Deaths follow end of squad

COLORADO SPRINGS» In the weeks before the policedepartment would disband its gang unit, members of the specialized team sat talking with known gang member Diego Chacon as part of a disturbance call.

It wasn’t the first time they’d contacted the then 17-year-old, known for his trail of petty crimes. But this time he told them he was done with the South Side Soldados. He wanted out of the gang life, a ranking officer familiar with the conversation said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to media.

Police Chief Pete Carey abruptly disbanded the unit in September 2016 to combat a “critical” staffing shortage that left patrol officers unprotected on violent calls and response times too high. The reorganization meant no one was assigned specifically to check in on the city’s roughly 700 known gang members, such as Chacon, or track their activity.

Six months later, Chacon

was rearrested on suspicion of murder. He is one of five people accused of leading Coronado High School teens Natalie Partida-cano, 16, and Derek Greer, 15, to an abandoned field in El Paso County and shooting them over a gang rivalry. An accused accomplice who plans to testify against Chacon identified him as one of the shooters.

“It was a bummer,” the officer said of events surrounding Chacon after the unit disbanded. While it’s not uncommon for suspects to say “whatever they think will keep them out of jail that night,” if Chacon had been serious about wanting out of Soldados, the gang unit was best equipped to help him.

“I’ll never know if we would have been able to pull him out (of the gang) or not because we pulled all the units out that could have worked with him,” the officer said.

The gang unit also had flagged a teenage Manuel Zetina for breaking into cars and throwing gang signs on his Facebook page, although he wasn’t yet considered a full-fledged gang member, the ranking officer said.

When the unit disbanded, Zetina was likely among the many up-and-coming threats that fell off the radar, until two years later on Feb. 5, when he was caught in a stolen vehicle, setting off a gunbattle in which El Paso County sheriff’s Deputy Micah Flick was killed, three other law enforcement officers wounded and a bystander was shot and left paralyzed.

Although Zetina, who also was killed, still has not been identified by police as a full-fledged gang member, the ranking officer said when it comes to stealing cars, “you don’t act that way on your own.”

Whether the gang unit could have prevented the murders is “one of those great unanswered questions,” the officer said. “Maybe, you know? Maybe.”

Police Lt. Rafael Chanza called the officer’s conclusion “unfair” because the department has never stopped tracking gangs, although admittedly not as closely as when there was a designated gang unit.

“They’re both tragic events,” Chanza said.

Change in crime focus

Police consistently blame gang violence for at least a couple homicides each year. In 2014 and 2015, when the gang unit was active, it reported five and three gang-related killings, respectively. In 2016 there were two, and in 2017, three.

Including attempted murder charges for 2017 the number jumps to 15.

Police can’t say whether the absence of the unit led to a rise or fall in gang crime.

Their records show that, overall, gang crime — meaning those either committed by a gang member for the furtherance of the gang, by a gang associate possibly for the furtherance of the gang or by a gang member but not for the gang — has fallen each of the past four years. Numbers dropped 30 percent in 2015, down from 1,242 crimes the previous year, before being reduced by half in 2016. From 2016, the numbers ticked up slightly to 396 in 2017, the first full year without a gang unit.

Some of the decline in overall numbers can be attributed to a change in crime focus by police, records show.

Where petty crimes and misdemeanors such as vandalism and criminal mischief made up more than half of recorded gang crime in 2014, those crimes largely were eliminated from the total in 2016 and 2017 as police focused their limited resources primarily on violent or more serious crimes — rape, murder, assault and drug and weapon violations. Those designations showed fluctuations from year to year but no drastic deviation.

But it’s also likely that patrol officers are now too busy running “from call to call to call” that they’re not spotting the gang nexus, are not able to fully investigate the potential link, or are not as “diligent” in marking it on their reports, Chanza said.

Response times improve

Even without a specialized unit, tracking gang activity in the city has not fallen completely by the wayside, Chanza said.

The Gang Intervention Network, or Gangnet, is a long-standing partnership between police and the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office to train officers to be more attuned to gang activity, track basic gang data and turn it into “actionable intel,” Chanza said.

But it operates supplemental to officers’ regular duties.

It took a full-time gang unit eight months to make 122 arrests, recover $3.5 million of drugs and seize 110 firearms, 15 of which were assault-style, the unit’s last report in 2016 showed.

They knew “exactly who to go talk to ... to develop some of the leads that help bring a lot of those cases to a quicker resolution,” Chanza said. So, restoring the unit “can only benefit us,” he said, adding, but not if it comes at the expense of other essential police operations.

The caveat echoed Carey’s reasons for dismantling the unit: The city needed to commit more officers to responding to calls to drive down response times and improve officer safety. And it worked, Chanza said.

In the past two years, response times dropped three minutes, to 11 minutes and 27 seconds, still well above the goal of 8 minutes.