Do Gang Injunctions Work?

He writes, “The question, however, of whether gang injunctions improve public safety remains largely unaddressed at trial, the evidence deemed unnecessary by the courts.”

Citing USC Professor David Sloane, he reported that there is a lack of data on the impact of gang injunctions and those “independent studies that have been published found either a moderate decrease in crime, and a heightened feeling of community safety, or, in one instance, an increase in reported violent crimes.”

The Rand Study that Mr. Sangree cites is significant in that it was prepared for the US Department of Justice and found increases in both the numbers of violent crimes and property crimes in a Santa Ana gang injunction.

Writes Mr. Sangree, “Researchers suggested the increase in reported violent crimes might have been because residents were more willing to report crimes with the injunction in place, or because rival gangs moved in ‘to commit crimes, believing that the injunction reduced the likelihood of retaliation.’ Researchers lacked the data to test either hypothesis.”

“Our evaluations do not support (the contention) that civil gang injunctions are effective in reducing crime,” lead researcher Jeremiah Goulka told the Bee.

Older studies show some decrease in crimes in the short term.

“USC’s Sloane, one of the authors, said much more research is needed to measure the effectiveness of gang injunctions and to determine what approaches, including combining law enforcement with social services, work best,” the Bee reported.

“We desperately need to know more as it expands as a strategy,” Professor Sloan told the Bee. “We need to know whether it differs by implementation or location. There are some factors we don’t understand very well at all.”

From our perspective, this was a particularly interesting piece in light of some of the criticisms we have leveled at the legal system in general, such as the reliance on testimony from experts even when their opinions are not empirically or scientifically tested to see if they have accuracy in the real world.

There are really several different questions that need to be asked.  One is a question about civil rights and whether gang injunctions violate constitutional rights of the enjoined, by reversing the burden of proof and effectively punishing them for actions that they might do rather than crimes they actually commit.  And without such crimes, does the government have the right to restrict the otherwise lawful behavior of its citizens because of their affiliation?

The bigger question, of course, is whether or not the injunction will work at all.  One of the studies that really needs to be done is to test to see if gang injunctions work in the long term, or whether gangs simply shift their tactics and responses.

For instance, while a 2003-04 LA County Grand Jury report found evidence that crime dropped modestly in the first year the injunction was implemented, in successive years reductions in crime rates were statistically insignificant.

One of the questions the attorneys asked prior to the trial is why we should even expect a gang injunction to have an impact – after all, their reasoning goes, it is a civil injunction with civil penalties.  Criminal laws with lengthy sentences are not preventing gang activities, according to the DA’s Office, but a civil remedy will?

Gang expert Joe Villanueva argued in an interview with the Vanguard last year that the gang injunction had the effect of calming things down.

“It was amazing how it quieted things down in that you didn’t see stuff out there that was so blatant,” he said.

“The guys that were getting arrested were tired of getting arrested so it prevented some crime, [and] at the same time it’s an intervention to the show the young kids that it’s not worth getting on this list,” he continued.

“It really quieted things down.  If you asked the guys that were in West Sacramento that worked the streets, they’ll tell you after the first one, how busy West Sac was, it just quieted down.  It was a huge impact with limited resources.  Even if we weren’t enforcing it, or enforcing it so much, just to have it there, it didn’t allow the gang members to think, I can be free to roam this area,” Officer Villanueva described.

He concluded, “If you think about it, the injunction itself only covers a certain amount of square miles in the city, however with the gangsters they were thinking it was the entire city.  So they were unable to roam freely and intimidate people.  They had to think a little bit before they went out and were doing this stuff.  Some of them just said this wasn’t worth it.”

On the other hand, statistical analysis shows a more nuanced view.  Crime did fall in West Sacramento, but crime also fell in all of Yolo County at a similar rate.  In fact, crime fell all across the region over the same period of time, making it difficult to pin a drop in crime on any one factor.

Moreover, West Sacramento is changing.

“West Sacramento has changed a lot, it’s cleaned up a lot over the years,” Officer Villanueva told the Vanguard.  “They cleaned up a lot of the prostitution that was going on, on West Capitol.”

The city has invested millions in cleaning up hot spots for crime and prostitution, put millions into economic development and millions into redevelopment.

So is the change in West Sacramento due to the gang injunction, or is it due to the fact that West Sacramento is now investing millions into making their city a better place to live?

All of this makes it more difficult to figure out if the gang injunction has worked.

But this also fits into a broader pattern of problems with a legal system that fails to examine evidence scientifically.  The result is that there are a number of practices that have been discredited scientifically, but have continued to have legal weight.

For instance, there is the fact that there have been a number of cases that come down to eye witness testimony, even though repeated studies continuously and consistently demonstrate that eye witness testimony, particularly identification of the assailant, is highly unreliable at best.

The experts may look at colors and tattoos and determine that an individual is a member of the gang.  But as we saw last week with defendant Timothy Acuna, that case is much more gray than one might want to believe.

Criteria for gang validation includes tattoos, colors, and association.  But what if you got your tattoos when you were young trying to impress older peers?  What if you got arrested, and were registered as a gang member by the authorities strictly as a means to segregate the prison population?  What if your crimes that you have been charged with and convicted of have little or nothing to do with any gang?  What if you plead to a gang enhancement to avoid a longer prison sentence?

Are you a gang member?  That is the real problem, because despite all of the efforts by law enforcement to identify gang membership, for the most part it is still a subjective process.

But the courts and legal process do not require scientific study and validation for use at trial. 

Most gang experts testify to 200 hours of training.  Sounds like a lot until you realize that the typical undergraduate student, in a semester term, is getting almost as many hours of training.

We are assigning expertise on a complex subject like gangs to people with barely a term’s worth of training?  Really?

The bottom line is that in the next three weeks the gang injunction trial will conclude, and the ball will be in Judge Kathleen White’s court.  She has done her job, she has listened to the evidence, scrutinized it, played playground referee, the whole works.

But as the Bee pointed out, one of the key questions is not important, whether this injunction which encroaches on, if not violates, civil rights will even do a darn bit of good in helping make people safer.  Is that not a question that should be important?

—David M. Greenwald reporting