A Sobering Lesson in Guilt by Association

The assignment was to write an essay about a time he’d felt intimidated. Jesus Daniel Guerrero could have written a book. He titled his paper, “Guilty Until Proven Innocent.” As a child, I would spend countless hours daydreaming of becoming a mighty police officer, he wrote. Jesus Daniel Guerrero is 17. He isn’t even out of high school.

But as I entered my junior high school years, the essay continues, my dream of becoming a police officer began to fade like sunlight at dusk. . . . I have been scolded, searched, handcuffed, pushed, kicked and wrongfully accused of crimes I did not commit.

So begins one boy’s story of life as a presumed “gang associate.”

Now you might ask: Is this Jesus Daniel Guerrero actually a gang member? This would be an excellent question, for, in fact, he is not. His record is as clean as the Brentwood floors his mother scrubs for a living. His sole affiliation is the yearbook staff at Belmont High School. He carries a B average, plans to enroll after graduation at L.A. City College and copied his essay to me via the Internet.

But he does live in a gang-graffitied neighborhood, does know some gangbangers and does have a brother, 10 years older, who got mixed up in gangs and thus with the Rampart Division of the LAPD.

“I have six kids,” says his mother, Martha, “and only one ever get in trouble.” One was sufficient. Because of nothing more salient than his friends, brother and address, Jesus Daniel Guerrero has repeatedly been detained and “field interviewed” by the police.

This means that his name and description have been taken down for use in unspecified future investigations and that he is almost certainly in the state’s controversial CAL/GANG database of suspected gang “members” and “associates.” “Almost certainly” because, though this database is tax-financed, its contents are secret--not even the people in it get to know whether the cops have input them.

At last count, The Times reported this weekend, CAL/GANG--a compendium of arrest records, field interviews and gossip--had 250,000 names in it, a quarter of which were entered by LAPD anti-gang units, including the one from which the Rampart scandal was spawned.

You might ask: Can there really be that many gangs and associates? Another excellent question, for it’s hard to imagine. Two hundred fifty thousand people. More people than are on active duty with the U.S. Marine Corps. More than exist in all of Marin County. So many people, you could fill a book.

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This business of creepy, secret police lists is, of course, not new. If Jesus Daniel Guerrero were older, his essay might have mentioned the McCarthy years. But CAL/GANG is particularly troubling because, even without these new Rampart questions, it’s an unreliable mess. Contrary to the insistence of police agencies that it’s necessary for crime-stopping, most people on it may not even be bad guys. A government audit done in the early 1990s on a precursor to the database called Gang Reporting Evaluation and Tracking, or GREAT, found that information on a majority of names on it had never been requested by police.

In a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle last summer, California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer said the state limited who in law enforcement could access CAL/GANG because, legally, the criteria for inclusion in it were highly problematic. “This database,” Lockyer wrote, “mixes verified criminal history and gang affiliations with unverified intelligence and hearsay evidence, including reports on persons who have committed no crime.”

Nor can it be taken for granted that we need CAL/GANG because the gang problem is so enormous. The problem’s scope has, from the start, been distorted by racism and media hype.

A 1992 district attorney’s study of L.A. gang databases found, for example, that nearly half the black men in the county between the ages of 21 and 24 were, incredibly, on some gang list. Four years ago, the Garden Grove police were forced to change their field interview procedures and pay $85,000 to a group of Little Saigon teenagers they’d detained for alleged gang behavior. The girls turned out to be honor students in hip-hop pants waiting for a ride home from a mini-mall; one works for a congresswoman now and two are enrolled at UC Irvine.

CAL/GANG’s one undisputed use is as a grant-getter. In 1996, the American Civil Liberties Union found, Oakland police let GREAT know about everyone they came across who had been seen with or had written to a gang member, or had a gang tattoo. The city got a half-million-dollar federal grant on the claim that gang membership had shot up 300% in three years. No one knows how much of that “increase” involves people like Jesus Daniel Guerrero, but I’ll bet somebody could write a book.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.