EDITORIAL INJUNCTION MALFUNCTION CITY'S FIGHT AGAINST GANGS IS LIKE ONE HAND CLAPPING.

IMAGINE the city's problem with illegal street gang crime as a balloon half-filled with Jell-O. The city's efforts to fight gangs, then, would be like a single vise grip.

Even with all the force behind it, all you can get from squeezing one side is a bulge at the other end.

A Daily News analysis of gang crime in four areas of the San Fernando Valley under gang injunctions confirmed what was already becoming self-evident: Even the best-made tools don't work if they aren't used properly.

Gang injunctions give the city extra power to arrest and convict identified gang members by prohibiting their activities to congregate, associate and generally do gang business within a defined area. However, the Daily News found that in three of the four Valley neighborhoods with gang injunctions, gang-related crime actually increased.

In Pacoima, gang crimes rose 37 percent since October 2001, when the injunction on the Project Boys began. The area targeted by the injunction on the Blythe Street gang in Panorama City saw an increase of 33 percent more gang crimes since the days before an injunction in 2000, and Mission Hills saw an 11 percent gain. It's still to early to say whether the most-recent injunction in Canoga Park, instituted in April 2002, will follow the same trend.

It would be easy to conclude from these statistics that gang injunctions don't work. Some gang experts even suspect that these types of legal actions only embolden gang members by posing a challenge to authorities who they know lack the manpower to truly enforce the law.

But the numbers don't tell the whole story. In fact, City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo maintains that the higher number of reported crimes means that the injunctions have empowered people to report crimes that went unreported before.

That might well be true. But the truth is that gang injunctions can't work to quell gang crime all by themselves.

Ever since the city began using gang injunctions in 1987 under then-City Attorney James Hahn, focusing mostly on the gang activity in south and east Los Angeles, they were touted as one more weapon in the arsenal for law enforcement.

Gang injunctions must be part a larger set of comprehensive, multiprong tools that includes stronger and more law enforcement, involvement by families, parole and probation departments and community-based anti-gang programs.

In the past year, the City Council and mayor have repeatedly lamented the lack of law enforcement available to fight crime and vowed to add more cops. But then they made budgetary decisions contradicting their words.

If our elected officials truly wanted to put fighting gang crime in Los Angeles before their political futures, they would quit handing out millions in raises to overpaid employees and start hiring more cops by the dozen, setting up anti-gang programs and working every day to support a multiagency law enforcement crackdown.

Mayor James Hahn has pledged to use a priority-based budgeting process this year to dole out the more than $5 billion in city money. The city's top priority ought to be paying for the tools that can squeeze that gang balloon on both ends so it finally bursts.

If making the streets safe from crime isn't the No. 1 priority of our city leaders, then perhaps we need one more injunction - against them.