U.S. Funding of Anti-Gang Program Cut : Oxnard: Agencies receive no explanation. Computer system was used as a national blueprint for tracking habitual offenders.

Federal officials have withdrawn funding for a widely acclaimed but controversial gang tracking program that was born in Oxnard and used as a blueprint for anti-gang efforts nationwide.

The program keeps tabs on about 1,700 known gang members and others who police believe have ties to gangs and dramatically increased burglaries, robberies and other crimes in Oxnard.

Using federal money, crime analysts created a computer system that can immediately produce photos, physical descriptions and criminal histories of Oxnard’s gang members and their associates.

The program initially focused on tracking and locking up a core group of repeat offenders, but it evolved into a countywide system that provided quick and vital information on gangsters and others in frequent trouble with the law.

Oxnard was one of three cities in the nation picked as demonstration sites for SHOCAP--the Serious Habitual Offender Comprehensive Action Program.

But federal officials recently informed the three jurisdictions--Oxnard, Tallahassee, Fla., and Colorado Springs, Colo.--that their $600,000 in funding had been withdrawn and ordered them to immediately stop spending federal money. Oxnard was getting about $120,000 a year to run its program.

Officials offered the agencies no explanation for cutting what by most accounts was an effective, low-cost approach to battling gangs and violent crime.

A federal official familiar with SHOCAP said it fell victim to bureaucratic maneuvering during the final days of the Bush Administration. Others suggest there was some question about whether the program was really any good.

“That’s absolute nonsense,” said former Oxnard Police Chief Robert Owens, who established the Oxnard program with federal money in 1984. “I would dispute the idea that someone made a reasonable decision about the merits of the program based on a careful analysis of the results.

“This was the act of a Washington bureaucrat who was on his way out.”

As one of the federal demonstration sites, the Oxnard Police Department helped show other police agencies how to mimic the program that has now spread to more than 300 agencies nationwide.

Despite their own budget problems, Oxnard officials agreed to pick up the tab--between $7,000 and $9,000--to continue the serious habitual offender program through June so that the City Council could consider including it in next year’s budget.

But Oxnard is short on cash and is looking to cut programs, not pick up the cost of additional ones.

At a time when Ventura County police agencies are stepping up gang enforcement, Oxnard police and other law enforcement officials say the loss of federal dollars threatens to severely damage efforts to keep pace with escalating gang violence.

“It really hurt us,” said David Keith, Oxnard’s crime analyst. “We won’t solve as many gang-related crimes. It will make us less effective and it will make our job a lot harder.”

The federal government has been chipping away at SHOCAP for years.

Nearly a decade ago, the U.S. Department of Justice selected Oxnard and two other cities to identify repeat juvenile offenders, track them closely through the criminal justice system and press for maximum jail time.

SHOCAP was founded in response to research indicating that the majority of serious juvenile crime was committed by a small group of habitual offenders.

Oxnard created the Serious Habitual Offender/Drug Involved program, a component of SHOCAP, and its achievements were hailed from coast to coast by law enforcement officials struggling to cope with juvenile crime.

The idea was to have police, prosecutors, schools and welfare and probation workers pool information and focus on the worst offenders.

“There was awfully strong evidence that these kids needed to be dealt with more severely,” Owens said.

The early results were phenomenal, Owens said.

In the first year, Oxnard police locked up the five targeted criminals in one south Oxnard neighborhood where there had been 57 burglaries, seven robberies and six assaults. Crime in the area dropped 5%.

By 1989, after all 30 of Oxnard’s most serious juvenile offenders were behind bars, murders declined 60%, robberies 41% and burglaries 29%.

The other law enforcement agencies in the pilot program reported similar successes.

That same year, federal officials discontinued Oxnard’s Serious Habitual Offender/Drug Involved program in favor of a society re-entry program that offered juvenile offenders job training, counseling and job referrals when released from jail.

Oxnard officials adopted a version of the serious habitual offender program that continues today without federal funding.

In 1991, the Oxnard Police Department received another federal SHOCAP grant to create the anti-gang program. Federal funding of the re-entry program and the anti-gang program were lost with the decision to gut SHOCAP.

Based on Oxnard’s early success, state lawmakers adopted legislation that provided money for similar juvenile offender programs.

Oxnard landed a state grant in 1986 that placed a countywide SHOCAP coordinator in the district attorney’s office. Last year, state funding for that program dried up too.

“It was an absolutely outstanding program, very effective,” said Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury, who is crafting a cost-sharing plan to revive the countywide coordinator position. “Its demise has caused me and the sheriff and the police chiefs in this county a great deal of concern.”

But for all its laurels, many people are happy to see SHOCAP on its way out.

Critics say that too many young offenders are being treated as if they were adult career criminals and that the program discriminates against minorities.

“I’m not going to miss it too much,” said Gabe Serrano, a county probation officer who runs a private social service group. “The program has worked to establish a bank of misinformation. I think it is really a sophisticated form of discrimination.”

More than 90% of the youths entered in the city’s gang tracking computer are Latino, Filipino or African-American.

The youngest in the tracking system is a 10-year-old who admitted being a member of a south Oxnard gang. One of the oldest is a 20-year-old doing time for murder. His rap sheet includes numerous robberies and a drive-by shooting.

Of the 1,700 identified gang members, only about 50 are considered hard-core members.

Many of those identified as “gang-involved” have never committed crimes.

“My son is not bad,” said an Oxnard woman. She said her teen-age son was labeled a gang member and entered into the Police Department’s computer system based on his dress and because he keeps company with the neighborhood gang.

“The police treat the Mexican kids differently,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified because she fears retaliation from authorities. “They think they all belong to gangs.”

Oxnard defense attorney Jorge Alvarado said he worries that the SHOCAP label on a defendant could influence some judges and prevent a youth from receiving a fair trial, although he offered no specific examples.

In addition, he said he believes the gang tracking program sets up a youngster for suspicion of lifelong gang involvement.

“It’s too easy to identify kids as gang members,” said Alvarado, noting that the computer program currently has no mechanism for purging names from the system. “Once they’re in, there is no way out.”

In the end, it was not the complaints of discrimination that brought SHOCAP to its knees.

A federal employee familiar with the nationwide program said it was done in by a former administrator for the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

He said the administrator, who was with the Bush Administration, scrapped the program in favor of another pet project.

“I thought it was a bad decision,” said the federal worker, who requested that his name not be used for fear of losing his job. “I haven’t seen a program with the potential of SHOCAP, but it all came to a crushing halt because of one guy’s poor judgment.”

John Wilson, acting administrator for the office of juvenile justice, denied that charge. He said SHOCAP was gutted to pay for other programs authorized by Congress last year.

But Wilson acknowledged that there was some question about just how well SHOCAP had performed over the years.

“I personally think it was a good decision,” said Wilson, noting that the federal government pumped nearly $6 million into SHOCAP since 1984.

“We felt that given the investment that had been made, and given our inability to determine whether we were getting our money’s worth, that we could not continue to support this ongoing effort.”

But for those who patrol the streets--the officers and detectives who made daily use of the computer-generated information--SHOCAP has been a valuable tool in the war against gangs.

“It is probably one of our most important tools in terms of gathering and distributing intelligence,” said Sgt. Charles Hookstra who coordinates gang enforcement activities for the Oxnard Police Department. “I think we will notice a difference if we lose the program entirely.”

Added former chief Owens: “The people who took this away probably never spent a single day in a patrol car.”