Six members of O.C. gang are arrested

Six members of an Anaheim street gang have been charged with violating a 2-week-old court order that prohibits them from a variety of activities in the neighborhood authorities say they have terrorized.

The arrests are the latest made as the result of the Orange County district attorney’s office’s decision to use the legal tactic to break up two of the county’s gangs that have the most tenacious grip on their communities.

A first order in July targeted 134 members of the Santa Nita gang in an area of Santa Ana. The second order affects 77 members of the Boys in the Hood gang in the Wakefield neighborhood centered in Anaheim. The gang members in each case were served with 600-page injunctions that spell out restrictions, including a 10 p.m. curfew, no drinking in public, no wearing of gang attire and no associating in public with members of the group.

The men, women and children were named in the court orders because they had police contact within the previous 18 months that showed them to be gang members, according to authorities. The American Civil Liberties Union has fought such tactics nationwide, arguing that innocent people have been swept up in the injunctions.

A violation of the court order may result in misdemeanor or felony prosecution.

Police have charged two men and four juveniles in Anaheim. Thirteen people have been charged in Santa Ana.

Most recently arrested were 18-year-old Hugo Israel Diaz of Anaheim and 21-year-old Jesus Hernandez Salinas of Santa Ana, members of Boys in the Hood.

Salinas is accused of loitering on Nov. 21 in the injunction’s safety zone with two other gang members.

Diaz is accused of being in the company of several males outside an apartment complex Friday in the 2000 block of South Mountain View Avenue in Anaheim. He is accused of having a small bag of marijuana in his pocket and giving the drug to a 15-year-old boy. In addition to breaking the law by possessing marijuana, Diaz violated the injunction by being in the presence of drugs, the district attorney’s office said.

Both were charged with misdemeanor violations of the injunction, carrying a penalty of as many as six months in jail.

UC Irvine Professor Cheryl Maxson, who led a three-year study of a gang injunction’s effectiveness in San Bernardino County, said the “results are modest but in the right direction.”

Maxson found that residents in the injunction area generally felt safer and that police reported a drop in violent crime, especially assaults. She cautioned, however, that academic studies of the injunctions’ long-term effectiveness had not been done, so the benefits could be solely short term.

Hector Villagra, director of the ACLU’s Orange County office, said he was monitoring implementation of the local injunctions.

“At some level, I think what you need is a strengthening of the definition of what is a gang member and care from the D.A. in not sweeping too broadly,” Villagra said.

“The fact that your brother or sister is, or your friend is, is not enough to establish you as a gang member. And all of those things can get you swept up, as it currently stands.”

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garrett.therolf@latimes.com