The War On Gangs

Summer has brought similar spasms of gang chaos to the Western Addition. Court records describe Chopper City and Knock Out Posse as "archrivals" of Eddy Rock. Their neighborhood feud flared during a 12-hour span in June, with tit-for-tat shootings injuring eight gang members, among them a 16-year-old boy. The bloodshed followed a weeklong clash in February, when two men were killed and a third injured in separate incidents. A 13-year-old girl also was shot and wounded, an attack linked to an Eddy Rock member. Police suspect the gangs in at least a dozen homicides over the last four years.

Herrera filed the twin lawsuits in June. A month later, as it happened, the Justice Policy Institute, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., published a hefty report that raises doubts about whether injunctions and police crackdowns stunt gang violence.

The study's authors analyzed the anti-gang strategies of several metro areas, saving their harshest critique for Los Angeles. The city enforces 33 injunctions against 50 gangs, court orders that cover 61 square miles and name more than 11,000 alleged members. Yet L.A. owns "the dubious honor of being the gang capital of the world," the report states, counting some 40,000 members and, in 2005, more than 11,000 gang-related crimes.

"If injunctions and mass arrests were the answer, you'd think Los Angeles would be sitting pretty," says Judith Greene, the study's co-author.

Greene argues that too many cities, expecting police to tame gangs overnight, emphasize "heavy-handed" enforcement tactics instead of prevention programs. Injunctions multiply the error, she says, isolating youth from social services while reinforcing their allegiance to the streets. "Kids get in and out of gangs quickly, for the most part," she says. "But if you exclude them from those programs and deny them job opportunities, it's going to have a bad effect. ... They're going to feel they have no other options."

Her appraisal elicits an unlikely echo from Gary Hearnsberger, head of the Los Angeles district attorney's hard-core gang unit. "Cities have been doing suppression for a long time," he says. "I won't say it's ineffective, but it hasn't solved the problem."

The report's conclusions read like gospel to Jeff Adachi, San Francisco's public defender. He labels injunctions "a form of McCarthyism," charging that the orders strip legal protections from reputed gang members in and out of the courtroom.

The accused in a criminal proceeding receives court-appointed counsel if unable to afford an attorney, a guarantee absent in civil cases. As a result, gang injunctions often sail through court without a fight; lacking the money to hire a lawyer, the defendants stay away. The outcome amounts to an end-run around due process, Adachi says, as losing the civil suit exposes them to criminal prosecution if they violate the order.

Meanwhile, inside the safety zone, they are deprived of certain civil liberties, without having been convicted of a crime. "Basically, it's allowing police to unilaterally name gang members and harass them," Adachi says. He intends to argue in court next month that his office can provide counsel to injunction defendants because of the potential they face for criminal prosecution.

Damone Hale represented an alleged Oakdale Mob member in last year's injunction suit. The man, who maintained he had left the gang, lost his case, as city attorneys argued that he still acted as a leader of the group and fingered him as a suspect in three murders. (Hale's client declined to comment to SF Weekly, as did several people identified in the two proposed injunctions.)

Hale views injunctions as a lazy way for authorities to squeeze an alleged gang member without taking the time to build a criminal case, contributing to a slow erosion of civil rights. "It's gang members today. What about tomorrow? Who's next? We're losing our rights because of fear."

Most of the alleged Oakdale Mob members live outside the city, a fact that diminishes the injunction's impact on them. In contrast, many of those listed as defendants in the pending cases reside in San Francisco, some of them inside the proposed safety zones. Already treading on the economic margins, they could tumble off the edge if the city prevails in court. Employers might decide against retaining or hiring a suspected gang member. Friends and relatives may cut off contact, lest the police peg them as gang associates, while some families could find something as ordinary as eating at a restaurant fraught with jeopardy: The lawsuits name at least two sets of brothers.