A move away from gang injunctions as crime falls
Recent court orders prohibiting police in California from enforcing gang injunctions are prompting law enforcement leaders to reconsider how they use the court orders that for decades were considered a critical weapon in the state’s war on gangs.
The shift away from the injunctions, which can severely restrict a suspected gang member’s movements, relationships and even clothing choice in certain neighborhoods, comes as critics say they are too broad and often ensnare people who have tenuous connections to gang life. At the same time, gang crime has sharply declined since its peak in the 1990s, leading some law enforcement officials to question if the court orders are still needed.
Police in Long Beach stopped enforcing injunctions against roughly 850 suspected gang members in March after a federal judge ordered the Los Angeles Police Department to do the same. In the past few months, Orange County prosecutors sent letters to more than 200 people releasing them from the conditions imposed by local injunctions, according to records reviewed by The Los Angeles Times.
A separate court battle prompted the Stanislaus County district attorney’s office to suspend its use of gang injunctions in late 2017, and that legal defeat led police in Ventura County to stop enforcement against 368 suspected gang members soon after. The San Francisco city attorney’s office announced a review of its injunctions this year, and last month, prosecutors in San Diego County said they would review their decades-old gang injunction rosters to see if hundreds of people should still be subject to the court orders.
Oakland stopped using injunctions in 2015, and prosecutors in San Diego County said police there have not sought a new injunction since 2011.
“The ground has shifted underneath this whole process,” said Sean Garcia-leys, a staff attorney with the Urban Peace Institute who represents several clients subject to
gang injunctions in Southern California.
The policy shifts started a few weeks after President Donald Trump said California authorities were being soft on gang crime, an accusation that puzzled most law enforcement leaders in the state. Los Angeles is the birthplace of MS-13, the Salvadoran gang that Trump commonly refers to as evidence of the link between crime and illegal immigration, but its presence in the city and state has weakened, as has been the case with other gangs.
Trump made a baffling claim that people would see “crime like no one’s ever seen crime in this country” if he removed federal law enforcement agents from California, even though homicides and gang activity have plummeted in major cities such as Los Angeles, compared with the height of the gang boom of the 1990s. Police chiefs in the cities where the injunctions have been scaled back in recent months said they have not seen a surge in gang crime as a result.
The injunctions are civil court orders that can bar suspected gang members from wearing certain clothes or associating with other alleged members of the same gang set in neighborhoods thought to be under that gang’s control, called “safety zones.” Violation of the LAPD Harbor Division police officer Coss jumps a fence to let fellow officer Carreroñ Ortiz into a housing complex in order to serve notice of a gang injunction being instituted against the 204th Street gang.
orders can bring contempt charges and jail time.
Although gang injunctions have been used in other states, they are most commonly associated with California, where Los Angeles used them against thousands of residents to combat a rise in gang violence that gave the Bloods, Crips and other groups national prominence.
From 2000 to 2017, the city obtained injunctions against 79 gang sets, encompassing roughly 8,900 people.
Los Angeles’ injunctions have long been criticized by activists and the
American Civil Liberties Union, which alleged in a 2016 lawsuit that how the city enforced its injunctions was unconstitutional. Virginia A. Phillips, chief of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, agreed in March, ruling that the city had probably violated the civil rights of accused gang members who were targeted without being given a chance to challenge claims of gang affiliation in court.
The future of the injunctions in Los Angeles remains unclear. City officials removed 7,300 people
from the orders last year after determining that many of them had either moved way from the areas where the injunctions could be enforced, left the gang life or, in some cases, been imprisoned or died. Phillips’ ruling barred the city from enforcing injunctions against 1,450 more people.
After Phillips’ decision, law enforcement officials in other cities agreed to review or modify their injunction policies.
In late March, Long Beach suspended enforcement of roughly 850 injunctions it had in place against suspected gang members. Unlike Los Angeles, the city had originally given the targets a chance to appear in court before enforcing the orders, but City Prosecutor Douglas Haubert said he would still review the city’s policies.
“We’re doing a top-down review to make sure that our tactics are still effective and protect the rights of the people who live in the gang area as well as those targeted by court orders,” he said.
Some authorities had worried that reducing the use of injunctions in Los Angeles County could lead to more gang crime, but Long Beach police spokeswoman Nancy Pratt said it was too early to quantify any effect. Pratt said the department expects the city to resume its use of injunctions soon, but cautioned that the court orders are just part of a multi-pronged approach to gang activity that includes intervention and rehabilitation programs.