Prosecutor Brings Experience to Gang Detail : Crime: Brent V. Romney heads the D.A.’s gang unit after having specialized in such cases--considered the toughest in the office.

SANTA ANA —  For most of his six years as a homicide prosecutor, Brent V. Romney specialized in gang cases--the toughest in the office--before career advancement placed him on other assignments within the district attorney’s office.

“Gang cases can be extremely difficult to prove,” he said about those days. “Witnesses you desperately need are either hostile or too scared to testify.”

Last month, after stints as head of the writs and appeals section and the fraud unit, Romney returned to gang duty after four years. Only this time he is head of the district attorney’s gang unit, still in its infancy as a specialized approach to combatting gang crime.

It’s a challenge that the 13-year veteran prosecutor says he relishes.

“Half the victims of gang crimes are people who are totally innocent,” he said. “As far as the other half, the victim is usually some young person who is just on the periphery of gang life.”

Romney has also been placed in charge of the juvenile prosecution unit. He replaced John Conley, who had also run both units, after Conley was promoted under the new district attorney, Michael R. Capizzi.

But gangs are taking up most of Romney’s time right now.

With the year less than half gone, Orange County has already had a record number of at least 17 gang-related homicides. More than two-thirds of those murders remain unsolved. Suspects have been arrested in less than half of those cases.

Romney is convinced that tough sentences for gang members are not enough.

“This gang problem is like a huge pond, with a steady stream flowing into it,” he explained. “The pond is the gangs, and the stream includes the 13- and 14-year-old kids who think that gang life is an answer for them. We have to find ways to dam up the stream, to keep it from feeding the pond.”

One way, Romney suggests, is through a more flexible court system. For example, prosecutors have cooperated with juvenile court judges in finding alternative sentences for youngsters in trouble.

Superior Court Judge Robert B. Hutson, who sits in juvenile court in Orange, will often sentence a youngster to six months in Juvenile Hall, then suspend all but a weekend of it and place him on probation. But the probation has conditions: He has to stay in school, and give the court updates on his attendance, or begin counseling sessions.

“I still have that six months hanging over their heads to let them know there is a price to pay if you abuse the system,” Hutson said.

But Hutson doesn’t ask the district attorney’s gang unit to sympathize with these gang-oriented youngsters. “I’ve got the probation department and the public defender’s office to provide all the sympathy,” Hutson said. “What I need from the district attorney is to help me identify just who the habitual gang offenders might be--or someone to tell me who is not a hard-core gang member.”

That’s why Hutson is a strong advocate of the gang unit concept in the district attorney’s office.

The unit is what prosecutors call “a vertical prosecution unit.” Instead of a case going through several prosecutors as it advances through the system, which is what usually happens, cases identified as gang-related are assigned to a prosecutor who remains with that case from beginning to end.

Conley created the gang unit three years ago. The idea was that the deputies in the unit would become so specialized that prosecution would become more effective. When Conley was promoted, Romney was the logical choice to replace him, said Maury Evans, now chief assistant to Capizzi, who became district attorney when Hicks became a judge in January.

Romney also receives high marks from Bryan F. Brown, his former supervisor from the homicide panel.

“He’s a tremendous prosecutor,” Brown said. “You don’t even have to put him in the starting blocks; he’s off and running before you know it.”

Romney, 39, says he never wanted to leave gang cases. As tough as they were, the prosecutions brought great satisfaction, he said.

But Romney, who is married with three children, did not start out with any particular interest in gangs.

A graduate of Loara High School in Anaheim and Cal State Fullerton, Romney got his law degree from Brigham Young University.

He joined the district attorney’s office in December, 1976, right after passing his bar exam. He had been a clerk in the office during his college years.

“My family has always believed in obeying the law, and I wanted a career trying cases as a prosecutor,” Romney said.

When he gravitated toward gang prosecutions, he found out how tough things could be. For example, one day in Municipal Court in Westminster he noticed that the sister of a gang member was wearing the same sweat shirt to court that a witness had identified her wearing at the scene on the day of a murder. Romney asked the investigator on the case to take her picture in the hallway during a break, so that the witness’s version of events could be corroborated.

The young woman responded by kicking the investigator in the shins and tearing up his film before she finally was arrested.

Romney has had cases in which gang members would sit in the hallways outside the district attorney’s office in an attempt to intimidate government witnesses. On one occasion, gang members followed Romney and an investigator when they tried to take two witnesses to lunch. Romney made a quick call and had a police patrol car turn back the pursuers. But it exemplifies the kinds of tactics gang members will use to help a defendant on trial.