Ganging up on civil liberties - anti-gang policing and civil rights

Progressive, The, Oct, 1997 by Nina Siegal

Sixteen-year-old Claudio Ceja of Anaheim, California, is an eleventh grader at Loara High School. From 8:00 A.M. until 2:35 P.M., he is in classes. From 4 P.M. to 6 P.M., he hands out fliers for a local business. From 6 P.M. to 9:30 P.M., he completes his homework before he goes to his second job at an Anaheim convention center.

But the Anaheim police don't see Ceja as a hard-working young student. In the past few years, they have stopped, detained, and photographed Ceja five times and put his photograph in the city's gangtracking computer database. Each time, Ceja told them he was not involved with a gang. But each time they ignored his claims, he says. Despite the police attention, Ceja has never been arrested or charged with any crime.

"They seem to be doing it for the fun of it," says Ceja. "They take my picture, and they put it in a gang file. But I'm not a gangster. I don't want to be identified as one."

Ceja says he recently contacted members of United Neighborhoods, an Anaheim-based group founded last year to help young people fight police abuse. Chairperson Jessica Castro told Ceja that he had a right to refuse to be photographed. So the next time he was stopped, says Ceja, "I told an officer that he couldn't take my picture because I was a minor. He said: 'Now you know your rights, huh?' and he took my picture anyway."

Ceja is one of thousands of young people across the nation who are being snared in a giant net cast by law enforcement agencies to nab suspected gang members.

Two of the most popular gang-fighting strategies today--employed widely in California and under consideration in other states--are gang-tracking databases and civil gang injunctions. Although police and prosecutors herald both tactics as effective methods of gang control, opponents say the measures infringe on the basic civil liberties of young people and are biased against minorities.

Using the new practice of civil gang injunctions, prosecutors can prohibit alleged members of certain street gangs from criminal activities usually associated with gang-banging, such as vandalism, graffiti, and possessing weapons.

But the injunctions don't stop there. They include many activities that may not involve criminal activity at all. A San Jose injunction prohibits "standing, sitting, walking, driving, gathering, or appearing anywhere in public view" with any suspected gang member. Those named in the injunction are barred from carrying "glass bottles, rocks, bricks, chains, tire irons, screwdrivers, hammers, crowbars, bumper jacks, razor blades, razors, sling shots, marbles, [and] ball bearings." They are also enjoined from "approaching vehicles, engaging in conversation or otherwise communicating with the occupants of any vehicle," as well as "making, causing, or encouraging others to make loud noise of any kind."

The first civil gang injunction was issued in December 1987 against alleged members of the Playboy Gangster Crips of the Cadillac-Corning section of West Los Angeles. Now there are about a dozen in place in California cities, including San Jose, Los Angeles, Oakland, Inglewood, Burbank, Pasadena, and Long Beach. Violators of the injunctions face fines or jail time.

Marty Vranicar, head of the gang unit for the Los Angeles city attorney's office, says injunctions imposed in West Los Angeles, Norwalk, and Pasadena have significantly decreased gang activity. "From our experience, it has had a tremendous suppressive effect on gangs," says Vranicar. "It provides breathing space for the neighborhoods to get out from under the constant intimidation caused by the gangs in the area."

But civil-liberties advocates are dismayed.

"When a person who has not been convicted of any gang-related activity or any criminal activity, for that person to be prohibited from being on a public sidewalk during daylight hours, runs against everything that our Constitution stands for," says Robin Toma, consultant and attorney at the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission.

Vranicar disagrees. "The underlying legal theory is a simple one," he says, "and it has been supported by the California Supreme Court: Not every right of association is going to receive the same level of protection under the First Amendment."

New injunctions are now being considered throughout California. In July, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge imposed a ban on free association in a seventeen-block stretch of the Jefferson Park neighborhood in southwest Los Angeles, the hangout of the notorious Eighteenth Street Gang, according to the Associated Press. The most sweeping of its kind so far, this injunction would name and tag more than 500 people who live in a Latino neighborhood of just 28,000.

Ed Chen, staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California, represented five teenagers in a suit against San Jose. An injunction filed in 1993 against thirty-eight suspected members of two Latino gangs in the Rocksprings neighborhood of San Jose included the names of several young people who had never been convicted of, or charged with, any crime.