Reforms sought for California’s gang database
LOS ANGELES — Brian Allen wasn’t surprised when he recently heard officers in the Los Angeles Police Department may have fabricated evidence to label people as gang members.
He believes it happened to him, landing him on CalGang, the state’s secretive database of criminal street syndicates and their suspected crews that is in the middle of a contentious reform process.
In June, after a two-year fight that ended in front of a Superior Court judge, the Los Angeles city attorney agreed to take Allen off the gang list — acknowledging in court documents that he’d been added based on nothing more than a single interview by officers who had conducted a traffic stop on Allen in 2017 as he drove home through South L.A., information Allen said was “no evidence, all speculation.”
While Allen was on CalGang, he worried often about the consequences, that if “I didn’t blink my blinker or I didn’t stop at a stop sign, just something small could turn into something big,” he said.
“For the couple years I was on there, I felt probably like 90% of other black American kids in the ‘hood, like (police) didn’t care. Like it was a setup,” said Allen recently.
The state Department of Justice has been working to fix CalGang for two years to prevent cases like those of Allen and other questionable gang identifications recently uncovered in the LAPD. But some are worried that the overdue overhaul is in jeopardy, as state Attorney General Xavier Becerra signaled last month that he may backtrack on expected changes. Doing so, say critics, would leave too much latitude in the hands of local law enforcement when it comes to deciding who is in a gang.
The ongoing LAPD scandal, in which at least 20 officers are suspected of falsifying information used to identify gang members, will likely play a central role as Becerra works to finalize the reforms by summer. It goes to the heart of the question that has divided law enforcement from community members when it comes to CalGang: How much trust should be afforded to a system that is largely immune to public scrutiny?
Law enforcement has rebuffed critics’ fear of unfair additions as rumor without evidence — until now. With the LAPD investigation providing an unprecedented glimpse into how the closely guarded database works, the conversation is shifting.
The LAPD investigation “really is the booster rocket to say this has got to be reformed and it’s got to be reformed not in a superficial way but in a meaningful way,” said Jorja Leap, a gang expert at UCLA’s
Luskin School of Public Affairs.
CalGang has been described as an “electronic file cabinet” that contains information about suspected gang members and those in their orbits — currently allowing inclusion of people such as girlfriends or family members. Its precursor began in the 1980s in Los Angeles as the county struggled with rising gangrelated violence. It grew in sophistication and scope over the intervening decades, now providing California law enforcement with a quick way to track tens of thousands of suspected criminals across jurisdictions — not just by name, but by intelligence that officers collect in field interviews and investigations, such as tattoos, nicknames, cars and associates.
The public has no access to CalGang. Only approved law enforcement can see the more than 88,000 records on it, even to check their accuracy.
Using anecdotal evidence like Allen’s experience, critics have argued that under current rules, overzealous officers can use anything from a sports jersey to a casual conversation with a gang member as proof that a person belongs on CalGang. Because agencies are not required to share what evidence they used — even when a person goes to court to fight the label, as removal sometimes requires — those on the CalGang list often have no idea what prompted their inclusion. It has been nearly impossible for those outside of law enforcement to gauge the integrity of the process.
Concerns about CalGang date back to a scathing 2016 state audit, which found it lacked oversight, and that some of the agencies entering alleged gang members, including the LAPD, could not substantiate the claims. Auditors found records for children as young as 1 year old when their names were uploaded, prompting the Legislature in 2017 to put the database under the purview of the attorney general and demand new rules for its use. Until then, it had functioned without state oversight.