Gang Research to Get Boost From U.S. Funds

A $1-million federal grant awarded this week to bolster Orange County’s anti-gang efforts caps an unconventional alliance between law enforcement leaders and UC Irvine criminologists studying how well police programs work.

“We’re going to be able to get at issues that have to do with how accurately police report gang crimes,” said Bryan Vila, UCI assistant professor of criminology.

“When they characterize something as a gang crime, is it because it’s really different from other delinquent behavior, or is it just because someone dresses in sagging and bagging clothing?”

Vila and his team have set up a Gang Incident Tracking System--a sophisticated academic look at every reported gang incident in the county. Researchers are studying not only where and when the county’s gangs are active, but how the various police agencies evaluate gang crime and how the mere perception of a gang threat can erode a neighborhood.

The researchers were commissioned by the Orange County Police Chiefs and Sheriff’s Assn. to do the independent study, which involves every police agency in the county.

“It is quite innovative,” said Ronald Huff, director of the criminal justice research center at Ohio State University and author of “Gangs in America.” “To have [the chiefs] come together and seek an outside evaluator . . . is extremely impressive. They’re getting a more dispassionate critique of the system.”

Huff said that most communities first deny their gang problems, then graduate to a phase of “overreaction and misidentification,” in which youths who dress like gang members or hang around with them are lumped together by law enforcement with more hardened criminals.

“The idea of overreaction is ‘Yes, we have a gang problem. Let the police solve it.’ What we need to do is look at it as more of a community problem,” Huff said. “Orange County is ahead of most counties in the fact that they’re talking about it, and they have agreed to have a common database.”

The grant, announced by the U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday, comes as a welcome boost for UCI researchers who have quietly plowed through gang data for the past year on a shoestring budget.

The chiefs association approached UCI in early 1995 to launch the project, and Vila’s team has inched along with some university money and private funding from the Pacific Mutual Foundation.

Very few jurisdictions across the country--Broward County in Florida and the city of Denver among them--share gang information among police agencies, Huff said. He said he knows of no other county that has sought an outside consultant to analyze the data.

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The chiefs association launched its countywide gang strategy steering committee in 1992 to draft a collective plan to combat gangs, rather than merely pushing them from one city to the next, said Westminster Police Chief James Cook, the committee’s chairman.

The committee’s anti-gang plan combines aspects of heavy enforcement--such as the county’s nine Tri-Agency Resource Gang Enforcement Teams, or TARGET teams--with preventive programs such as Project: No Gangs. It also works to steer at-risk youth who fit a Probation Department profile of future delinquents away from crime, Cook said. The federal grant will help pay for those programs in addition to the UCI research.

Law enforcement officials say an innovative part of the plan is UCI’s involvement.

In offices set aside for the focused research group on gangs, Vila, co-director Jim Meeker and three doctoral students have been poring over hundreds of gang incident reports collected from across the county.

Doctoral students are looking at whether officers at various agencies report gang crimes consistently from day to day; measuring how fear of crime matches up against real gang incidents; and mapping out crime against the backdrop of myriad social and demographic factors.

“There’s no real test for what works, and they’re developing a system for determining what works,” said Loren Duchesne, chief investigator for the district attorney’s office. “Without research and without a system in place to do that, it’s guesswork.”

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Duchesne said the research will measure the effectiveness of the county’s TARGET teams--which combine prosecutors, district attorney investigators, police detectives and probation officers to crack down on the most active gang members.

The grant--part of a Clinton administration initiative to counter a rise in youth crime--comes at a crucial time for Orange County, still struggling in the wake of the 1994 bankruptcy.

“This funding is going to allow us to continue what we’ve been doing on a shoestring--hanging on tooth-and-nail and paying for things out of our pocket,” Vila said.

Vila, a veteran of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and a former police chief in Micronesia, said some research results may be available by late spring.

Vila lauded the chiefs for setting aside their personalities and political goals to seek an independent analysis.

“I had to tell them, ‘We do research here, and all we’ve got going for us is our integrity. If you don’t like the results, they don’t go away.’ And they said, ‘We don’t care.’ ”

Irvine Police Chief Charles Brobeck, president of the chiefs association, said law enforcement alone cannot deal with the ballooning problem of youth crime and gangs.

The collaborative effort draws the county Probation Department, superintendents of schools and local business leaders into the plan to analyze the gang problem and work on solutions, he said.

“We’re saying that we need help getting our arms around it and managing it,” Brobeck said. “We want to make Orange County a proving ground.”

Sheriff Brad Gates agreed.

“We have set aside our personalities, we’ve set aside our jurisdictional boundaries. We’ve set aside all those things that tend to get us into conflict, and we’ve said the most important thing is to do something about gangs in a positive way for all citizens in Orange County,” Gates said.