CommentsEDITOR’S PICK--One mild fall evening, two deputies with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s gang unit headed into the streets of Carson, California, where palm trees are tagged with gang graffiti and street signs in some neighborhoods are turned around or removed to confuse outsiders.
The deputies, Jon Boden and Alfredo Garcia, had a big job to do. As part of the Operation Safe Streets Bureau, they were expected to get a handle on gang violence in the cities of Carson and Compton.
The intent of that evening’s patrol was to prevent shootings – but the deputies also were on the hunt for intelligence about gang feuds and activity. Several times during the 2014 patrol – with a Reveal reporter riding along – they stopped, searched and questioned young blacks and Latinos about drugs, gangs and what they were doing in a particular neighborhood.
About 10 minutes into their shift, the deputies spotted a young couple in a silver Chevrolet parked under a tree in a J.C. Penney store’s backlot. Boden saw the man rolling a blunt of what he thought looked like crushed marijuana. Both deputies sprang out of the squad car and asked the man and his companion, a woman, to step out of the vehicle.
As Boden held the man’s hands behind his head and searched his pockets, the man started to struggle. The deputy forced him onto the hood of the squad car and handcuffed him. Boden pulled two bullets out of the man’s pants pocket; a search of the car yielded a gun safe with a .22-caliber pistol, several grams of marijuana, prescription drugs, a digital scale and two driver’s licenses that the deputies discovered had been reported stolen.
During a fall 2014 stop in Carson, Calif., deputies from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s gang unit searched a car, finding a gun safe with a .22-caliber pistol, several grams of marijuana, prescription drugs, a digital scale and two driver’s licenses that had been reported stolen. Credit: Ali Winston/Reveal
The young man also had an unlocked cellphone on him. Thumbing through the device, Garcia found photographs of him posing with shotguns and pistols, a blue bandanna wrapped around his face. The man quickly admitted that the gun and drugs in the safe were his and that he was a member of the Park Village Compton Crips.
After Boden and Garcia had handcuffed the pair and were searching their car, Sgt. Gerardo Lucio, their supervising officer, pulled up. As the deputies conducted their search, Lucio explained the significance of the stop. It inevitably would produce a field information card identifying the man as a gang member, he said, “because he self-admitted and we found those photographs.” The woman also would get a card referring to her “as an associate” of a gang member.
If the officers hadn’t pulled over the duo that day, Lucio added, they would have “miss(ed) out on that information about his membership. … Field interview cards and field interviews help us figure out who’s hanging with who, when. A lot of the time, my guys get new members we haven’t come into contact with.”
Police are “not supposed to rely on CalGang as evidence of gang membership. … In practice, they use it to check if an individual is listed as a gang member.”Peter Bibring
senior staff attorney, ACLU of Southern California
The field card information would then be loaded into CalGang, a statewide database that over the years has grown to include more than 150,000 people. Law enforcement officials maintain that the tool is critical in the ongoing battle against gangs, but it has come under fire from civil libertarians and criminal justice reformers for its secrecy, which can ensnare innocent people without their knowledge.
Lucio said his deputies typically add people to CalGang based on tattoos, gang-related clothing or self-admission, criteria laid out in the 1988 STEP Act – California’s Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act – which allows judges to mete out harsher punishment for gang members.
Self-admission is unique. Whether it’s obtained in a field interview or at jail intake, it is the only criteria the STEP Act allows to stand on its own as proof of gang membership. There’s no room for gray areas: If someone claims a gang membership during a jail interview to avoid being housed with people from a hostile neighborhood or because he or she thinks it will garner respect and status, that automatically marks the person as a gangster in the eyes of California law enforcement.
Aside from a 2013 law that established a way for parents and juveniles to challenge a child’s inclusion in the database, most people can’t find out whether they are in CalGang. An effort to create a similar process for adults failed last year amid heavy lobbying by law enforcement agencies, which use the data to build files and bring charges against people based on their alleged gang ties.
Civil liberties advocates claim that the secrecy surrounding CalGang has created, in effect, a statewide investigative file blocked from external scrutiny.
“They’re not supposed to rely on CalGang as evidence of gang membership. They’re supposed to contact the person who entered that information into the system,” said Peter Bibring, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, speaking of both district attorneys and police. But, he said, “in practice, they use it to check if an individual is listed as a gang member.”
Those concerns, coupled with criticism that the criteria for adding someone to the database are too vague and people of color are disproportionately included, prompted the state to launch an audit of the system last summer. That report is due in August. In February, Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, introduced AB 2298, the latest attempt to require that adults be notified if they are included in CalGang. (Read the rest.)
-cw