2 Units Approved for Gang Crackdown

The Board of Supervisors unanimously voted Tuesday to crack down on Orange County gangs with a specialized district attorney’s unit and a countywide gang task force.

Supervisor Roger R. Stanton, who proposed the measure with District Attorney Cecil Hicks, said the new focus on gangs is in response to an increase in their violent activity in Orange County and a new sophistication in gang structures.

“The simple fact is that gang activity permeates the entire area,” Stanton said at a press conference after the supervisors’ vote. “The time is now for Orange County to reassert its programs and address gang problems.”

The supervisors called for a new county gang task force made up of representatives from schools, community organizations and law enforcement. They also created a new district attorney’s gang unit, which will include six new deputy district attorneys, five investigators and a clerical staff of three.

The cost of the gang unit will be $50,000 for the remainder of the current fiscal year and $404,000 for the fiscal year beginning in July, Stanton said.

Chief Asst. Dist. Atty. Michael Capizzi said the new unit will be more effective because its members will have a lower than normal caseload and they will follow a case throughout its term in the court system, a process known as “vertical prosecution.”

Normally, a different deputy district attorney is assigned to each case at different steps in the judicial process. But Capizzi said that this can cause problems in continuity, retaining witnesses and establishing expertise on the nature of gangs and on individual cases.

Most trial attorneys in the district attorney’s office have a load of about 35 cases at any one time, and gang unit members will have a caseload of about 15 active cases, Capizzi said.

Stanton, who is running for reelection, and Capizzi appeared at the press conference with Santa Ana Police Chief Clyde Cronkhite; Public Defender Michael Schumacher; Gus Frias, a coordinator of the anti-gang program at the county Department of Education, and Tuong Duy Nguyen of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc.

The officials did not have specific figures on gang activity countywide. They said that collecting that kind of information would be part of the focus of the county’s new gang task force.

In Santa Ana, however, one of the most affected cities, there are about 4,000 gang members and there were about 400 violent gang incidents last year, Cronkhite said.

The district attorney’s office has also noted an increase in gang cases. Eight gang-related homicides were prosecuted in the fiscal year ending last July, contrasted with 10 gang murders already in the first half of this fiscal year.