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State and local officials have been unable to come up with any comprehensive solution to the gang problem. Meanwhile, demography is making radical changes ; in Southern California's gang life. South Central Los Angeles, where the Bloods and Crips began, now has more immigrant Latino youths than African- American kids. Poor black families have moved out, sometimes to the South, to keep their children out of gangs. "In five years," says educator David Flores, a gang expert who runs special school programs, "the Crips and Bloods will cease to be a serious problem there." Perhaps. But Sergeant Wes McBride, a gang expert with the sheriff's department, predicts that "Hispanic Bloods and Crips" may soon fill the vacuum left by the departing black gang members. On Southern California's mean streets, faces change, but the conditions that breed gangs have not.