement Project can never match his organization’s street smarts.

“We have tested strategies, tools and tactics. We can show you an end-line product,” he said. “If you’re going to put together something this critical, you’d better have a thorough understanding of the culture. . . . We’re taking it all the way.”

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A 16-year-old boy was arrested Wednesday night for a triple shooting in San Bernardino earlier this week that killed one man and wounded two others, police said.

The boy was arrested about 7:20 p.m. in the 200 block of W. 39th Street. His name was not released because of his age. The District Attorney’s Office is deciding whether to charge him as an adult with the slaying of 19-year-old Donzell Tate Jr.

Police said there may be another arrest because there were two shooters.

Tate and two other men, whom police have said are known gang members, were shot during an argument about 9:20 p.m. Tuesday in the intersection of 40th Street and Electric Avenue.

Firefighters on duty at the fire station across the street rushed to help the victims, one of whom was lying in the middle of the road.

“It appears to be a gang-related shooting at this point but we’re not ruling anything out,” said homicide Sgt. Dave Dillon.

Dillon said the shooters were also gang members.

Tate was on probation for felony vandalism, which prohibits him from associating with other gang members.

Police were called to the area 20 minutes prior to the shooting on report of a fight and talked to Tate and three other men. Since there was no evidence of a crime, officers let them go.

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The Fulton County coroner has ruled Ashley “AJ” Jewell’s death was not a result of the injuries that he sustained in a fight he had with Frederick Richardson on October 2, 2009. Jewell was the ex-fiance of Kandi Burruss, a cast member on Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

According to the coroner’s report the cause of death was “physical altercation resulting in sickle cell trait related exertional collapse,” with AJ’s “intestinal myocardial fibrosis,” and enlarged heart as contributing factors.

Richardson was charged with voluntary manslaughter after Jewell’s death. Police said he continued to assault Jewell even after Jewell fell to the ground. While Richardson’s attorney wants the charge dropped in light of the medical examiner’s revelation, Jewell’s family wants an independent investigation. Richardson is out on bail.

Should the State of Georgia pursue charges against Richardson in light of the revelations by the coroner’s office?

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A once-promising high school football star accused of fatally shooting the mother of a young woman who was expected to testify against him in a robbery case was convicted Tuesday of attempting to intimidate a witness, but the jury deadlocked on the more serious charges against him.

Tyquan Knox, 21, was charged with robbing Khristina Henry and her boyfriend three years ago, then killing Henry’s mother, Pamela Lark, in an effort to dissuade the girl from testifying against him. Knox feared that a conviction in the case would ruin his chances of being recruited to play football in college, the prosecution contended.

The conviction on the attempted intimidation charge was based on a series of text messages and telephone calls to Henry and Lark, primarily by Knox’s mother and friends. His mother contended that Knox was innocent and allegedly asked what she could do to make the case go away. At least one friend of Knox’s suggested that Henry should not testify. During one telephone call, Knox himself got on the phone, according to testimony.

Lark and Henry told police they felt threatened by the contacts and asked authorities for financial help to relocate. They were in the process of looking for a place to live when Lark was killed Jan. 4, 2007.

Jurors had deliberated for five days before announcing that they were hopelessly deadlocked on the robbery and murder counts against Knox. The prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Danette Meyers, told Judge Michael E. Pastor that her office had already decided to retry Knox on all counts.

Defense attorney John Sweeney said that although he was “disappointed” Knox was not acquitted of the charges, he saw the mistrial as a relative victory. “Any time the prosecution is felled in its attempt to convict a defendant, it is a good day,” he said.

Though it was Knox who was on trial for murder, the case seemed at times to revolve almost entirely around his former girlfriend Keeairra Dashiell.

Dashiell, an honors student at Crenshaw High School who earned an academic scholarship to UC San Diego, had reluctantly entered into a plea deal with prosecutors in which she agreed to testify against Knox in exchange for a seven-year sentence for her role in the slaying.

Dashiell testified that she called Knox to wake him up early on the morning they planned to commit the crime and drove him to the neighborhood where Henry and Lark lived. She said Knox was armed with a gun and dressed all in black when he got out of his car. He returned a couple of hours later, lay back in the passenger’s seat so as not to be seen and told her to drive, she said.

Sweeney, however, sought to portray Dashiell as a lovesick girlfriend so obsessed with Knox that she orchestrated the slaying to protect him and ensure her place in his future.

On the eve of her testimony, Dashiell dealt a heavy blow to the prosecution when she acknowledged for the first time that she had earlier plotted to kill Henry with another man while Knox was out of town and that Knox knew nothing of the plan. Sweeney also argued that phone records entered as evidence in the case did not bear out Dashiell’s claim that she called Knox to wake him the morning of the slaying.

Jurors were so mistrustful of Dashiell’s testimony that they disregarded it altogether, said jury foreman Jules Vallier.

“I thought everything that was coming out of her mouth was garbage,” said Vallier, 43. “We all found our reasoning without her.”

The verdict on the robbery counts was 9 to 3 in favor of guilt. The verdict on the murder was 8 to 4, also in favor of guilt.

Vallier said there were passionate arguments from both sides.

“There was a lot of table pounding. There were voices raised quite extensively,” he said. Vallier said those who voted not guilty questioned the validity of witness identifications made by Henry and her friends, who testified that they did not know Knox, despite one of them testifying that they were all at the same party sometime before the robbery.

Henry questioned how the jurors could find Knox guilty on the charge of attempted witness intimidation but not reach a decision on the more serious robbery and murder charges.

“Why else would he need to intimidate us?” she said.

Henry said the prospect of again testifying against Knox was daunting. “I was prepared for all this to be over, to get on with my life.

“I’ll come back a third and a fourth time if I need to,” she said. “I won’t rest until my mama is rested in peace and, for me, that means seeing [Knox] convicted.”

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