Ganging Up on Gangs

Steve “Skinny Cuz” Gordon didn’t know what to think when a police officer swooped up to him on a Venice sidewalk this week, handed him a 2-inch stack of paper and then walked away.

“What’s this?” the 20-year-old Shoreline Crip asked. “Does this mean I’m bad? Am I going to jail?”

The officer didn’t respond. But the answers to those questions, according to police, are: yes and maybe.

Police and prosecutors say Gordon is one of several hundred hard-core gang members in Los Angeles who are so menacing that they are being slapped with injunctions aimed at restricting their gangster ways.

Under such injunctions, some of the gang members alleged to be most troublesome are prohibited from hanging out with each other on their own turf, the theory being that crimes frequently occur when two or more gang members associate. Many injunctions go so far as to prohibit gang members from carrying pagers, using walkie-talkies, driving through rival gang territories or standing within 10 feet of an open can of beer.

In recent weeks, the Los Angeles city attorney and Police Department have stepped up their use of the tactic. With nine active or proposed injunctions citywide, Los Angeles is the nation’s leader in the movement. The injunctions are also popular elsewhere in Los Angeles County and in other Southern California communities. In San Diego, injunctions are being used to attack a prostitution problem.

In Cicero, Ill., officials are pushing the legal envelope on the injunction approach developed in California. They are trying to evict all gang members, including minors and people with no criminal records, from the town’s borders.

Los Angeles officials are far from that scenario, but they swear by the effectiveness of their approach.

“Our injunctions can really take a bite out of a gang,” said Assistant City Atty. Martin Vranicar, who oversees the office’s gang unit. “In some cases, an injunction can wipe out a gang.”

Although the injunctions are civil court orders, any violation can be criminally prosecuted and land a gang member in jail for up to 180 days. The typical jail term for violators, however, is about five days.

Law enforcement officials and politicians hail the use of so-called public nuisance or gang injunctions and say they are powerful tools to help police stamp out gang violence and drug dealing. Civil libertarians assail the injunctions as blatant violations of their targets’ civil rights, criminalizing such normally noncriminal behavior as having lunch with a friend.

Although supporters argue that gang injunctions help drive down crime, opponents say they only shift criminal activity from one location to another.

And so the debate has raged for more than a decade.

No Broad Study of the Tactic Has Been Done

The fact is, however, nobody has completed a comprehensive study that broadly examines the effectiveness of gang injunctions, although a couple of such surveys are underway, say academicians and law enforcement authorities.

“I’m a skeptic,” said Malcolm W. Klein, a professor of sociology and a gang specialist at USC, about the effectiveness of the injunction. “In some cases it may make things worse. Any time you give attention to a gang, you’re giving them what they wanted in the first place. It gives them status and may even make the gang more cohesive because they feel they’re under attack.”

But Los Angeles City Atty. James K. Hahn, who has been at the forefront of the injunction effort, dismisses that notion.

“Gangs are already cohesive,” he said. “And I haven’t seen gang members asked to be included on injunctions to increase their stature.”

Hahn has used the court orders to go after the notorious 18th Street gang, the Playboy Gangster Crips, the Culver City Boys and a number of other gangs. Members with names such as Sniper, Wicked, Psycho and Silly have been his targets. In the last several years his office has prosecuted about 70 injunction violation cases.

By most accounts, including Hahn’s, the injunctions are only as effective as the resources and effort put into them. “It’s not a magic bullet,” he conceded.

In Inglewood, for example, funds for an anti-gang task force were depleted before an injunction was issued. As a result, the Police Department did not “provide sufficient resources for enforcement” of the injunction, minimizing its effect, according to an analysis of that injunction by USC professor Cheryl L. Maxson. She found that crime did not drop in the area targeted by the injunction.

But in other areas, according to police, crime statistics have dropped significantly once an injunction has been issued.

“When gang members can’t hang out with their homies, it has a big impact,” Vranicar said.

In Los Angeles over the last several years, law enforcement officials have backed the program with tremendous resources, designating police and prosecutors who focus on enforcing the injunctions.

“Without enforcement, it’s nothing,” said LAPD Sgt. Ruben Lopez, who supervises a team of officers who enforce injunctions on the Westside. “It requires a commitment, but it is a good program.”

Nature of the Gang Can Play a Role

The characteristics of a gang also determine the success of an injunction, officials say. The legal device, they say, is a more effective tool against gangs whose members live in single-family homes rather than apartment complexes, because gang membership tends to be more stable and entrenched in the former areas.

“They’re less likely to pick up and move,” Lopez said.

When an injunction is announced in Los Angeles, it is usually done with great public fanfare and expectations. Politicians line up to take credit for the action and promise that a gang’s reign of terror in a community is about to end.

“Sometimes it looks like these things are being done more for the political mileage they generate than helping the community,” said one city official. “On the other hand, I have seen them work.”

Officials say it is costly to file and enforce injunctions, but they do not have precise figures on the expense.

The first use of a civil court order against gang activity was in Santa Ana in 1980, authorities say. In that case, the city attorney sought to break up a gang hangout. The city successfully obtained a restraining order prohibiting gang members from gathering and drinking at the location, but an injunction was not granted. In the following years, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office and the Los Angeles city attorney’s office started seeking injunctions to thwart gang activity.

It was a slow, gradual process, with law enforcement officials expanding the scope of the injunctions each time they went after a gang.

“We ask for more and more each time we do it,” Vranicar said.

Although prosecutors in Los Angeles have gotten bolder with each injunction, they have also been meticulous. They secure affidavits from police and residents attesting to criminal activity of every gang member listed as a defendant.

“We only go after the most active gang members,” Vranicar said.

For the most part, the courts have backed the legality of the injunctions.

“There’s not much we can do legally” against them, said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “We believe they are unconstitutional and don’t solve the problem, but the appeals courts have upheld them.”

She said some of the defendants listed in the local injunctions are not even gang members anymore.

Such was the argument of Skinny Cuz Gordon this week when he was served with his injunction.

“I’m going to school; I’ve got a job,” he said.

Weeks earlier, however, police say a narcotics surveillance operation allegedly caught him in a drug transaction.

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Strategy of the Streets

In the city of Los Angeles, police and prosecutors have obtained seven active gang injunctions and are seeking two more (areas 1 and 2) in an effort to thwart gang violence and drug dealing. The injunctions target the most active gang members from the city’s most dangerous gangs, officials say. Here’s a look at the areas covered by the injunctions.

IG Strategy of the Streets, VICTOR KOTOWITZ / Los Angeles Times