Juvenile crime continues rising
New gun-crime initiatives are starting to show results, according to a new crime analysis
For a second straight year, juvenile crime rose in Santa Clara County, with the increase blamed in part on a prolific violent teen robbery gang targeted by multiple police crackdowns, according to a new report from the District Attorney’s Office.
At the same time, the report credits the more frequent use of a relatively new legal tactic for preventing at least one potential school shooting.
The agency’s second annual crime analysis also shows that violent crime saw a county-wide rise in 2017, with Gilroy, Mountain View, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale charting double-digit percentage increases in that category. Property crimes, particularly car break-ins and auto thefts — the latter spiking 8.3 percent — similarly saw a broad increase across the county.
“Everybody’s experiencing an increase in auto thefts and commercial burglaries,” said Santa Clara Police Chief Michael Sellers, who is president of the county police chiefs association. “And talking to my officers, there’s a sense of frustration with repeat offenders, especially with juveniles.”
A high-profile breakup of a massive auto break-in ring in January illustrated how widespread the problem is in the Bay Area, revealing an alliance between a notorious street gang stealing laptop computer and smartphones from cars, and fencers who swiftly moved the
“I find it concerning when law enforcement takes to marketing and promoting ways to skirt due process in order to violate people’s rights.” — Craig De Luz, spokesman for the Firearms Policy Coalition and the Calguns Foundation
contraband to Vietnam.
That bust was spearheaded by the Crime Strategies Unit, a consortium composed of the county’s law-enforcement heads and District Attorney Jeff Rosen. Supervising Deputy District Attorney Marisa McKeown runs the unit.
The report focused particular attention on juvenile crime, where according to data from the District Attorney’s Office, home burglaries attributed to underage suspects rose by 128 percent, from 81 to 185 between 2016 and 2017. Robberies were up 21 percent in 2017, from 99 to 120; carjackings rose 250 percent, from eight to 28 cases; assaults increased 59 percent from 32 to 51, and car burglaries jumped 51 percent from 138 to 208.
It has been a source of conflict across the county law-enforcement spectrum, with police agencies periodically at odds with probation officials over finding the right balance of deterrence — or incarceration — and rehabilitation for troubled and criminal youths. According to the report, 52 percent of youth charged in the county last year were classified as repeat offenders.
The face of the juvenile crime problem in Santa Clara County over the past year has been the socalled “Lash Money Gang” robbery crew. It’s part of a South Bay trend where police and local gang experts say young suspects organize among themselves without operating in traditional street gangs. San Jose police made two large rounds of arrests of the gang in January and April.
“The reason we focused on this particular group, is that we can say definitively they were responsible for driving up crime,” McKeown said. “They are disproportionately responsible for burglaries, robberies, and carjackings, and now they’ve graduated to shootings. We’re hopeful these arrests will have a significant impact on violent crime.”
Another major focus of the DA report is a series of initiatives aimed at bringing down gun crimes in the county. The agency hired four new analysts for the county crime lab focused entirely on ballistic work, increasing the firearms unit to 10. McKeown credited the additional personnel for accelerating how quickly authorities can analyze and link guns to particular crimes and suspects.
“Recently, we were able to link a gun that was recovered in a car stop in Santa Clara, to two shootings in San Jose that we had no idea were previously related,” she said.
Sellers echoed the sentiment.
“By having (guns) examined quickly, it’s going to benefit all of us,” he said, “link different crimes and different agencies together.”
A budding administrative tool is now being used to curb shootings before they happen, in the form of Gun Violence Restraining Orders. Using legal principles that allow people with mental-health emergencies to be held involuntarily, law enforcement can file emergency gun-based protective orders to seize guns from someone who has firearms and has exhibited threatening behavior.
McKeown cited two incidents in which the specialized restraining orders were used, both in San Jose. In one instance, a San Jose resident was allegedly manufacturing “assault style” weapons in his home and “sent incredibly alarming text messages to people threatening to shoot up a school and saying he sympathized with the Unabomber,” McKeown said.
“It was really alarming, with objectively threatening words and articulable facts of his access to weapons,” she said. “He had not yet committed a crime, and absent a restraining order, we had no prior mechanism to stop it.”
Family members or cohabitants can also file a gun violence restraining order against someone on the standard of a person posing a “substantial likelihood” of harming others.
Data from the District Attorney’s Office show a marked jump in use of the orders: Santa Clara County recorded seven filed orders in 2016, four orders last year, and 20 orders in the first few months of 2018. McKeown said that as recently as Thursday, a man who had been pointing a gun at people driving in his neighborhood was the subject of such an order.
The preemptive nature of the orders raises the hackles of gun-rights advocates. Craig DeLuz, spokesman for the Firearms Policy Coalition and the Calguns Foundation, called it a “way around due process to disarm lawabiding gun owners.”
“I find it concerning when law enforcement
takes to marketing and promoting ways to skirt due process in order to violate people’s rights,” DeLuz said.
McKeown acknowledged the opposition to such tactics.
“I would remind them this is subject to judicial review,” she said. “In light of what’s happening today with school shootings, I refer to this as, better safe than sorry.”