Police Pressure Keeps the Gangs on File : Law enforcement: L.A. officers’ aggressive tactics are questioned.

At the moment the deadly shots rang out, it didn’t matter that Omar Valdez was not a gang member. His gangster-look shaved head and baggy clothes, police said, were enough to attract the attention of two carloads of authentic gang members looking to avenge an earlier attack.

As the 17-year-old San Fernando High School senior stood alone at a pay phone on Laurel Canyon Boulevard last month, he was shot several times in the chest and back, and died a few hours later at Holy Cross Medical Center.

Because it was a drive-by shooting and Valdez’s age and clothes made him look like a gang member, the Los Angeles Police Department’s North Hollywood division called in their gang experts, the CRASH unit.

They quickly surmised that he was not a gang member, but also not a stranger in the gangs’ dark world. Rather, they identified him as a “gang associate,” someone who hung around with gang members but was not a formally initiated--or “jumped in”--member.

How do police know that?

On what do they base such fine distinctions? Gang members don’t have to register anywhere and they certainly don’t keep records for the government to review. So when CRASH officers unhesitatingly identify arrest suspects and bullet-riddled bodies in the street as gang members, what information do they have to make such a statement?

The answers lie in a determined effort to track gang membership, right down to the individual and “wanna-be” level, by the LAPD’s specialist teams, called CRASH (for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums).

The practice is not without controversy.

While police say aggressive methods are the only way to gather intelligence on the 400 gangs and more than 50,000 gang members they estimate inhabit the city, youths complain they are constantly rousted by CRASH officers based simply on their ethnic group and clothing. And civil liberties activists complain that the criteria officers use to pick subjects for questioning are arbitrary and that the classification process borders on being unconstitutional.

In the case of Valdez, he had been interviewed four times on the street since March by officers who were able to establish that he had connections to a local gang, said CRASH Detective Mark Aragon.

Valdez told them that he hung around with members of a neighborhood gang because he grew up with them. But he never took part in gang business.

Youths like Valdez play a dangerous game, Aragon said, making themselves targets for attacks by other gangs.

“They draw attention to themselves,” he said. “If Omar was wearing a polyester suit, this probably wouldn’t have happened.”

In the North Hollywood division alone, there are more than 2,800 gang members and “associates” like Valdez on file, Aragon said. Valleywide, the figure is 20,000 gang members and their associates.

By the time they are 18 years old, about 90% of gang members in the LAPD’s files have been arrested, and 75% have been arrested at least twice, police say. By the time they reach age 20, more than half of those in the file are dead or in prison.

To gather information for those files, CRASH officers stop and interview people, usually boys or men between the ages of 14 and 25 with shaved heads or slicked-back hair, wearing large pants, white T-shirts, baseball caps with gang insignias and big jackets.

“It can be at a traffic stop, or for any legitimate reason,” said Aragon, adding that popular gathering spots for gang members are parks, alleys or in front of apartment houses.

Police fill out a field interview card on each person they stop. A name, address, description and any gang affiliation is required. A brief description of who the person was with and what they were doing at the time of the stop is compiled by the officer.

Police sometimes check for tattoos, drugs and weapons in such field interviews, but only after asking the subject’s permission, Aragon said. If someone claims to be a gang member, a picture is taken and filed with the information card in the station’s gang membership files.

“It is not like the police just pick out any Hispanic kid and give him an affiliation to a gang,” Aragon said.

But others say stopping youngsters--and often conducting searches without warrants--verges on being unconstitutional.

“It has never been clear what the guidelines are” for stopping and identifying gang members, said Manny Velasquez of Youth Gang Services, a city agency that works with gang members. “I think the police are walking a really thin line there.”

Velasquez said officers stop and photograph even youths who don’t claim gang membership, harass other youths and search them without permission. Often police consider youths guilty simply by association, he said.

“I don’t think it is right that they are labeling a lot of kids who don’t need to be labeled,” Velasquez said. “If you do, you are empowering the kid to become a homeboy when he wasn’t going to before.”

Jerry, 19, dressed in a pair of 50-inch-waist Dickie pants and a large Ben Davis shirt, was recently detained by the North Hollywood CRASH unit after he was caught drinking in front of his brother’s apartment house with some of his “homies” or gang friends.

“They had our faces on the floor and their feet on our backs,” said Jerry, who declined to give his last name.

An admitted gang member, Jerry said he is constantly being harassed by police.

“It happens because the police see four or five Mexicans standing around and see the way we are dressed,” he said. “They stop us because we are gang members; it doesn’t matter if we are doing anything.”

But police say it is just such aggressive questioning, constantly tracking gang membership, that pays off in investigations of serious crimes--like the slaying of Omar Valdez.

It was through gang files, Aragon said, that CRASH officers came up with a suspect, a 17-year-old member of a Sun Valley gang who was arrested Dec. 15 on suspicion of murder and is being held at the Juvenile Hall in Sylmar.

“Gangs are something that society considers an epidemic,” Aragon said. “We know we aren’t going to eradicate them, but we try to keep them at a controllable level, and the files help.”

Aragon, 39, is no stranger to gang life. With the LAPD for 12 years and a CRASH detective for five, he freely uses gang lingo gleaned from the street and the routine training seminars mandatory for all CRASH investigators in Los Angeles.

But he knows the culture on a more intimate level. Gang tattoos cover his arms and shoulders as reminders of his youthful years as a gang member.

At 12, he was initiated into a gang. By 16, he was a father and husband. Not until he was 20 did he leave.

“The biggest lure to gang life is the sense of power you get,” Aragon said. “Not everyone can get 100 people behind them with a single phone call (for a fight).”

He said that although gang members’ style of dress does attract attention from police, suspected gang members are usually stopped because they are in a neighborhood where gangs are prominent or for drinking in a public place.

As with any crime, Aragon said, there must be probable cause for police to detain and search someone in a field interview. But simply striking up a conversation with a suspected gang member, asking him about life in the gang world--new members, animosities, relationships--does not qualify as a field interview and requires no probable cause, he said.

Legal scholars agree, said Dr. Eugene Price, a professor of constitutional law for 20 years in the Cal State Northridge political science department.

But the legality of field interviews, questioning and photographing suspected gang members on the street, has yet to be challenged in the courts, Price said. Recent Supreme Court rulings allow warrantless searches only if a police officer “acted in good faith” and no irrevocable harm was done, but probable cause is still required, he said.

If police engage in an informal conversation with suspected gang members, “and then find something on them when they decide to search them, the case could be thrown out because there is no probable cause,” he said.

Many youths are afraid to say no when officers ask permission to search them and “police use that fear effectively,” he said. “Police cannot simply engage in fishing expeditions.”

To conduct a warrantless search, police must prove they believed a crime was about to take place, someone’s safety was in jeopardy or that the evidence might disappear unless they conducted an immediate search, Price said.

“When police stop a group of gang members, they could just be patrolling,” Price said. “But if a search takes place, they need probable cause or permission.”

Gang membership information takes on added importance when arrests lead to trial. If police can establish that a defendant is a gang member, it is easier to get a conviction, according to both prosecutors and defense attorneys.

“The average citizen sees gang members as violent and they are prejudicial against them because of that,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Shellie Samuels of the Valley’s Hardcore unit, which prosecutes gang-related murders, attempted murders and robberies.

For defense lawyers, a gang label can be devastating.

“We want to try to prevent the jury from hearing that they are a member of a gang,” said Marty Mizel, an attorney with the Los Angeles public defender’s office.

“Just because a person is in a gang, it doesn’t mean he runs around every moment of the day raping and pillaging,” Mizel said. “But the juries’ general reaction to gang members is highly prejudicial.”

Mizel said details of gang membership can be critical for defendants facing trial for serious crimes, such as murder or robbery. Establishing that one 18-year-old defendant was a gang associate, not a full-fledged member, may have helped him win an acquittal on two murder charges against the youth, Mizel said.

Velasquez of Youth Gang Services said youths need to protect their own rights.

“When they have the spotlight in their face, the kids know they have to come up with the correct answer. They might say something that they didn’t really want to say,” he said.

A correct address and prompt answers are the most effective way to deal with the police, he said. “They empower police when they give answers like ‘I don’t know,’ ” Velasquez said. “If (police) ask them why they are wearing a Raiders jacket, you either say you are cold or you are a hard-core Raiders fan.”

He said that if a police officer is harassing them, youths should quietly memorize the officer’s badge number and report him to the station later.

On a recent night, while CRASH detectives were combing the streets for Valdez’s killer, Aragon, in full uniform but an unmarked car, stopped youths on the street, in front of a home and anywhere they looked suspicious.

“Hey, get rid of that Raiders jacket,” Aragon told a young man talking to his girlfriend on a pay phone late at night.

“Someone is going to think you are a gang member.”

Because that’s what someone apparently thought about Omar Valdez.