Hahn’s Anti-Gang Plan Has Its Skeptics

Mayor James K. Hahn’s latest crime-fighting proposal is breathtaking in scope: an injunction prohibiting Los Angeles gang members from congregating anywhere within the city’s roughly 470 square miles.

But the plan, announced March 28, has elicited deep skepticism from legal scholars and gang experts, who doubt that it would survive a court challenge and wonder how it could be realistically enforced.

Wes McBride, president of the California Gang Investigator’s Assn., offered an assessment that was typical among experts contacted by The Times.

“I worked gangs for 30 years,” said McBride, a retired Los Angeles County sheriff’s sergeant. “I just don’t see a citywide injunction working, and I don’t see it passing a constitutional test.”

Yet the proposal has already served a political purpose for Hahn as he fights for reelection against City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa.

Introducing the topic -- even with few specifics and no overt support from local law enforcement officials -- has allowed Hahn to project a tough-on-crime message. And it has given him a pretext to argue that Villaraigosa is weak on crime.

The day after he announced the plan, Hahn told reporters that Villaraigosa “took the side of the gang members” in a 1992 lawsuit that challenged a law banning gangs from a San Fernando city park. Villaraigosa was the sole plaintiff in the suit, which raised civil liberties issues similar to those raised in gang injunction cases.

At the time, Villaraigosa was vice president of the Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has challenged a number of California gang injunctions and remains one of the chief critics of the tactic.

In the 2001 mayoral campaign, Villaraigosa said he supported gang injunctions along with preventive measures. Last week, he said, Hahn’s citywide plan deserved further study by City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo.

But some of his supporters had harsh words for Hahn’s proposal. Ira Reiner -- a former city attorney and district attorney who supports Villaraigosa -- called the idea “just fatuous.”

“It’s just campaign talk and nothing else,” said Reiner, who used narrowly tailored injunctions to combat gangs in the 1980s. “It’s not something you can seriously analyze, because there’s nothing to analyze.”

Hahn acknowledged that he hasn’t worked out details of his plan. And some of the city officials who would be crucial to carrying out a citywide injunction have kept their distance from the mayor’s proposal.

Contessa Mankiewicz, a spokeswoman for Delgadillo, said the office would study the idea for Hahn. But ultimately, she said, the plan “has to make sense from a legal and resource point of view.” Delgadillo himself has not commented, and Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, who consults with the city attorney’s office on gang injunctions, declined to comment. Police Chief William J. Bratton, through a spokeswoman, expressed an interest in studying it.

Hahn said his proposal would build on the success of the 25 gang injunctions currently in place throughout Los Angeles that affect almost a quarter of the 39,565 gang members identified by police.

Nine of those injunctions were won by Hahn when he served as city attorney from 1985 to 2001. Hahn said it was time to take the idea citywide to avoid simply moving gangs from one neighborhood to another -- a criticism of injunctions that Villaraigosa leveled in the 2001 campaign.

“A citywide gang injunction will stop every gang member in every neighborhood from working with other gang members to take away the quality of life of the law-abiding residents of the city,” Hahn said.

Gang injunctions have generated controversy since Los Angeles officials began seeking them in court in the early 1980s. Today, each injunction is typically focused on a few dozen blocks the gang claims as turf. They prohibit gang members from congregating in those areas, or committing other gang-related acts such as annoying the neighbors. Violators face up to six months in jail, and sometimes more.

The city attorney’s office believes they are effective in deterring crime. In the late 1990s, Jeffrey Grogger, a former UCLA professor who is at the University of Chicago, studied 14 gang injunctions and concluded that violent crime fell 5% to 10% in the year after injunctions took effect.

Civil libertarians believe the injunctions violate gang members’ constitutional rights of association.

But advocates say injunctions help police solve a basic but vexing problem: When officers arrive in a gang neighborhood, gang members might be hanging out, but they usually are not committing crimes. The real crime starts after the police leave. Injunctions allow police to break up the groups without waiting for a crime to be committed.

The California Supreme Court upheld the right of cities to file gang injunctions in a 1997 case, Gallo vs. Acuna. In it, the court supported a San Jose injunction that prohibited 38 Latino gang members from gathering in a four-block area they had been terrorizing.

One reason the court decided the San Jose injunction was constitutional was that it was valid only in a “limited area.” Outside that area, the justices noted, gang members were free to meet as they pleased.

Experts say that language could give Hahn’s proposal serious trouble. Christopher S. Yoo, a Vanderbilt University law professor who has studied gang injunctions, said courts generally have required injunctions to show a connection between a gang’s activity and negative effects on a specific neighborhood.

Yoo said judges probably would frown on a citywide injunction because it would include too much conduct that should be deemed constitutionally protected.

Gerald Uelmen, a law professor at Santa Clara University, agreed that the plan would face serious constitutional hurdles. Like Yoo, Uelmen said he supports gang injunctions that are narrowly tailored to specific neighborhoods.

Uelmen said he couldn’t imagine how a citywide injunction would work logistically. Some previous injunctions have required prosecutors to name all of the gang members affected. Hahn has said he was willing to do that for a citywide injunction, even if it took thousands of pages.

Other legal experts wondered how a police officer in Venice would recognize gang members from East Los Angeles.

Hahn said that city officials could justify a citywide injunction in court if they could show that “gangs who are highly mobile are operating outside their traditional turf areas.”

“We’re just trying to balance the rights of people here,” he added. “We think sometimes the balance tipped too far in favor of the criminals. We want to tip it back in favor of the law-abiding residents.”