Injunctions against gang members upheld by courts

Gang injunctions, challenged regularly in California courts since the first one was obtained in Los Angeles 20 years ago, appear to hold up under judicial scrutiny, their defenders say.

Visalia City Attorney Alex Peltzer, who is working with police to petition for the city's first gang injunction, based on the California nuisance code, legislative action and court rulings, said he also plans to be ready for a legal challenge. "We're preparing to be able to defend it," he said, though he added that he believes the legal basis for gang injunctions is solid.
Los Angeles, which got the first civil gang injunctions 20 years ago, has faced legal challenges. "All of our injunctions have been upheld," Frank Mateljan, a spokesman for the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office, said.
He said that he knows of no communities in California where gang injunctions have been successfully challenged in the courts.
In 2001, California's 4th District Court of Appeal upheld a trial court's ruling that gang injunctions are constitutional, rejecting a challenge to a 1997 attempt to get an injunction against 28 members of the Posole street gang in Oceanside.
Although that ruling was further appealed, the state Court of Appeal upheld it.
Still, success in the courtroom has not stopped questions about whether the injunctions violate civil liberties by interfering with the constitutionally guaranteed freedom to assemble.
Officials at the American Civil Liberties Union are among those critics, but the group would not provide anyone to be interviewed on the subject. Instead, officials cited a statement on the ACLU Web site that cited several objections to gang injunctions, including:
They aren't effective at curbing violence because they don't address the root causes of that violence.
Injunctions are more motivated by politics than solving community problems.
The injunctions give police too much leeway to harass and target "young men of color," even those who aren't gang members.
The practice imposes permanent, probation-like restrictions with no clear way out.
Don Gallian, assistant district attorney for Tulare County, said, "It does look like fairly solid law."
But, he added, when a law enforcement agency here does present prosecutors with its investigative findings to seek a gang injunction, his office will look at the case and the law carefully before going forward.
While it looks likely that Visalia police and Tulare County sheriff's investigators will seek gang injunctions in the coming months, a first for the county, authorities have looked into them before.
John Jackson, a criminal defense attorney in Visalia, said that seven years ago he was a Tulare County prosecutor who was directed to see if a gang injunction could be filed here.
"And I think our general consensus at the time [was] down in Los Angeles the gangs really are turf oriented. It's basically block by block," he said.
All the members of many Los Angeles gangs lived in the same blocks or neighborhoods with clear boundaries that made enforcing the injunctions fairly simple, Jackson said
"They're just as brutal here as in Los Angeles, but we're kind of different in that our gangs are not really differentiated block by block."
In fact, Jackson said, rival Sureño and Norteño gang members may live on the same block or members could be spread from Visalia to Goshen or Tulare to Porterville.
Seven years ago, Jackson said, the District Attorney's Office was trying to model the injunction after Los Angeles' injunctions, but the difficulty in defining the areas where gang members couldn't consort made it too difficult.
While authorities here are looking at what other communities have done to enjoin gangs, including Fresno County and Los Angeles, it's not clear how the finished injunctions might vary from those in other areas.
If a challenge is made to a Tulare County injunction, Jackson said public opinion on gangs may have an effect on the courts.
"I think, generally, the citizens are fed up with gang crimes, and I think the courts are trying to find any measure ... to curb gang conduct," he said.
As for the effectiveness of gang injunctions, Peltzer said there isn't a lot of hard data, and mostly he's heard anecdotal claims by law enforcement officials.
Indeed, Bill Little, city administrator for Orange Cove — where injunctions have been handed down against 110 members of two rival gangs since late January — said the effects there haven't been easy to gauge.
"On the one hand, the sheriff's [deputies] are making some arrests. But on the other hand, that's a fairly small number that I've heard so far," he said.
The Fresno County Sheriff's Department reports assaults and shootings have dropped by half in Orange Cove since January.
Little said the lack of clarity may be due to the fact there are other programs in that city geared to reducing gang crime that may be responsible for some of the changes.
But at the same time, authorities in Fresno are cracking down on gangs, and some of the affected gang members are moving out to rural areas, including Orange Cove, he said.
In Los Angeles, Mateljan said there has been at least a 10 percent drop in crimes in areas where gang members have injunctions against them.
"Off the top of my head, I can think of, for example, one of our injunctions in Hollywood where we've seen a 50 percent drop in crime since the injunctions," he said.
But Mateljan had no hard data to back that claim.
A 2005 report by criminologists at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Irvine, said there's scant research on the impact of civil gang injunctions.
Santa Barbara Police Chief Cam Sanchez has said that for now, at least, he will not pursue any gang injunctions in his city.
"He has some questions about the effectiveness of what it accomplishes," said Santa Barbara Police Lt. Paul McCaffrey. "And he has concerns of the labeling of a town that has a gang injunction. What does that mean to the town as a whole?"
Port Hueneme Mayor Maricela Morales, said she voted last year against allowing neighboring Oxnard to extend its second gang injunction into the southern part of her city in part because of the lack of data.
"On my part, I did extensive research on gang injunctions, and found the research was inconclusive and, if anything, leaned toward the gang injunctions not being very effective."
In fact, Morales said, she believes that more than anything the injunctions make people feel safer without delivering long-term results.
Besides the effectiveness issue, Morales said she worried that the injunctions would feed a hostile, aggressive, revenge mentality among residents.
Cheryl Maxson, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, was lead author of the UC Irvine/USC study that compared neighborhoods in San Bernardino before and after injunctions had been obtained against gangs in the area.
She said the injunctions had only "mild, positive" effects, at least in the short term.
"Only in fear of crime did the primary injunction area show a relative decrease," her report said. "Little evidence was found that immediate effects on residents translated into larger improvements in neighborhood quality..."
Maxson said in an interview that "certainly, the way we framed our conclusion was this should be one tool in a larger toolbox of gang intervention and prevention."
Visalia and Tulare County officials strongly stressed that the injunctions are just that, one of many tools they are using to battle gang problems here.
As for Maxson's study, it states that if gang injunctions "crack the window of opportunity for change in communities, then public officials must seize this moment to put in place social policies that might check the economic disadvantage and social inequities that spawn gangs in communities. If they succeed, it might get a little less crazy out there."

By David Castellon Staff writer
The reporter can be reached at dcastell@visalia.gannett.com