County Authorities Warn Gang-Related Crimes Increasing, but Others Disagree

After a weekend marred by an unusual spate of gang-related violence, prosecutors warned that such incidents are on the rise in Ventura County, where there are 500 to 1,000 hard-core gang members.

“Gangs are a significant factor in the countywide crime picture at this point, and that was much less true a few years ago,” said Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Vincent J. O’Neill Jr. “What has changed isn’t just the amount of gang-related violence, but the seriousness, the use of firearms, the potential for harm.”

But that view is not unanimous. Many city and police officials insist that the gang problem is not growing and caution against reading too much into a rare outbreak of violence.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter Brown said Ventura County has 15 to 20 “sizable gangs that are established and regularly involved in violent crime,” with 500 to 1,000 active members.

“There are many more people who identify with those gangs but aren’t hard-core,” he said. “And there are probably hundreds of other, smaller gangs in this county that don’t do much in the way of crime.”

Brown said gang-related violent crime “definitely is increasing.”

Within an eight-hour span Saturday night and early Sunday morning, four people were stabbed and a fifth was hit by a car in incidents in Thousand Oaks, Ventura and Oxnard. The two stabbing victims who were admitted to hospitals were in serious and fair condition Monday evening.

Although all three incidents were at first labeled gang-related, Sheriff’s Department investigators later said the gang connection to a melee in Thousand Oaks was tenuous.

Thousand Oaks Mayor Frank Schillo said gang violence isn’t increasing in his city. “There’s never really been that much of a gang problem,” he said.

But according to Brown, who prosecutes most of the county’s cases of gang-related violent crime, “Thousand Oaks has seen a pretty good increase” in gang activity.

“It’s spread out of the traditional areas like Oxnard and Santa Paula, into the Conejo Valley and Simi Valley,” Brown said. “Thousand Oaks has three very distinct, active gangs.”

While one Ventura police captain said gang activity rose moderately in the city in 1990, Police Chief Richard Thomas cited a one-third drop in the number of aggravated assaults from 1989 to 1990 as evidence that gang violence did not increase.

“We have not seen any evidence in the last three years that it has increased,” Thomas said.

Students who witnessed a Feb. 27 melee at Oxnard High School called it a gang fight. Police and school officials disputed that interpretation.

The contradictory conclusions can be traced in part to a lack of statistical evidence on the county’s gang problem.

Among crimes committed in 1990, the district attorney’s office lists two homicides and 15 felony assaults by adults as gang-related. But no records were kept of the number of gang-related charges filed against juveniles, or of any gang crimes before last year.

The county’s two largest law enforcement agencies, the Sheriff’s Department and the Oxnard Police Department, began tracking gang-related crime just this year.

“It just wasn’t enough of a problem before to justify keeping records on,” Brown said. “But it is now.”