SAN DIEGO -- Scores of police officers searched Friday for the gunmen who opened fire into a crowd of people outside a Lincoln Park liquor store on New Year's Day, killing two women and critically injuring an 8-year-old boy.

City leaders, outraged by recent shootings, pledged to halt a spate of violence in and around the Lincoln Park area.

"This community, this police department, will not tolerate this type of violence in our city," San Diego Police Chief David Bejarano said Thursday. "We intend to keep this community one of the safest in San Diego."

The crackdown is directed at the city's estimated 5,200 gang members, police told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Gang members can now expect to be questioned after getting pulled over for something as small as a traffic offense, police told the newspaper.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in San Diego and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms will help track down the killers, said Assistant Chief Rulette Armstead.

Police are reviewing surveillance tapes from a security camera on the store's roof for of clues on the identity of the killers.

But as of Thursday, San Diego police had developed "nothing significant" in terms of leads into the parking lot attack, which also wounded a man, San Diego Police Department Lt. Mike Hurley said.

Slain in the 1 a.m. barrage of gunfire in the 5000 block of Logan Avenue were 45-year-old Carol Waites, who lived in the nearby Valencia Park district, and Sharon Burton, 32, of Temecula.

The victims were outside Dr. J's Liquor when the attackers arrived in at least one car, got out and fired as many as 50 shots, homicide Sgt. Jorge Duran said.

As the killers fled, one of the wounded women staggered into the store, where she died. Medics took the other woman to Scripps Mercy Hospital, where she succumbed to her injuries a short time later.

Medics transported the wounded boy to Children's Hospital in Linda Vista, where he underwent surgery for life-threatening wounds.

The injured man was treated at UCSD Medical Center for a single gunshot wound and released.

Emergency crews found an unscathed toddler in a child safety seat in a car riddled with bullets.

At a news conference Thursday at the scene of the shooting, Bejarano and Councilman Charles Lewis decried the assaults and others that have plagued the city's southeastern reaches lately.

"I'm upset, disgusted and hurt at the recent violence in the community," said Lewis, who took office last month.

He called on local law enforcement to come up with a plan to end the "senseless" spate of crimes, which included a shooting last March that killed two teens at the same site.

Five gang-related shootings have occurred in the general area over the last month, with four fatalities, including Wednesday's, Bejarano told reporters.

Hurley declined to discuss what might have motivated this week's shooting.