Massive Gang Member List Now Clouded by Rampart

State and local law enforcement officials have created a computer database with files on more than 112,000 purported Los Angeles County gang members, 62,000 of whom were identified largely by officers from the now-disbanded Los Angeles Police Department CRASH units--including those in the scandal-ridden Rampart station, senior police officers say.

The CRASH units were disbanded after members of the Rampart Division allegedly committed unjustified shootings, stole drugs, planted evidence and perjured themselves to frame innocent people. The heavy reliance by the database, called CAL/GANG, on intelligence gathered by such units raises questions about the reliability of the computerized information, which is available to agencies statewide.

John Crew, a police practices expert for the American Civil Liberties Union, said CAL/GANG amounts to “a secret blacklist” that circumvents the constitutional presumption of innocence.

The LAPD and the state Department of Justice, in fact, are reviewing the data.

The Los Angeles list constitutes a large portion of about 250,000 names in the 2-year-old state database, according to Don Mace, who runs CAL/GANG at its coordinating agency, the California Department of Justice. About 160,000 people are listed as gang members and 90,000 are labeled associates, Mace said.

About two-thirds of the Los Angeles County residents listed are Latino, a third are black, and a few--2,000--are white, according to the Sheriff’s Department’s CAL/GANG coordinator, Sgt. Wes McBride.

“Not everybody in there has an arrest record,” said Capt. John O’Connell, the LAPD’s gang coordinator. “This is an intelligence file. There are other [gang] associates who may eventually become full-fledged gang members, and this gives us a way of tracking them.”

Some city officials questioned the size of the numbers--whether they include gang members or their associates.

“I think it’s outrageous,” said City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg. “It’s probably every kid in some neighborhoods who wear baggy pants.”

Officers are not required to tell people they are included in the database--even during the systematic “field interviews” that the LAPD and other forces conduct with suspected gang members whom they question and photograph, Mace said.

LAPD Det. Chuck Zeglin said 80% to 90% of the system’s data on gangs in the city of Los Angeles came from CRASH officers.

About a dozen officers and employees at Rampart CRASH used the system, and seven of them were allowed to enter information about alleged gang members, Capt. O’Connell said.

“CRASH officers and civilian support personnel were the only [LAPD] users of the system,” he added.

But more than 4,000 other California law enforcement officers in 522 entities--from local police forces to agents in the Los Angeles offices of the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration--are authorized to retrieve information from CAL/GANG, Mace said.

He said INS anti-gang agents in Los Angeles are trained to pull up information, “but they’re prohibited from printing gang lists and that sort of thing.”

Cmdr. David Kalish, an LAPD spokesman, said the department conducted an audit of its CAL/GANG entries after the Rampart scandal erupted and determined that none of the officers implicated in alleged misconduct ever had entered information in the system.

“There were no improprieties discovered,” Kalish said. “It appears from information that we have at this time that the system was not compromised. I’m not aware of any information that was removed from the system.”

But state officials said they are conducting their own audit of the database’s information to ensure its soundness.

Nathan Barankin, spokesman for state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, whose department oversees the list, said no inappropriate information has been discovered by state officials.

“There will be no aspect of this Rampart investigation that won’t be scrutinized--including our CAL/GANG database,” Barankin said.

“It’s extremely alarming,” said Dan Tokaji, the staff attorney at the Los Angeles office of the American Civil Liberties Union. “We know that Rampart LAPD officers were repeatedly lying. . . . This presents an enormous potential for abuse. It’s no surprise that almost all the people labeled gang members are black and Latino. It just shows the culture of racism within law enforcement. This presumes people are guilty until proven innocent. That’s contrary to basic constitutional principles.”

McBride of the Sheriff’s Department said police officers are told they should enter a name in the database only if the suspect has matches at least two of the gang criteria:

* Professes to being a gang member.

* Is deemed a gang member by a reliable source, such as a trusted informant, teacher or parent.

* Is called a gang member by an untested informant with corroboration.

* Has gang graffiti on his personal property or clothing.

* Is observed, by an officer, using gang hand signs.

* Hangs around with gang members.

* Is arrested with gang members.

* Identifies his gang affiliation when brought to county jail--something authorities say suspects do to avoid being jailed with enemy gang members.

“It’s very useful because it has a lot of pictures of people in it,” said Matthew Vurek of the DEA, who was recently trained on the system but has not yet begun to use it. “If you say, ‘There’s this guy Joe who rides a Harley-Davidson and has a swastika tattoo on his left arm and has missing teeth,’ you can pull up a location.”

After the Rampart scandal erupted, the Sheriff’s Department administrators of the Los Angeles component of the system were “somewhat concerned” about the possibility of tainted intelligence, McBride said.

“We weren’t terribly concerned,” he said. “I know the LAPD was, and they started looking back at records and trying to figure out if they should clean any records. I don’t think they found anything.

“You’ve always got to be concerned. You don’t want garbage to enter the system. You want it pristine,” McBride said. “We reviewed all our procedures, too, to make damned sure we weren’t going to get caught up either.”

Law enforcement files on Los Angeles gangs have played an unseen role in a joint effort by the LAPD, the FBI and the INS to curb the 18th Street gang.

A March 1998 FBI document on the effort says a review of “gang databases maintained by local law enforcement reveals that over 15,000 individuals have been identified as claiming membership in the 18th Street gang. Additionally, approximately 8,000 known and suspected 18th Street gang members have been identified through INS indices.”

“Those other law enforcement databases are being reviewed to discern whether these individuals meet the prosecution guidelines,” the FBI document said, without identifying the databases.

Laura Bosley, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Los Angeles, said she could not identify them because they were referred to in a confidential document in a federal investigation. She said her office has had access to CAL/GANG for eight months.

However, transcripts of interrogations conducted as part of the ongoing Rampart investigation do show that INS agents worked directly with Rampart officers.

A top INS official said the federal agency’s Violent Gang Task Force worked “hand in glove” with LAPD CRASH officers. The official said the INS and the LAPD also shared intelligence on deportable criminal noncitizens, who are a growing focus of immigration agents’ enforcement.

The LAPD’s Kalish said the files are crucial for dealing with gangs, which were responsible for 7,600 crimes in the city last year--including 136 homicides, 900 drive-by shootings, 524 attempted murders, and 2,600 felony assaults.

“These aren’t just little kids spray-painting the walls,” he said. “We’re talking about people involved in very violent activity involving all parts of the city. The gang files are absolutely critical to successful cases on gang members.”

LAPD Det. Zeglin said the department first created a gang file in the mid-1980s, calling it the Gang Tracking System. The Sheriff’s Department had already begun its own Gang Reporting Evaluation and Tracking System, or GREAT, in 1984, McBride said.

When a statewide database was proposed, “we would have used GREAT, but it was basically 1984 technology,” Zeglin said. “That’s how CAL/GANG came about.”

The LAPD fed two-thirds of the names in its Gang Tracking System into CAL/GANG when it joined the system in October 1998.

San Diego, home to gangs whose members sometimes moonlight as Tijuana drug cartel gunmen, had already joined CAL/GANG in January 1998, and the database is now used throughout the state, Zeglin said.

With the demise of CRASH, “there’s going to be a temporary reduction in intelligence gathering.” Zeglin said. “That slack will be picked up by gang detectives and bureau officers in those divisions. There won’t be a severe interruption. I think it will be minor.”