NYTimes | In Stanislaus County,
as in many counties in California and across the United States,
law-enforcement officers keep a database of individuals that they have
identified as gang members. From their point of view, these lists are
vital and necessary, but activists argue that they can be
discriminatory. Researchers have found that white gang membership tends
to be underestimated and undercounted, while the opposite is true for
black and Latino youth. In 1997, California created a statewide
database, called CalGang, and by
2012, according to documents obtained by the Youth Justice Coalition,
there were more than 200,000 individuals named in it (roughly the same
number as the population of Modesto), including some as young as 10.
Statewide, 66 percent were Latino, and one in 10 of all
African-Americans in Los Angeles County between the ages of 20 and 24
were on the list.
When
the STEP Act became law, there were dissenting voices, some of them
unsurprising, like the American Civil Liberties Union. But there were
others you might not expect: Among law-enforcement authorities, for
example, there were concerns that the STEP Act could be applied too
broadly. Wes McBride, a retired sergeant of the Los Angeles County
Sheriff’s Department and the executive director of the California Gang
Investigators Association, told me that although he has come to see the
law as valuable, he was initially skeptical. “We thought the original
writing of that bill was bad,” he said. “It made being a gang member a
crime, and that flies in the face of the Constitution, in my mind.
What’s to stop the Boy Scouts from being considered a gang?” Shortly
after the STEP Act went into effect, The Los Angeles Times quoted
an anonymous law-enforcement official expressing concern: “I realize
that we have to do something, but when you have carte blanche, it’s
difficult not to abuse it.”
A
quarter of a century later, this point is still being raised. Manohar
Raju, a lawyer who manages the felony unit at the San Francisco Public
Defender’s Office, told me he has seen prosecutors’ use of gang
enhancements go up in recent years. Young men and women are bundled into
the broad category of “gang member” all the time, based on photos like
the ones shown at Sebourn’s trial; based on their wearing this color or
that one; based, essentially, on a misunderstanding of how difficult
these neighborhoods really are for youth. “Posing in a picture, acting
cool or acting tough can be a navigation strategy,” Raju said. “That may
not mean they want problems; in fact, it may mean the opposite.”
According
to Raju, weak cases can seem stronger when prosecutors introduce gang
enhancements. Instead of concrete evidence related to the criminal
charge, gang allegations permit prosecutors to introduce potentially
inflammatory information that might otherwise be legally irrelevant.
“Now we’re looking at: what did some other person do six months earlier
or six years earlier,” Raju said. “Your client may not have anything to
do with them, but they both have some connection to some name or
symbol.” In other cases, the very threat of the gang enhancement can
often be enough to persuade a defendant to accept a plea bargain. Given
the lengthy sentences that can result, a trial might not be worth the
risk.
Roughly
7 percent of California’s prison population, around 115,000 people, is
serving extra time because of gang enhancements; given that the state
has been ordered by the Supreme Court to reduce its prison overcrowding,
this is hardly an insignificant figure. According to the California
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, nearly half of those
convicted with gang enhancements are serving an additional 10 years or
more. Black and Latino inmates account for more than 90 percent of
inmates with gang enhancements; fewer than 3 percent are white.
