Police Told to Review Rule on Immigrants

Reopening an emotionally charged issue, a Los Angeles City Council committee on Monday ordered the Police Department to reexamine a 17-year-old city policy restricting police officers’ ability to work with the Immigration and Naturalization Service or quiz suspects about their residency status.

In a session examining strategies needed to combat the violent 18th Street gang--the region’s largest and most widely dispersed--members of the Public Safety Committee gingerly broached immigration policy as one of several means of controlling street gangs, some of which have a sizable illegal immigrant membership.

“It’s wrong for us to put a procedure in place and never revisit them,” said committee Chairwoman Laura Chick. “If it’s going to be volatile, that’s OK. . . . I don’t think anyone would not want to take a look at [ways] to do things better.”

Meanwhile, a top state parole official, citing a Times series on 18th Street, said he has directed his staff to develop a new computerized system to more closely track members of specific gangs when they are released from state prison back to their communities.

Monday’s hearing by the council panel came in response to the Times series, which described the gang’s spread across state and international borders. The series found law enforcement agencies have not always shared information or pooled resources to combat the challenges posed by the gang’s growth and increasing sophistication.

Council members said they wished to explore a series of measures to combat 18th Street and other gangs--from new federal legislation and grants to prevention programs and ways to bolster innovative anti-gang enforcement efforts on the street.

But the issue that drew much of the council members’ attention was so-called Special Order 40, adopted by the City Council in 1979, partly at the behest of former LAPD Police Chief Daryl F. Gates.

Put forth at a time when the Police Department was coming under considerable criticism for its handling of illegal immigrants, the policy prevents officers from asking anyone about their immigration status, checking with the INS or turning suspects accused of minor violations over to INS officials.

The policy stemmed in part from official concerns that the city’s large numbers of new arrivals--many of them lacking legal documents and coming from countries where police were linked to death squads--would fail to report crime for fear of being deported.

LAPD Deputy Chief John D. White, noting that some immigrants join gangs for protection in violent neighborhoods, told the panel that Special Order 40 hinders the LAPD’s ability to investigate residency status or work with the INS on investigations and enforcement.

“That becomes a major problem,” White said.

In an interview after the session, White said that because witnesses and victims of gang violence are often intimidated into silence, being able to work with the INS more closely would allow the LAPD another means to get gang members off the streets--by deporting them under federal law.

As many as 60% of the estimated 20,000 18th Streeters in Southern California are illegal immigrants, according to a confidential California Department of Justice report on the gang issued last year.

Chick said there is a great deal of confusion about the limitations imposed by the policy, and called for a “thoughtful” review of the restriction by the LAPD, the Police Commission and the City Council. She and Councilman Mike Feuer stressed that they were not suggesting people be targeted because of their immigration status, but felt elements of the policy may need to be revised.

LAPD officials were instructed to seek a review of the policy by the Police Commission and report back to the council committee along with other recommendations to bolster anti-gang efforts.

The Police Department has been reluctant to invite any return to the immigrant issue, White told the panel. “This is going to open a significant, heated debate,” he said.

Chick responded: “We mustn’t be afraid.”

The improvements being ordered by state parole officials are needed because agents have no comprehensive means of tracking parolees by gang.

“I should be able to go to a computer and hit ‘18th Street’ and get a list of where they are at and when they are coming out,” said Fernando Rios, the agency’s deputy regional administrator in Los Angeles.

“Eventually we will be able to do that. Now, [it’s] random paperwork that may not list . . . gang activity.”

The agency also will set up a special gang unit to analyze gang trends and work more closely with local police.

Also Monday, a top county official, who heads an interagency panel seeking to improve criminal justice information sharing, said he has asked for a report next month on a series of proposed improvements to regional gang tracking databases.

County Chief Probation Officer Barry Nidorf said that in the wake of The Times’ 18th Street series, he has called for an examination of ways to enhance an existing system, operated by the Sheriff’s Department, which contains information on individual gang members. The expanded system, he said, would be involve all county law enforcement agencies and add gang-related crime information that would permit analysis of “patterns of crime areas, by gang and by geographic area.”

Nidorf said he hopes to present proposals for the improved system to the interagency Criminal Justice Coordinating Committee as early as next month.