ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Sheriff--Please Get With the Program

Sheriff Brad Gates’ refusal to take part in an innovative, proven anti-gang program is disappointing. Other county officials are understandably upset by his stance and perplexed by his reasons.

“I don’t have to participate in the district attorney’s plan,” Gates said. That’s technically true, because he is an elected official. “This has nothing to do with me,” Gates added. He is wrong on that score.

The program that Gates is shunning is known as the Tri-Agency Resource Gang Enforcement Team (TARGET). Begun in Westminster last year, it would be expanded to Santa Ana, Anaheim, Costa Mesa, Garden Grove and Orange under a program announced by Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi. TARGET gathers prosecutors, police and Probation Department employees in one office to focus on gangs. In Westminster it has been effective in tracking cases from start to finish, getting violent gang members arrested, convicted and sent off to jail for long terms.

Gates’ deputies patrol nearly all of South County, including both the cities that have contracted with the Sheriff’s Department and unincorporated territory. The Sheriff’s Department thus would be welcomed in the TARGET program, but Gates declined, saying that TARGET contains nothing “new” and that his deputies get along fine with other agencies, thank you.

It’s true that the six TARGET cities have the bulk of the estimated 17,000 gang members in Orange County. But the county has learned in recent years that it no longer is a suburban enclave immune to crime.

So, too, in recent years has South County found that it is not necessarily beyond the reach of the menace of violence in our society. There are gangs in San Juan Capistrano; in San Clemente this year a high school student was fatally speared through the skull with a paint roller by suspected gang members. If the number of gangs is small, law enforcement has a chance with TARGET to keep it that way.

Gates has loaned his department’s assistance to cities needing help in the past. And although he is free to run his department as he wishes, the county supervisors control his budget. Most years, a threat from the sheriff to close a jail or his hints that criminals will run rampant if his budget is touched have been enough to get the supervisors to go along with his proposals. However, the days of this sort of empire building are over. Pooled resources and shared services are the wave of the future, in law enforcement as elsewhere, in tough economic times.