Gang Times

Prosecutors and Defense Attorneys Know Gang Expert, Dr. James E. Shaw

2008-12-09T09:13:00.000-08:00

[BIO AND PHOTO APPEAR BELOW]

Today, there are 1,000,000 gang members in the United States. They are individuals, they are active, and males and females comprise their ranks. The U.S. Army currently has 1.5 million trained and battle-ready soldiers. According to the FBI, gangs are increasing in number in and among the U.S. armed forces. There are currently some 8,000 gang members in the armed forces of the United States, the majority being in the Army. Gang presence in the country's military forces is a fact. The FBI says that every gang in the U.S. is represented in the military, the difference being in size and number. Do you think gangs in the military have the same sense of patriotism and national security as do their non-gang counterparts? Gang presence in the military compromises the honor of the armed services and weakens the nation's defense. Said another way, should the Statue of Liberty shed a tear and look upon gangs in the military with shame and revulsion? What about us? What should our response be?

The FBI says that Al-Qaeda is viewing gangs in the U.S. military with deep interest. Why? Because a gangsta' (the street term) fulfills al-Qaeda's four-point profile criteria: (1) the gangsta has deep feelings of alienation and anger, usually due to not having or knowing his father; (2) the gangsta yearns for a sense of achievement to fulfill his feelings of emptiness; (3) the gangsta longs for a father-figure from whom he can take orders--the direction he missed in his childhood years; and (4) the gangsta wants to be well-paid (money) so he can show off his bling (ostentatious jewelry), as proof, reward and recognition of his achievement. Al-Qaeda identifies with the gangsta's mindset and respects it as being of value and equivalent to the A-Qaeda mind. The gangsta and Al-Qaeda operate on the same paradigm. Al-Qaeda has no shortage of money to substitute for the gangsta's unquenchable thirst for adoration, respect, kudos, and self-fulfillment.

I have done work for military defense lawyers (Judge Advocates General) at West Point Military Academy and in the United States Navy. But if gangs are growing in number and, presumably, in strength in the nation's military and in communities across the country, why is a Gang Expert needed to assist lawyers in trials involving alleged gangs? Isn't a duck a duck no matter whatever else you call it? According to the reasoning of many people, including court jurors and military prosecutors, isn't the fact that gangs are growing enough reason to try and convict an alleged gang member standing trial in criminal court or facing adjudication in juvenile court?

Alleged gang members, as do we all, have the inalienable right to a full and fair court trial. That is a legal hallmark that separates and distinguishes United States courts from the guilty-until-proven-innocent paradigm on which courts in most of the world's countries operate. Following are just some of the reasons Criminal Defense Attorneys need a Gang Expert to help them to achieve their client-objectives in court.

1. Police often "mis-hear" and "re-translate" what a gang suspect tells them about his or her affiliation: The common testimony police officers make in court is "I made a consensual contact with Joe Gangster and he said he's a member of XYZ gang." Defendants frequently tell me that they were either pressured by the arresting officer to admit being in the gang or they admitted growing up with known gangbangers and going to school with them--and that's all. A Gang Expert, through skillful interviewing of neighbors, school administrators, and employers, can verify or refute purported affiliations. Often, a Gang Expert is very knowledgeable about the gang in question, as well as familiar with its members, as well as thoroughly knowledgeable about its rivals.

2. Police often testify that "common knowledge" is what confirms their suspicion about and allegation that a defendant is a gang member and the crime for which he is being tried was done specifically at the behest of the gang, to enhance the gang's stature, and inspire fear in and exercise control over the community. A Gang Expert can aid the Criminal Defense Attorney by analyzing police documentation of the gang's past violations and, specifically, noting whether or not the defendant has been named in any incident reports or cited in Field Interview Cards (F.I.C.s). I had a gang case, in Sacramento Superior Court, where the police officer stated he never profiled my client, a female defendant, but that he "could have." The prosecutor argued with me that "could have" was enough proof that my client was in fact a gang member and her having GSR (gunshot residue) on her hand was further proof that the act she was alleged to have committed was done for the benefit of her gang.

I responded that "could have" was so far removed from the criteria the Sacramento Police Department uses to profile gang members, that it cast reasonable doubt as to whether the officer had sufficient training and even suggested his own confusion. I further stated that against Sacramento Police Department's eleven-point criteria for profiling a gang member, the police officer failed to testify as to which criteria, exactly, framed his sophomoric "I could have profiled her, if I'd wanted to." I told the prosecutor the police officer had not finished his job. "I could have profiled her" is a defective testimony and only suggested the officer's dereliction of duty. The judge threw the case out of court and released my client with no prison term or probation.

3. Some police officers magnify their gang expertise to show their "best side" to the jury, having already won the prosecutor's heart (most prosecutors use only police officers as their gang experts--could this be because (a) police officers have a natural prosecutorial bias? or (b) police officers and prosecutors are paid out of the same county budget, their checks signed by the same budget chief?). In a court in which I frequently work, a police officer identified himself as "Head of the Black Gang Unit." The court reporter dutifully typed this into the transcript. In a conference with the attorney representing our client, I complained that such identification would prejudice the jury toward guilt. I explained that the jury would see an African-American police officer introduce himself as "Head of the Black Gang Unit" and then proceed to state how he happened to arrest the African-American defendant, my client. The jury would subconsciously figure who better to know an African-American defendant on trial than an African-American police officer? Reasonable doubt would go out the window and the jury's view of my client would be tainted.

Further, I explained, such an introduction as the officer used begs the question about his competence and qualifications. If he is the head of the "African-American Gang Unit," what would happen to his job if the police department experienced budget declines? Would he be laid off or terminated because of a decision that he could work only with or among African Americans rather than as an equal opportunity, full-service police officer able to serve the entirety of the city? Moreover, I pointed out, such an introduction of himself as "Head of the Black Gang Unit" is a racist statement that ought to have been protested just as the Italian-American community protested the use of "Cosa Nostra" during the Senate Racketeering Hearings on Organized Crime during which Mafia lieutenant Joe Valachi "sang like a canary," according to the attorney general."Cosa Nostra" is a term no longer allowed in a court of law. Likewise, since there are other ethnicity-based gangs as well as multi-racial lawbreakers, "Head of the Gang Unit" should have been what the officer said, not "Head of the Black Gang Unit."

I have just touched on a mere few areas in which I can materially help an attorney defending a client on gang-allegation charges. There are many other ways in which I can aid and abet an attorney's client-objectives, as well as reasons for employing me as a Gang Expert. In addition to providing court testimony throughout the United States, I consult with attorneys, in both the Civil and Criminal bars, provide litigation support, and write preliminary as well as full and complete case opinions. Using my expertise can result in an efficient, economical, and easy strategy for winning your client's case. Gangs are growing throughout the country and in the military. Therefore, those of us in the defense bar need to increase our defensive and Constitutional strategies, in order to address the increasing vulnerability of juries to prosecutors' arguments about gangs, their growth and our defendants' alleged roles in both. No matter the growth on the "gang tree" the nation's prosecutors hold up to jurors, my objective in court is to separate and distinguish my gang-alleged clients from allegations that they are branches on that tree. I am grateful and honored for my success in helping attorneys achieve their Constitutional goals for clients.

I can be reached at 310-678-6950 or courtexpert@gmail.com. I look forward to working with you to help you achieve your case objectives.

2008-12-05T19:38:00.000-08:00

GANGrene: The Gang/Hip Hop Trivia Game to Train Police

2008-11-23T10:00:00.000-08:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

National Gang Expert Invents Game for Police

CONTACT: James E. Shaw, Ph.D. (310-678-6950)

November 23, 2008. Los Angeles, CA. Hip Hop icon Fifty-Cent has been shot with real bullets how many times? What “thug rapper” (as he called himself) wrote the hit Rap song, “I Love You Mama”? What is the annual worldwide sales revenue of the Hip Hop industry? What “bad boy” Rapper changed his Rap name a few times before coming out with his own brand of cologne? True or false: Lee Iococca used to make Chrysler commercials with a Rap star. What is the name of the hit cable/satellite TV show whose title is a gang term meaning conned/humiliated/used? What is the favorite athletic event of both gangbangers and members of the Mafia? What Rap records exec arranged an audition for the daughter of a deputy district attorney? Nickname of the Mafia don, loved by today’s ‘gangstas’, who had a disfigurement he could not hide?

These are just some of the thousands of questions found in an innovative gang/hip hop trivia game designed by Dr. James E. Shaw, a nationally-renowned Criminal Court Gang Expert, whose clients have included the West Point Military Academy and the United States Navy. Shaw intends his game, called “GANGrene: The Gang/Hip Hop Trivia Game”, to be a training tool for, among other professions, law enforcement agencies. “Law enforcement agencies either face gangs on a daily basis or have to confront, suppress or clean up the destruction gangs cause,” says Shaw. Shaw is available to lawyers in both the Defense and Prosecutorial Bar. “Hip Hop culture and the ‘gangsta’ lifestyle are happily married and divorce does not seem likely,” says Shaw. Youth, whether rich or poor, and of all ethnicities, are infatuated with and influenced by “what gangsters do, and how and when they do it. Hip Hop music is the symbolic airport, bus depot, and entertainment pavilion where ALL America’s youthful and multi-cultural travelers meet,” says Shaw.

For a number of years Shaw taught the law course, “Administration of Justice: Juvenile Delinquency and Legal Procedures,” at the El Camino Police Academy (CA). He feels that police officers need to know much more than they currently do about the attitude and “behavioral drivers” that bind the Hip Hop culture and the gang culture. Police, Shaw says, “usually have a middle class world view with values built on an enforcement model.” Today’s young people increasingly are relating to the world from a gangster mentality and anti-authority model. Shaw states, “And like the trumpets of ancient Troy, Hip Hop music is often the war cry of today’s gangsta.” He adds: “In gangdom, the Hip Hop community is the equivalent of the United Nations.” Shaw says that what Rap icon Snoop Dogg told CNN’s Larry King, in a televised pre-election (’08) interview, “was a wake-up scream.” Said Snoop Dogg: “I ain’t interested in the Democrat or Republican party. I’m only interested in the Gang Party.”

“GANGrene: The Gang/Hip Hop Trivia Game” is also for the general public. Shaw says, “It is a tool for helping to break down certain barriers and improve positive understanding about and current practices for successfully interfacing with all youth, whether ‘gangstas’ or not, on a daily basis.” ###

Federal and State Definitions of "Gang", "Gang Crime," and "Gang Member"

2008-11-21T12:37:00.000-08:00

Editor's Note: Often, in courts, the definition of "gang" is bandied about, not unlike fierce volleys back and forth between fierce rivals, on the tennis court. The following is listed by the United States Department of Justice as a "review" (read that as "reminder" or "renewed reinforcement") of what current federal law says a "gang" and allied terms mean.

August 2008
Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions of the Terms
“Gang,” “Gang Crime,” and “Gang Member”

Federal Law

Current Legislation

Currently, federal law defines the term “gang” as “an ongoing group, club, organization, or
association of five or more persons: (A) that has as one of its primary purposes the commission
of one or more of the criminal offenses described in subsection (c); (B) the members of which
engage, or have engaged within the past five years, in a continuing series of offenses described in
subsection (c); and (C) the activities of which affect interstate or foreign commerce.” 18 USC §
521(a).

Current federal law describes the term “gang crime” as:

(1) “A federal felony involving a controlled substance (as defined in Section
102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 USC § 802)) for which the
maximum penalty is not less than five years.
(2) A federal felony crime of violence that has as an element the use or
attempted use of physical force against the person of another.
(3) A conspiracy to commit an offense described in paragraph (1) or (2).”
18 USC § 521(c).

Also, current federal law describes the term “gang member” as “a person who:

(1) Participates in a criminal street gang with knowledge that its members
engage in or have engaged in a continuing series of offenses described in
subsection (c).
(2) Intends to promote or further the felonious activities of the criminal street
gang or maintain or increase his or her position in the gang.
(3) Has been convicted within the past five years for:
(A) An offense described in subsection (c).
(B) A state offense:
(i) Involving a controlled substance (as defined
in Section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act
(21 USC § 802)) for which the maximum penalty is
not less than five years‟ imprisonment.
(ii) That is a felony crime of violence that has as an
element the use or attempted use of physical force
against the person of another.
(C) Any federal or state felony offense that by its nature involves a
substantial risk that physical force against the person of another
may be used in the course of committing the offense.
Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions

Page 2 of 35 August 2008
(D) A conspiracy to commit an offense described in subparagraph
(A), (B), or (C).” 18 USC § 521(d).

Proposed Legislation

The proposed Gang Abatement and Prevention Act of 2007 would define a “criminal street
gang” as “a formal or informal group or association of five or more individuals, who commit
three or more gang crimes (not less than one of which is a serious violent felony), in three or
more separate criminal episodes (not less than one of which occurs after the date of enactment of
the Gang Abatement and Prevention Act of 2007, and the last of which occurs not later than five
years after the commission of a prior gang crime (excluding any time of imprisonment for that
individual)).”

The Act would also define a “gang crime” as “a felony offense under federal or state law
punishable by imprisonment for more than one year, in any of the following categories:

(1) A crime that has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of
physical force against the person of another, or is burglary, arson, or
extortion.
(2) A crime involving obstruction of justice, or tampering with or retaliating
against a witness, victim, or informant.
(3) A crime involving the manufacturing, importing, distributing, possessing
with intent to distribute, or otherwise trafficking in a controlled substance or
listed chemical (as those terms are defined in Section 102 of the Controlled
Substances Act (21 USC § 802)).
(4) Any conduct punishable under:
(A) Section 844 (relating to explosive materials).
(B) Subsection (a)(1), (d), (g)(1) (where the underlying conviction is
a violent felony or a serious drug offense (as those terms are
defined in Section 924(e)), (g)(2), (g)(3), (g)(4), (g)(5), (g)(8),
(g)(9), (i), (j), (k), (n), (o), (p), (q), (u), or (x) of Section 922
(relating to unlawful acts).
(C) Subsection (b), (c), (g), (h), (k), (l), (m), or (n) of Section 924
(relating to penalties).
(D) Section 930 (relating to possession of firearms and dangerous
weapons in federal facilities).
(E) Section 931 (relating to purchase, ownership, or possession of
body armor by violent felons).
(F) Sections 1028 and 1029 (relating to fraud and related activity in
connection with identification documents or access devices).
(G) Section 1084 (relating to transmission of wagering information).
(H) Section 1952 (relating to interstate and foreign travel or
transportation in aid of racketeering enterprises).
(I) Section 1956 (relating to the laundering of monetary instruments).
(J) Section 1957 (relating to engaging in monetary transactions in
property derived from specified unlawful activity).
Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions

Page 3 of 35 August 2008
(K) Sections 2312 through 2315 (relating to interstate transportation
of stolen motor vehicles or stolen property).
(5) Any conduct punishable under Section 274 (relating to bringing in and
harboring certain aliens), Section 277 (relating to aiding or assisting certain
aliens to enter the United States), or Section 278 (relating to importation of
aliens for immoral purposes) of the Immigration and Nationality Act
(8 USC 1324, 1327, and 1328).
(6) Any crime involving aggravated sexual abuse, pimping or promoting
prostitution, obscenity (including Sections 1461 through 1465), sexual
exploitation of children (including Sections 2251, 2251A, 2252, and 2260),
peonage, slavery, or trafficking in persons (including Sections 1581 through
1592) and Sections 2421 through 2427 (relating to transport for illegal
sexual activity).”

State Law

A review of current state laws for various states‟ definitions of the words “gang,” “gang
member,” and “gang crime” reveals the following information:

“Gang” Definitions

 Thirty-seven states and Washington, DC, have legislation that defines “gang.”
 Twenty-nine states and Washington, DC, define a gang as consisting of three
or more persons.
 Twenty-two states include a common name, identifying sign, or symbol as
identifiers of gangs in their definitions.
 Twenty-three states refer to a gang as an “organization, association, or group.”
 Twenty-one states and Washington, DC, use the term “criminal street gang” to
describe a gang.
 Every definition includes criminal/illegal activity or behavior.

“Gang Crime” Definitions

 Twenty states define “gang crime/activity.”
 Twelve states refer to it as a “pattern of criminal gang activity.”
 Sixteen states enumerate the exact crimes that are to be considered criminal
gang activity.

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions

Page 4 of 35 August 2008

“Gang Member” Definitions

 Eleven states have legislation that defines a “gang member.”
 Six states have a list of criteria, some of which a person must meet to be
considered a gang member.
 Of those, five states require that a person must meet at least two criteria to be
considered a gang member.
 Kansas requires an admission of gang membership OR three or more of its
criteria.

Violent Gang and Terrorist Organizations File

The definitions of “gang,” “gang crime,” and “gang member” of the Violent Gang and Terrorist
Organizations File (VGTOF), contained within the FBI‟s National Crime Information Center
(NCIC) share some similarities with those definitions used by the states:

“Gang” Definitions

 The VGTOF defines a gang as consisting of three or more persons.
 The VGTOF refers to a gang as an “organization, association, or group.”
 The VGTOF definition includes criminal/illegal activity or behavior.

“Gang Crime” Definitions

 The VGTOF definition enumerates the exact crimes that are to be considered criminal
activity.

“Gang Member” Definitions

 The VGTOF definition has a list of criteria, some of which a person must meet to be
considered a gang member.
 The VGTOF definition requires an admission of gang membership OR two of its criteria.
Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Member” by State

Page 5 of 35 August 2008
State Term(s) Number Criteria Belongs to or Engages in
VGTOF Gang member Admission or
any 2
 Has been identified as a gang member by an
individual of proven reliability
 Has been identified as a gang member by an
individual of unknown reliability, and that
information has been corroborated in
significant respects
 Has been observed by law enforcement
members to frequent a known gang‟s area,
associate with known gang members, and/or
affect that gang‟s style of dress, tattoos, hand
signals, or symbols
 Has been arrested on more than one occasion
with known gang members consistent with
gang activity
 Has admitted membership in a gang at any
time other than at the time of current
arrest/incarceration
“must be a member of a group, or sub-group thereof,
which meets the criteria for a gang.”
Arizona
§13-105
Criminal street gang member 2 of 7  Self-proclamation
 Witness testimony or official statement
 Written or electronic correspondence
 Paraphernalia or photographs
 Tattoos
 Clothing or colors
 Any other indicia of street gang membership
N/A
Florida
§874.03

Criminal street gang member 2 or more  Admits to criminal street gang membership
 Is identified as a criminal street gang member
by a parent or guardian
 Is identified as a criminal street gang member
by a documented reliable informant
 Resides in or frequents a particular criminal
street gang‟s area and adopts its style of dress,
use of hand signs, or tattoos and associates
with known criminal street gang members

“who is a member of a criminal street gang”
Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Member” by State

Page 6 of 35 August 2008
State Term(s) Number Criteria Belongs to or Engages in
Florida
§874.03

(continued)
 Is identified as a criminal street gang member
by an informant of previously untested
reliability, and such identification is
corroborated by independent information
 Has been arrested more than once in the
company of identified criminal street gang
members for offenses that are consistent with
usual criminal street gang activity
 Is identified as a criminal street gang member
by physical evidence such as photographs or
other documentation
 Has been stopped in the company of known
criminal street gang members four or more
times

Florida (2)
§874.03
Criminal street gang
associate
N/A N/A “who admits to criminal street gang association; or
meets any single defining criterion for criminal street
gang membership”
Idaho
§18-8502

Criminal gang member 2 or more  Admits to gang membership
 Is identified as a gang member
 Resides in or frequents a particular gang‟s area
and adopts its style of dress, use of hand signs,
or tattoos and associates with known gang
members
 Has been arrested more than once in the
company of identified gang members for
offenses that are consistent with usual gang
activity
 Is identified as a gang member by physical
evidence such as photographs or other
documentation
 Has been stopped in the company of known
gang members four or more times
“who engages in a pattern of criminal gang activity”

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Member” by State

Page 7 of 35 August 2008
State Term(s) Number Criteria Belongs to or Engages in
Illinois
§740 ILCS
147-10
Street gang member
Gang member
N/A N/A “who actually and in fact belongs to a gang, and any
person who knowingly acts in the capacity of an agent
for or accessory to, or is legally accountable for, or
voluntarily associates himself with a course or pattern
of gang-related criminal activity, whether in a
preparatory, executory, or cover-up phase of any
activity, or who knowingly performs, aids, or abets any
such activity”
Kansas
§ 21-4226
Criminal street gang member Admission or
3 or more
 Is identified as a criminal street gang member
by a parent or guardian
 Is identified as a criminal street gang member
by a state, county, or city law enforcement
officer or correctional officer or documented
reliable informant
 Is identified as a criminal street gang member
by an informant of previously untested
reliability, and such identification is
corroborated by independent information
 Resides in or frequents a particular criminal
street gang's area and adopts such gang's style
of dress, color, or use of hand signs or tattoos
and associates with known criminal street gang
members
 Has been arrested more than once in the
company of identified criminal street gang
members for offenses that are consistent with
usual criminal street gang activity
 Is identified as a criminal street gang member
by physical evidence including, but not limited
to, photographs or other documentation
 Has been stopped in the company of known
criminal street gang members two or more
times
 Has participated in or undergone activities
self-identified or identified by a reliable
informant as a criminal street gang initiation
ritual
N/A

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Member” by State

Page 8 of 35 August 2008
State Term(s) Number Criteria Belongs to or Engages in
Kansas (2)
§ 21-4226

Criminal street gang
associate
Admission or
2 or more
 Is identified as a criminal street gang member
by a parent or guardian
 Is identified as a criminal street gang member
by a state, county, or city law enforcement
officer or correctional officer or documented
reliable informant
 Is identified as a criminal street gang member
by an informant of previously untested
reliability, and such identification is
corroborated by independent information
 Resides in or frequents a particular criminal
street gang's area and adopts such gang's style
of dress, color, or use of hand signs or tattoos
and associates with known criminal street gang
members
 Has been arrested more than once in the
company of identified criminal street gang
members for offenses that are consistent with
usual criminal street gang activity
 Is identified as a criminal street gang member
by physical evidence including, but not limited
to, photographs or other documentation
 Has been stopped in the company of known
criminal street gang members two or more
times
 Has participated in or undergone activities
self-identified or identified by a reliable
informant as a criminal street gang initiation
ritual
N/A
Mississippi
§97-44-3
Street gang member
Gang member
N/A N/A “who actually and in fact belongs to a gang, and any
person who knowingly acts in the capacity of an
agent for or accessory to, or is legally accountable
for, or voluntarily associates himself with a gang-
related criminal activity, whether in a preparatory,
executory, or cover-up phase of any activity, or who
knowingly performs, aids, or abets any such activity”

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Member” by State

Page 9 of 35 August 2008
State Term(s) Number Criteria Belongs to or Engages in
New York
9 NYCRR
§301.3
Gang member N/A N/A “who is part of, associated with, or otherwise
affiliated with a gang”
South
Carolina
§16-8-230
Criminal gang member N/A N/A “who is an active member of a criminal gang”
South Dakota
§22-10A-1

Street gang member 2 or more  Admits to gang membership
 Is identified as a gang member by a
documented reliable informant
 Resides in or frequents a particular gang‟s area
and adopts its style of dress, use of hand signs,
or tattoos and associates with known gang
members
 Is identified as a gang member by an informant of
previously untested reliability if such identification
is corroborated by independent information
 Has been arrested more than once in the
company of identified gang members for
offenses that are consistent with usual gang
activity
 Is identified as a gang member by physical
evidence, such as photographs or other
documentation
 Has been stopped in the company of known
gang members four or more times
“who engages in a pattern of street gang activity”
Tennessee
§40-35-121

Criminal gang member 2 or more  Admits to criminal gang involvement
 Is identified as a criminal gang member by a
parent or guardian
 Is identified as a criminal gang member by a
documented reliable informant
 Resides in or frequents a particular criminal
gang‟s area, adopts its style of dress, use of
hand signs, or tattoos, and associates with
known gang members
 Is identified as a criminal gang member by an
informant of previously untested reliability,
and such identification is corroborated by
independent information
“who is a member of a criminal gang”
Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Member” by State

Page 10 of 35 August 2008

State Term(s) Number Criteria Belongs to or Engages in
Tennessee
§40-35-121

(continued)

 Has been arrested more than once in the
company of identified criminal gang members
for offenses that are consistent with usual
criminal gang activity
 Is identified as a criminal gang member by
physical evidence such as photographs or other
documentation

Wisconsin
§939.22
Criminal gang member N/A N/A “who participates in criminal gang activity”
Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang” by State

Page 11 of 35 August 2008
State Term(s) Grouping Number Formality Fact or
Law Purpose or Activity Identifiers
VGTOF Gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
N/A N/A “must have a common interest and/or
activity characterized by the
commission of or involvement in a
pattern of criminal activity or
delinquent conduct”
N/A
Alabama
§ 13A-6-26
Street gang Combination
Confederation
Alliance
Network
Conspiracy
Understanding or
Other similar
arrangement
3 or more
persons
N/A In law or
in fact
“that, through its membership or
through the agency of any member,
engages in a course or pattern of
criminal activity”
N/A
Alaska
§ 11.81.900
Criminal street gang Group 3 or more
persons
N/A N/A “who, individually, jointly, or in
combination, have committed or
attempted to commit, within the
preceding three years, for the benefit
of, at the direction of, or in
association with the group, two or
more offenses under any of, or any
combination of... [these offenses]”
Name, identifying
sign, symbol,
tattoo, or other
physical marking,
style of dress, or
use of hand signs
Arizona
§ 13-105
Criminal street gang Association At least 1
person who is
a criminal
street gang
member
Formal or
informal
N/A “whose members or associates
individually or collectively engage in
the commission, attempted
commission, facilitation or
solicitation of any felony act”
N/A
Arkansas
§ 5-74-103
Criminal gang
Criminal organization
Criminal enterprise
Group 3 or more
individuals
N/A N/A “who commit a continuing series of
two (2) or more predicate criminal
offenses that are undertaken in
concert with each other”
N/A

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang” by State

Page 12 of 35 August 2008
State Term(s) Grouping Number Formality Fact or
Law Purpose or Activity Identifiers
California
§ 186.22
Criminal street gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “having as one of its primary
activities the commission of one or
more … criminal acts … and whose
members individually or collectively
engage in or have engaged in a
pattern of criminal gang activity”
Common name,
common
identifying sign or
symbol
Colorado
§ 18-23-101
Criminal street gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “which has as one of its primary
objectives or activities the
commission of one or more predicate
criminal acts; and whose members
individually or collectively engage in
or have engaged in a pattern of
criminal gang activity”
N/A
Connecticut
§ 29-7n
Gang Group Juveniles or
youth
N/A N/A “who, acting in concert with each
other, or with adults, engage in
illegal activities.”
N/A
Delaware
11 Del. C. §
616
Criminal street gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “having as one of its primary
activities the commission of one or
more … criminal acts … and whose
members individually or collectively
engage in or have engaged in a
pattern of criminal gang activity”
Common name,
common
identifying sign or
symbol
Delaware (2)
11 Del. C. §
617
Criminal youth gang Group 3 or more
persons
N/A N/A “which either promotes, sponsors,
assists in, participates in or requires
as a condition of membership
submission to group initiation that
results in any felony or any class A
misdemeanor”
Gang name or
other identifier

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang” by State

Page 13 of 35 August 2008
State Term(s) Grouping Number Formality Fact or
Law Purpose or Activity Identifiers
Florida
§ 874.03

Criminal street gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “that has as one of its primary
activities the commission of criminal
or delinquent acts … and have two or
more members who, individually or
collectively, engage in or have
engaged in a pattern of criminal
street gang activity”
Common name,
common
identifying signs,
colors, or symbols
Georgia
§ 16-15-3
Criminal street gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
In fact “which engages in a pattern of
criminal gang activity”
Common name,
common
identifying signs,
symbols, tattoos,
graffiti, attire, or
other
distinguishing
characteristics
Idaho
§ 18-8502
Criminal gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “whose members individually or
collectively engage in or have
engaged in a pattern of criminal gang
activity, having as one (1) of its
primary activities the commission of
one (1) or more … criminal acts”
Common name,
common
identifying sign or
symbol
Illinois
§ 740 ILCS
147/10
Street gang
Gang
Organized gang
Criminal street gang
Combination
Confederation
Alliance
Network
Conspiracy
Understanding or
Other similar
conjoining
3 or more
persons
N/A In law or
in fact
“with an established hierarchy that,
through its membership or through
the agency of any member engages in
a course or pattern of criminal
activity”
N/A

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang” by State

Page 14 of 35 August 2008
State Term(s) Grouping Number Formality Fact or
Law Purpose or Activity Identifiers
Indiana
§ 35-45-9-1
Criminal gang Group At least 5
members
N/A N/A “that specifically either promotes,
sponsors, or assists in; or participates
in; or requires as a condition of
membership or continued
membership; the commission of a
felony or an act that would be a
felony if committed by an adult or
the offense of battery”
N/A
Iowa
§ 723A.1
Criminal street gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “having as one of its primary
activities the commission of one or
more criminal acts … and whose
members individually or collectively
engage in or have engaged in a
pattern of criminal gang activity”
Identifiable name,
identifying sign or
symbol
Kansas
§ 21-4226

Criminal street gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “having as one of its primary
activities the commission of one or
more person felonies, person
misdemeanors, felony violations of
the uniform controlled substances
act, … or the comparable juvenile
offenses, which if committed by an
adult would constitute the
commission of such felonies or
misdemeanors; and whose members,
individually or collectively, engage
in or have engaged in the
commission, attempted commission,
conspiracy to commit or solicitation
of two or more person felonies,
person misdemeanors or felony
violations of the uniform controlled
substances act, … the comparable
juvenile offenses, which if
Common name,
common
identifying sign or
symbol
Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang” by State

Page 15 of 35 August 2008
State Term(s) Grouping Number Formality Fact or
Law Purpose or Activity Identifiers
Kansas
§ 21-4226

(continued)
committed by an adult would
constitute the commission of such
felonies or misdemeanors, or any
substantially similar offense from
another jurisdiction”

Kentucky
§ 506.140
Criminal gang Alliance,
Network, or
Conspiracy
5 or more
persons
In law or
in fact
“that, through its membership or
through the action of any member,
engages in a continuing pattern of
criminal activity. „Criminal gang‟
shall not include fraternal
organizations, unions, corporations,
associations, or similar entities,
unless organized for the primary
purpose of engaging in criminal
activity”
An established
hierarchy
Louisiana
§ 15:1404
Criminal street gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “which has as one of its primary
activities the commission of one or
more … criminal acts … whose
members individually or collectively
engage in or have engaged in a
pattern of criminal gang activity”
Common name,
common
identifying sign or
symbol
Maryland
Criminal Law
Code § 9-801
Criminal gang Group
Association
3 or more
persons
N/A N/A “that forms to engage in criminal
activity, including acts by juveniles
that would be crimes if committed by
adults, for the purposes of pecuniary
gain or to create an atmosphere of
fear and intimidation either
collectively or with knowledge of the
acts of the members of the group”
Common
identifying sign,
symbol, or name

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang” by State

Page 16 of 35 August 2008
State Term(s) Grouping Number Formality Fact or
Law Purpose or Activity Identifiers
Minnesota
§ 609.229
Criminal gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “has as one of its primary activities
the commission of one or more …
offenses … and includes members
who individually or collectively
engage in or have engaged in a
pattern of criminal gang activity”
Common name,
common
identifying sign or
symbol
Mississippi
§ 97-44-3
Street gang
Gang
Organized gang
Criminal street gang
Combination
Confederation
Alliance
Network
Conspiracy
Understanding or
Other similar
conjoining
3 or more
persons
N/A In law or
in fact
“with an established hierarchy that,
through its membership or through
the agency of any member engages in
felonious criminal activity”
N/A
Missouri
§ 578.421
Criminal street gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “having as one of its primary
activities the commission of one or
more criminal acts … whose
members individually or collectively
engage in or have engaged in a
pattern of criminal gang activity”
Common name,
common
identifying sign or
symbol
Montana
§ 45-8-402
Criminal street gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “having as one of its primary
activities the commission of one or
more … criminal acts … whose
members individually or collectively
engage in or have engaged in a
pattern of criminal gang activity”
Common name,
common
identifying sign or
symbol

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang” by State

Page 17 of 35 August 2008
State Term(s) Grouping Number Formality Fact or
Law Purpose or Activity Identifiers
Nevada
§ 193.168
Criminal gang Combination Persons Formal or
informal
N/A “so constructed that the organization
will continue its operation even if
individual members enter or leave
the organization, which … has
particular conduct, status and
customs indicative of it; and has as
one of its common activities
engaging in criminal activity
punishable as a felony, other than the
conduct which constitutes the
primary offense”
Common name or
identifying symbol
New Jersey
§ 2C:33-29
Criminal street gang N/A 3 or more
persons
N/A In fact “individually or in combination with
other members of a criminal street
gang, while engaging in gang-related
activity, have committed or
conspired or attempted to commit,
within the preceding five years from
the date of the present offense,
excluding any period of
imprisonment, one or more offenses
on separate occasions of robbery,
carjacking, aggravated assault,
assault, aggravated sexual assault,
sexual assault, arson, burglary,
kidnapping, extortion, tampering
with witnesses, and informants or a
violation of chapter 11, section 3, 4,
5, 6, or 7 of chapter 35 or chapter 39
of Title 2C of the New Jersey
Statutes”
Two of the
following seven
criteria that
indicate criminal
street gang
membership apply:
 Self-
proclamation
 Witness
testimony or
official statement
 Written or
electronic
correspondence
 Paraphernalia or
photographs
 Tattoos
 Clothing or
colors
Any other indicia
of street gang
activity

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang” by State

Page 18 of 35 August 2008
State Term(s) Grouping Number Formality Fact or
Law Purpose or Activity Identifiers
New York
9 NYCRR §
301.3
Gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “having as one of its primary
activities the commission of one or
more criminal acts … and whose
members individually or collectively
engage in or have engaged in a
pattern of criminal gang activity”
Identifiable name,
identifying sign or
symbol
North Carolina
§ 15A-1340.16
Criminal street gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “having as one of its primary
activities the commission of felony
or violent misdemeanor offenses, or
delinquent acts that would be
felonies or violent misdemeanors if
committed by an adult”
Common name or
common
identifying sign,
colors, or symbols
North Dakota
§ 12.1-06.2-01
Criminal street gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “that acts in concert or agrees to act
in concert with a purpose that any of
those persons alone or in any
combination commit or will commit
two or more predicate gang crimes
one of which occurs after August 1,
1995, and the last of which occurred
within five years after the
commission of a prior predicate gang
crime”
N/A
Ohio
§ 2923.41

Criminal gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “has as one of its primary activities
the commission of one or more . . .
offenses . . . the persons in the
organization, association, or group
individually or collectively engage in
or have engaged in a pattern of
criminal gang activity”
Common name or
one or more
common
identifying signs,
symbols, or colors
Oklahoma
21 Okl. St.
§ 856

Criminal street gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
5 or more
persons
N/A N/A “that specifically either promotes,
sponsors, or assists in, or participates
in, and requires as a condition of
membership or continued
membership, the commission of one
or more criminal acts”

N/A
Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang” by State

Page 19 of 35 August 2008
State Term(s) Grouping Number Formality Fact or
Law Purpose or Activity Identifiers
South Carolina
§ 16-8-230
Criminal gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
5 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “who form for the purpose of
committing criminal activity and who
knowingly and actively participate in
a pattern of criminal gang activity”
N/A
South Dakota
§ 22-10A-1
Street gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “have members or associates who,
individually or collectively, engage
in or have engaged in a pattern of
street gang activity”
Common name,
common
identifying signs,
colors, or symbols

Tennessee
§ 40-35-121
Criminal gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “has as one (1) of its activities the
commission of criminal acts; and two
(2) or more members who,
individually or collectively, engage
in or have engaged in a pattern of
criminal gang activity

Texas
Tex. Penal
Code
§ 71.01
Criminal street gang N/A 3 or more
persons
N/A N/A “who continuously or regularly
associate in the commission of
criminal activities”
Common
identifying sign or
symbol or an
identifiable
leadership
Utah
§ 76-9-802
Criminal street gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
In fact “that is currently in operation; that
has one of its primary activities the
commission of one or more predicate
gang crimes; … and whose members,
acting individually or in concert with
other members, engage in or have
engaged in a pattern of criminal gang
activity.”

Identifying name,
or identifying sign
or symbol, or both
Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang” by State

Page 20 of 35 August 2008

State Term(s) Grouping Number Formality Fact or
Law Purpose or Activity Identifiers
Virginia
§ 18.2-46.1
Criminal street gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “which has as one of its primary
objectives or activities the
commission of one or more criminal
activities … and whose members
individually or collectively have
engaged in the commission of,
attempt to commit, conspiracy to
commit, or solicitation of two or
more predicate criminal acts, at least
one of which is an act of violence,
provided such acts were not part of a
common act or transaction”
Identifiable name
or identifying sign
or symbol
Washington
§ 59.18.030
Gang Group 3 or more
persons
N/A N/A “on an ongoing basis, regularly
conspires and acts in concert mainly
for criminal purposes”
Identifiable
leadership
Washington,
D.C.
§ 22-1731
Criminal street gang Association
Group
6 or more
persons
N/A N/A “has as a condition of membership or
continued membership the
committing of or actively
participating in committing a crime
of violence … or has as one of its
purposes or frequent activities, the
violation of the criminal laws of the
District, or the United States, except
for acts of civil disobedience”
N/A
Wisconsin
§ 939.22
Criminal gang Organization,
Association, or
Group
3 or more
persons
Formal or
informal
N/A “that has as one of its primary
activities the commission of one or
more … criminal acts, or acts that
would be criminal if the actor were
an adult … and whose members
individually or collectively engage in
or have engaged in a pattern of
criminal gang activity
Common name,
common
identifying sign or
symbol
Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Activity” by State
(States that have been highlighted in gray DO NOT have enhanced penalties for gang crimes.)

Page 21 of 35 August 2008
§State Term(s) Definition Enumerated/Elucidated Violations
VGTOF Criminal activity
Delinquent conduct
N/A  Illegal drug distribution
 Firearms or explosives violations
 Murder
 Extortion
 Obstruction of justice, including witness tampering or intimidation
 Any other violend crimes such as assaults, threats, burglaries, and
or/carjacking
 “Delinquent conduct is any conduct of a juvenile which would be a
crime if committed by an adult.”

California
§ 186.22
Pattern of criminal
gang activity
“the commission of, attempted
commission of, conspiracy to commit, or
solicitation of, sustained juvenile
petition for, or conviction of two or
more … offenses, provided at least one
of these offenses occurred after the
effective date of this chapter and the last
of those offenses occurred within three
years after a prior offense, and the
offenses were committed on separate
occasions, or by two or more persons”
 Assault with a deadly weapon or by means of force likely to
produce great bodily injury
 Robbery
 Unlawful homicide or manslaughter
 Sale, possession for sale, transportation, manufacture, offer for sale,
or offer to manufacture controlled substances
 Shooting at an inhabited dwelling or occupied motor vehicle
 Discharging or permitting the discharge of a firearm from a motor
vehicle
 Arson
 Intimidation of witnesses and victims
 Grand theft
 Grand theft of any firearm, vehicle, trailer, or vessel
 Burglary
 Rape
 Looting
 Money laundering
 Kidnapping
 Mayhem
 Aggravated mayhem
 Torture
 Felony extortion
 Felony vandalism

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Activity” by State
(States that have been highlighted in gray DO NOT have enhanced penalties for gang crimes.)

Page 22 of 35 August 2008
§State Term(s) Definition Enumerated/Elucidated Violations
California
§ 186.22

(continued)
 Carjacking
 Sale, delivery, or transfer of a firearm
 Possession of a pistol revolver, or other firearm
 Threats to commit crimes resulting in death or great bodily injury
 Theft or unlawful taking or driving of a vehicle
Colorado
§18-23-101

Pattern of criminal
gang activity
“the commission, attempt, conspiracy, or
solicitation of two or more predicate
criminal acts which are committed on
separate occasions or by two or more
persons”
“predicate criminal acts means the commission of or attempt,
conspiracy, or solicitation to commit any of the following: any conduct
defined as racketeering activity…; any violation of section 18-8-706
“Retaliation against a witness or victim” or any criminal act committed
in any jurisdiction of the United States, which, if committed in this state,
would violate section 18-8-706”
Delaware
11 Del. C. § 616
Pattern of criminal
gang activity
“the commission of, attempted
commission of, conspiracy to commit,
solicitation of, or conviction of 2 or
more … criminal offenses, provided that
at least one (1) of these offenses
occurred after July 1, 2003, and that the
last of those offenses occurred within 3
years after a prior offense, and provided
that the offenses were committed on
separate occasions or by 2 or more
persons”
 Assault
 Any criminal acts causing death
 Any criminal acts relating to sexual offenses
 Any criminal offenses relating to unlawful imprisonment or
kidnapping
 Any criminal acts of arson
 Any criminal acts relating to burglary
 Any criminal acts relating to robbery
 Any criminal acts relating to theft or extortion … provided that such
acts meet the requirements of felony offenses
 Any criminal acts relating to riot, unlawful disruption, hate crimes,
stalking, or bombs, provided that such acts meet the requirements of
felony offenses
 Any criminal acts involving deadly weapons or dangerous
instruments
 Any criminal acts involving controlled substances

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Activity” by State
(States that have been highlighted in gray DO NOT have enhanced penalties for gang crimes.)

Page 23 of 35 August 2008
§State Term(s) Definition Enumerated/Elucidated Violations
Delaware (2)
11 Del. C. § 616
Illegal gang
participation
“a person who actively participates in
any criminal street gang with knowledge
that its members engage in or have
engaged in a pattern of criminal gang
activity and who knowingly promotes,
furthers, or assists in any criminal
conduct by members of that gang which
would constitute a felony under
Delaware law shall be guilty of illegal
gang participation. Illegal gang
participation is a Class F felony”
N/A
Florida
§ 874.03
Pattern of criminal
street gang activity
“the commission or attempted
commission of, or solicitation or
conspiracy to commit, two or more
felony or three or more misdemeanor
offenses, or one felony and two
misdemeanor offenses, or the
comparable number of delinquent acts or
violations of law which would be
felonies or misdemeanors if committed
by an adult, on separate occasions
within a 3-year period”

N/A
Georgia
§ 16-15-3
Pattern of criminal
gang activity
“the commission, attempted
commission, conspiracy to commit, or
solicitation, coercion, or intimidation of
another person to commit at least two …
offenses, provided that at least one of
these offenses occurred after July 1,
1998, and the last of such offenses
occurred within three years, excluding
any periods of imprisonment, of prior
criminal gang activity
 Any offense defined as racketeering activity
 Any offense relating to stalking
 Any offense defined as rape, aggravated sodomy, statutory rape, or
aggravated sexual battery
 Any offense relating to escape and other offenses related to
confinement
 Any offense relating to dangerous instrumentalities and practices
 Any offense relating to the security of state or county correctional
facilities
 Any offense relating to aiding or encouraging a child to escape from
custody

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Activity” by State
(States that have been highlighted in gray DO NOT have enhanced penalties for gang crimes.)

Page 24 of 35 August 2008
§State Term(s) Definition Enumerated/Elucidated Violations
Idaho
§ 18-8502

Pattern of criminal
gang activity
“the commission, attempted
commission, or solicitation of two (2) or
more … offenses, provided that the
offenses are committed on separate
occasions or by two (2) or more gang
members
 Robbery
 Arson
 Burglary
 Murder or manslaughter
 Any violation … that involves possession with intent to deliver,
distribution, delivery, or manufacturing of a prohibited substance
 Any unlawful use of a weapon that is a felony
 Assault and battery
 Criminal solicitation
 Computer crime
 Theft
 Evidence falsified or concealed and witnesses intimidated or bribed
 Forgery and counterfeiting
 Gambling
 Kidnapping
 Mayhem
 Prostitution
 Rape
 Racketeering
 Malicious harassment
 Terrorism
 Money laundering and illegal investment
Illinois
§ 740 ILCS 147/10

Course or pattern of
criminal activity
“2 or more gang-related criminal
offenses committed in whole or in part
within this State when at least one such
offense was committed after the effective
date of this Act; both offenses were
committed within 5 years of each other;
and at least one offense involved the
solicitation to commit, conspiracy to
commit, attempt to commit, or
commission of any offense defined as a

 “Street gang related or gang-related means any criminal activity,
enterprise, pursuit, or undertaking directed by, ordered by,
authorized by, consented to, agreed to, requested by, acquiesced in,
or ratified by any gang leader, officer, or governing or policy-
making person or authority, or by any agent, representative, or
deputy of any such officer, person, or authority:
 With the intent to increase the gang‟s size, membership, prestige,
dominance, or control in any geographical area; or

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Activity” by State
(States that have been highlighted in gray DO NOT have enhanced penalties for gang crimes.)

Page 25 of 35 August 2008
§State Term(s) Definition Enumerated/Elucidated Violations
Illinois
§ 740 ILCS 147/10

(continued)
felony or forcible felony”  With the intent to provide the gang with any advantage in, or any
control or dominance over any criminal market sector, including but
not limited to, the manufacture, delivery, or sale of controlled
substances or cannabis; arson or arson-for-hire; traffic in stolen
property or stolen credit cards; traffic in prostitution, obscenity, or
pornography; or that involves robbery, burglary, or theft; or
 With the intent to exact revenge or retribution for the gang or any
member of the gang; or
 With the intent to obstruct justice, or intimidate or eliminate any
witness against the gang or any member of the gang; or
With the intent to otherwise directly or indirectly cause any benefit,
aggrandizement, gain, profit or other advantage whatsoever to or for
the gang, its reputation, influence, or membership”
Kansas
§ 21-4226
Criminal street gang
activity
“the commission or attempted
commission of, or solicitation or
conspiracy to commit, one or more
person felonies, person misdemeanors,
felony violations of the uniform
controlled substances act, or the
comparable juvenile offenses, which if
committed by an adult would constitute
the commission of such felonies or
misdemeanors on separate occasions”

N/A

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Activity” by State
(States that have been highlighted in gray DO NOT have enhanced penalties for gang crimes.)

Page 26 of 35 August 2008
§State Term(s) Definition Enumerated/Elucidated Violations
Kentucky
§ 506.140
Continuing pattern of
criminal activity
“a conviction by any member or
members of a criminal gang for the
commission, attempt, or solicitation of
two (2) or more felony offenses, the
commission of two (2) or more violent
misdemeanor offenses, or a combination
of at least one (1) of these felony
offenses and one (1) of these violent
misdemeanor offenses, on separate
occasions within a two (2) year period
for the purpose of furthering gang
activity”
N/A
Louisiana
§ 15:1404
Pattern of criminal
gang activity
“the commission or attempted
commission of two or more of the
following offenses, provided at least one
of those offenses occurred after
September 7, 1990, and the last of those
offenses occurred within three years
after a prior offense, and the offenses are
committed on separate occasions by two
or more persons”
 Aggravated battery or second-degree battery
 Armed robbery
 First- or second-degree murder or manslaughter
 Sale, possession for sale, transportation, manufacture, offer for sale,
or offer to manufacture controlled substances
 Illegal use of weapons or dangerous instrumentalities
 Aggravated arson
 Intimidating, impeding, or injuring witnesses; or injuring officers
 Theft of any vehicle, trailer, or vessel

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Activity” by State
(States that have been highlighted in gray DO NOT have enhanced penalties for gang crimes.)

Page 27 of 35 August 2008
§State Term(s) Definition Enumerated/Elucidated Violations
Mississippi
§ 97-44-3
N/A N/A  “Street gang related or gang-related means any criminal activity,
enterprise, pursuit, or undertaking directed by, ordered by,
authorized by, consented to, agreed to, requested by, acquiesced in,
or ratified by any gang leader, officer, or governing or policy-
making person or authority, or by any agent, representative, or
deputy of any such officer, person, or authority:
 With intent to increase the gang‟s size, membership, prestige,
dominance, or control in any geographical area; or
 With intent to exact revenge or retribution for the gang or any
member of the gang; or
 With intent to provide the gang with any advantage in, or any
control or dominance over, any criminal market sector, including
but not limited to the unlawful manufacture, delivery, possession, or
sale of controlled substances; arson; traffic in stolen property or
stolen credit cards; traffic in prostitution, obscenity, or pornography;
or that involves robbery, armed robbery, burglary, or larceny; or
 With intent to obstruct justice, or intimidate or eliminate any
witness against the gang or any member of the gang; or
 With intent to otherwise directly or indirectly, cause any benefit,
aggrandizement, gain, profit, or other advantage whatsoever to or
for the gang, its reputation, influence, or membership.”
Missouri
§ 578.421
Pattern of criminal
street gang activity
“the commission, attempted
commission, or solicitation of two or
more… offenses, provided at least one
of those offenses occurred after August
28, 1993, and the last of those offenses
occurred within three years after a prior
offense, and the offenses are committed
on separate occasions, or by two or more
persons
 Assault with a deadly weapon or by means of force likely to cause
serious physical injury
 Robbery, arson, and those offenses under chapter 569, RSMo,
which are related to robbery and arson
 Murder or manslaughter
 Any violation of the provisions of chapter 195, RSMo, which
involves the distribution, delivery, or manufacture of a substances
prohibited by chapter 195, RSMo
 Unlawful use of a weapon, which is a felony
 Tampering with witnesses and victims

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Activity” by State
(States that have been highlighted in gray DO NOT have enhanced penalties for gang crimes.)

Page 28 of 35 August 2008
§State Term(s) Definition Enumerated/Elucidated Violations
Montana
§ 45-8-405
Pattern of criminal
street gang activity
“the commission, solicitation,
conspiracy, attempt; adjudication as a
delinquent youth for the commission,
attempt, or solicitation; or conviction of
two or more of the offenses listed in
subsection (2) within a 3-year period,
and that the offenses were committed on
separate occasions”
 Deliberate homicide
 Assault with a weapon
 Intimidation
 Kidnapping
 Aggravated kidnapping
 Robbery
 Sexual intercourse without consent
 Aggravated promotion of prostitution
 Criminal mischief
 Arson
 Burglary
 Theft
 Forgery
 Tampering with witnesses and informants
 Bringing armed men into the state
 Unlawful possession of a firearm by a convicted person
 Carrying a concealed weapon
 Possession of a deadly weapon by a prisoner
 Possession of a destructive device
 Possession of explosives
 Possession of a sawed-off firearm
 Sale, possession for sale, transportation, manufacture, offer for sale,
offer to manufacture, or other offense involving a dangerous drug
 Use of threat to coerce criminal street gang membership or use of
violence to coerce criminal street gang membership
North Dakota
§ 12.1-06.2
Predicate gang crime “the commission, attempted
commission, or solicitation of any
felony, misdemeanor crime of violence,
or misdemeanor crime of pecuniary
gain”
 “crime of violence means any violation of state law where a person
purposely or knowingly causes or threatens to cause death or
physical bodily injury to another person or persons”
“crime of pecuniary gain means any violation of state law that
directly results or was intended to result in the defendant alone, or in
association with others, receiving income, benefit, property, money,
or anything of value”

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Activity” by State
(States that have been highlighted in gray DO NOT have enhanced penalties for gang crimes.)

Page 29 of 35 August 2008
§State Term(s) Definition Enumerated/Elucidated Violations
Ohio
§ 2923.41
Pattern of criminal
gang activity
“persons in the criminal gang have
committed, attempted to commit,
conspired to commit, been complicitors
in the commission of, or solicited,
coerced, or intimidated another to
commit, attempt to commit, conspire to
commit, or be in complicity in the
commission of two or more… offenses”
 A felony or an act committed by a juvenile that would be a felony if
committed by an adult
 An offense of violence or an act committed by a juvenile that would
be an offense of violence if committed by an adult
 A violation of section 2907.04 (Unlawful Sexual Conduct with
Minor), 2909.06 (Sexual Imposition), 2911.211 (Aggravated
Trespass), 2917.04 (Failure to Disperse), 2919.23 (Interference with
Custody), or 2919.24 (Contributing to Unruliness or Delinquency of
a Child) of the Revised Code, section 2921.04 (Intimidation of
Attorney, Victim or Witness in Criminal Case) or 2923.16
(Improperly Handling Firearms in a Motor Vehicle) of the Revised
Code, section 2925.03 (Trafficking in Drugs) of the Revised Code if
the offense is trafficking in marijuana, or section 2927.12 (Ethnic
Intimidation) of the Revised Code
There is a “pattern of criminal gang activity” if all of the following
apply with respect to the offenses that are listed in division (B)(1)(a),
(b), or (c) of this section and that persons in the criminal gang
committed, attempted to commit, conspired to commit, were in
complicity in committing, or solicited, coerced, or intimidated another to
commit, attempt to commit, conspire to commit, or be in complicity in
committing:
 At least one of the two or more offenses is a felony
 At least one of those two or more offenses occurs on or after the
effective date of this section
 The last of those two or more offenses occurs within five years after
at least one of those offenses
 The two or more offenses are committed on separate occasions or
by two or more persons

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Activity” by State
(States that have been highlighted in gray DO NOT have enhanced penalties for gang crimes.)

Page 30 of 35 August 2008
§State Term(s) Definition Enumerated/Elucidated Violations
South Carolina
§ 16-8-230
Pattern of criminal
gang activity
“the commission or attempted
commission of, commission as an
accessory before or after the fact to, or
solicitation or conspiracy to commit, by
a criminal gang member, while
knowingly and actively participating in
criminal gang activity, four or more …
offenses occurring within a two-year
period, provided that at least three of
these offenses occurred after
July 1, 2007”
 A violent offense as defined in Section 16-1-60 committed as a part
of criminal gang activity
 Financial transaction card crimes as defined in Chapter 14 of Title 16
committed as a part of criminal gang activity
 First-degree lynching as defined in Section 16-3-210 committed as a
part of criminal gang activity
 Second-degree lynching as defined in Section 16-3-220 committed as
a part of criminal gang activity
 Breaking into a motor vehicle as defined in Section 16-13-160
committed as a part of criminal gang activity
 Grand larceny as defined in Section 16-13-30 committed as a part of
criminal gang activity
 Blackmail as defined in Section 16-17-640 committed as a part of
criminal gang activity
 Malicious injury to property as defined in Sections 16-11-510, 16-11-
520, 16-11-530, and 16-11-535 committed as a part of criminal gang
activity
 Drug offense as defined in Sections 44-53-370 and 44-53-375
committed as a part of criminal gang activity
 Harassment, stalking, or aggravated stalking as defined in Article 17,
Chapter 3 of Title 16 committed as a part of criminal gang activity
 Pointing a firearm at any person as defined in Section 16-23-410
committed as a part of criminal gang activity
 Discharging a firearm at or into dwellings, structures, enclosures,
vehicles, or equipment as defined in Section 16-23-440 committed as
a part of criminal gang activity
 The common law offense of assault and battery of a high and
aggravated nature committed as a part of criminal gang activity
 The common law offense of obstruction of justice committed as a
part of criminal gang activity.

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Activity” by State
(States that have been highlighted in gray DO NOT have enhanced penalties for gang crimes.)

Page 31 of 35 August 2008
§State Term(s) Definition Enumerated/Elucidated Violations
Tennessee
§ 40-35-121

Pattern of criminal
gang activity
“Prior convictions for the commission
or attempted commission of, or
solicitation or conspiracy to commit:”
 Two (2) or more criminal gang offenses that are classified as
felonies; or
 Three (3) or more criminal gang offenses that are classified as
misdemeanors; or
 One (1) or more criminal gang offenses that are classified as
felonies and two (2) or more criminal gang offenses that are
classified as misdemeanors; and
 The criminal gang offenses are committed on separate occasions;
and
 The criminal gang offenses are committed within a five-year period
“Criminal gang offense” means any violation of Tennessee law:
 During the perpetration of which the defendant knowingly causes,
or threatens to cause, death or bodily injury to another person or
persons and specifically includes rape of a child, aggravated rape,
and rape; or
That results, or was intended to result, in the defendant receiving
income, benefit, property, money, or anything of value from the
illegal sale, delivery, or manufacture of a controlled substance or
firearm
As used in this subsection (a), "prior conviction" means a criminal gang
offense for which a criminal gang member was convicted prior to the
commission of the instant criminal gang offense by the defendant and
includes convictions occurring prior to July 1, 1997. "Prior conviction"
includes convictions under the laws of any other state, government, or
country which, if committed in this state, would have constituted a
criminal gang offense. In the event that a conviction from a jurisdiction
other than Tennessee is not specifically named the same as a criminal
gang offense, the elements of the offense in the other jurisdiction shall
be used by the Tennessee court to determine if the offense is a criminal
gang offense.
 Convictions for multiple criminal gang offenses committed as part
of a single course of conduct within twenty-four (24) hours are not
committed on "separate occasions." However, acts which constitute
criminal gang offenses under subdivision (a)(3)(A) shall not be
construed to be a single course of conduct.

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Activity” by State
(States that have been highlighted in gray DO NOT have enhanced penalties for gang crimes.)

Page 32 of 35 August 2008
§State Term(s) Definition Enumerated/Elucidated Violations
Utah
§ 78A-6-1202
Gang activity “any criminal activity that is conducted
as part of an organized youth gang. It
includes any criminal activity that is
done in concert with other gang
members, or done alone if it is to fulfill
gang purposes. Gang activity does not
include graffiti.”

Utah
§ 76-9-802
Pattern of criminal
gang activity
“committing, attempting to commit,
conspiring to commit, or soliciting the
commission of two or more predicate
gang crimes within five years; the
predicate gang crimes are: committed by
two or more persons; or committed by
an individual at the direction of, or in
association with a criminal street gang;
and the criminal activity was committed
with the specific intent to promote,
further, or assist in any criminal conduct
by members of the criminal street gang.”
“Predicate gang crime” means any of the following offenses:
 Any criminal violation of the Utah Controlled Substances Act
 Any criminal violation of the Utah Drug Paraphernalia Act
 Any criminal violation of the Imitation Controlled Substances Act
 Any criminal violation of the Utah Controlled Substance Precursor
Act
 Assault offenses
 Criminal homicide
 Kidnapping and related offenses
 Felony sexual offenses
 Property destruction
 Burglary and criminal trespass
 Robbery
 Theft, except Sections 76-6-404.5, 76-6-405, 76-6-407, 76-6-408,
76-6-409, 76-6-409.1, 76-6-409.3, 76-6-409.6, 76-6-409.7, 76-6-
409.8, 76-6-409.9, 76-6-410, and 76-6-410.5
 Fraud, except Sections 76-6-504, 76-6-505, 76-6-507, 76-6-508, 76-
6-509, 76-6-510, 76-6-511, 76-6-512, 76-6-513, 76-6-514, 76-6-516,
76-6-517, 76-6-518, and 76-6-520
 Identity Fraud Act
 Obstructing governmental operations, except Sections 76-8-302, 76-
8 303, 76-8-304, 76-8-307, 76-8-308, and 76-8-312
 Tampering with a witness
 Retaliation against a witness or victim
 Extortion or bribery to dismiss a criminal proceeding
 Explosives
 Weapons

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Activity” by State
(States that have been highlighted in gray DO NOT have enhanced penalties for gang crimes.)

Page 33 of 35 August 2008
§State Term(s) Definition Enumerated/Elucidated Violations
Utah
§ 76-9-802

(continued)

 Bus Passenger Safety Act
 Pattern of Unlawful Activity Act
 Communications fraud
 Money Laundering and Currency Transaction Reporting Act
 Burglary of a research facility
 Motor Vehicle Act
 Any state or federal criminal offense that by its nature involves a
substantial risk that physical force may be used against another in the
course of committing the offense
Any felony violation of a criminal statute of any other state, the United
States, or any district, possession, or territory of the United States which
would constitute a violation of any offense in Subsection (4)(a) if
committed in this state
Virginia
§ 18.2-46.1

N/A N/A  Predicate criminal act means
 An act of violence;
 Any violation of Section 18.2-42 (Assault or Battery by a Mob),
18.2-46.3 (Recruitment of Persons for Criminal Street Gang;
Penalty), 18.2-51 (Shooting, Stabbing, Etc., with Intent to Maim,
Kill, Etc.), 18.2-51.1 (Malicious Bodily Injury to Law-Enforcement
Officers, Firefighters, Search and Rescue Personnel, or Emergency
Medical Service Providers; Penalty; Lesser- Included Offense),
18.2-52 (Malicious Bodily Injury by Means of any Caustic
Substance or Agent or Use of any Explosive or Fire), 18.2-53
(Shooting, Etc., in Committing or Attempting a Felony), 18.2-55
(Bodily Injuries Caused by Prisoners, State Juvenile Probationers
and State and Local Adult Probationers or Adult Parolees), 18.2-
56.1 (Reckless Handling of Firearms; Reckless Handling While
Hunting), 18.2-57 (Assault and Battery), 18.2-57.2 (Assault and
Battery Against a Family or Household Member; Penalty), 18.2-59
(Extorting Money, Etc., by Threats), 18.2-83 (Threats to Bomb or
Damage Buildings or Means of Transportation; False Information as
to Danger to Such Buildings, etc.; Punishment; Venue), 18.2-121
(Entering Property of Another for Purpose of Damaging it, Etc),
18.2-127 (Injuries to Churches, Church Property, Cemeteries, Burial
Grounds, Etc.; Penalty), 18.2-128 (Trespass

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Activity” by State
(States that have been highlighted in gray DO NOT have enhanced penalties for gang crimes.)

Page 34 of 35 August 2008
§State Term(s) Definition Enumerated/Elucidated Violations
Virginia
§ 18.2-46.1

(continued)
N/A N/A upon Church or School Property), 18.2-137 (Injuring, Etc., Any
Property, Monument, Etc), 18.2-138 (Damaging Public Buildings,
Etc.; Penalty), 18.2-146 (Breaking, Injuring, Defacing, Destroying
or Preventing the Operation of Vehicle, Aircraft or Boat), 18.2-147
(Entering or Setting in Motion, Vehicle, Aircraft, Boat, Locomotive
or Rolling Stock of Railroad; Exceptions), subsection H, H 1 or H 2
of § 18.2-248 (Manufacturing, Selling, Giving, Distributing, or
Possessing with Intent to Manufacture, Sell, Give, or Distribute a
Controlled Substance or an Imitation Controlled Substance
Prohibited; Penalties), § 18.2-248.01 (Transporting Controlled
Substances Into the Commonwealth; Penalty), 18.2-255
(Distribution of Certain Drugs to Persons Under 18 Prohibited;
Penalty), 18.2-255.2 (Prohibiting the Sale or Manufacture of Drugs
on or Near Certain Properties; Penalty), 18.2-282.1 (Brandishing a
Machete or Other Bladed Weapon with Intent to Intimidate;
Penalty), 18.2-286.1 (Shooting from Vehicles so as to Endanger
Persons; Penalty), 18.2-287.4 (Carrying Loaded Firearms in Public
Areas Prohibited; Penalty), 18.2-308.1 (Possession of Firearm, Stun
Weapon, or Other Weapon on School Property Prohibited), or 18.2-
356 (Receiving Money for Procuring Person);
 A second or subsequent felony violation of subsection C of § 18.2-
248 (Manufacturing, Selling, Giving, Distributing, or Possessing
with Intent to Manufacture, Sell, Give, or Distribute a Controlled
Substance or an Imitation Controlled Substance Prohibited;
Penalties) or of § 18.2-248.1 (Penalties for Sale, Gift, Distribution
or Possession
 with Intent to Sell, Give or Distribute Marijuana);
 Any violation of a local ordinance adopted pursuant to § 15.2-
1812.2 (Willful and Malicious Damage to or Defacement of Public
or Private Facilities; Penalty); or
 Any substantially similar offense under the laws of another state or
territory of the United States, the District of Columbia, or the United
States.

Brief Review of Federal and State Definitions
Definition of “Gang Activity” by State
(States that have been highlighted in gray DO NOT have enhanced penalties for gang crimes.)

Page 35 of 35 August 2008

§State Term(s) Definition Enumerated/Elucidated Violations
Wisconsin
§ 939.22

Pattern of criminal
gang activity
“the commission of, attempt to commit
or solicitation to commit 2 or more of
the following crimes, or acts that would
be crimes if the actor were an adult, at
least one of those acts or crimes occurs
after December 25, 1993, the last of
those acts or crimes occurred within 3
years after a prior act or crime, and the
acts or crimes are committed, attempted
or solicited on separate occasions or by
2 or more persons”
 Manufacture, distribution, or delivery of a controlled substance or
controlled substance analog
 First-degree intentional homicide
 Second-degree intentional homicide
 Battery
 Battery, special circumstances
 Battery or threat to witness
 Mayhem
 Sexual assault
 False imprisonment
 Taking hostages
 Kidnapping
 Intimidation of witnesses
 Intimidation of victims
 Criminal damage to property
 Criminal damage to or threat to criminally damage the property of a
witness
 Arson of buildings or damage by explosives
 Burglary
 Theft
 Taking, driving, or operating a vehicle, or removing a part or
component of a vehicle, without the owner‟s consent
 Robbery
 Sexual assault of a child
 Repeated acts of sexual assault of the same child
 Sexual assault of a child placed in substitute care

Why Law Enforcement Agencies Need an Analytical Function

2008-11-21T12:19:00.000-08:00

Editor's Note: The following "fact sheet" (published in October 2005) was prepared by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), United States Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative. This fact sheet is significant for what it advocates--an analytical component to accompany the myriad of tasks encountered by law enforcement agencies--and the implications for those of us who work in the defense bar, were such analysis done in a regular and standard manner.

Following are listed the advantages that might be expected from such an analytical function:

1. Helps solve criminal investigations.
The analytical function develops a variety of intelligence
products to assist investigators in detecting, preventing,
and responding to criminal and terrorism activities.
Analytical personnel initiate inquiries, conduct information
searches, and act as a central point for information
gathered.
2. Increases the ability to prosecute
criminals.
Personnel assigned to the analytical function develop
summary tables, charts, maps, and other graphics for use
in a grand jury or trial. Analysts provide factual and expert
testimony and organize evidence for presentation in court.
3. Supports the chief executive and the
agency’s mission.
By maximizing the analytical function, the chief executive
can obtain important information and intelligence to
possibly prevent future criminal activities. Personnel
can prepare materials to assist in allocating resources;
developing budget and resource requests; and preparing
departmental reports, investigative briefings, and press
releases.
4. Proactively informs law enforcement
officers of crime trends and develops
threat, vulnerability, and risk
assessments.

The analytical function provides support to tactical and strategic operations. Personnel analyze crime
reports, identify crime hot spots, develop crime bulletins and summaries, study serial crime data, and forecast
future crime. The analytical function develops proactive intelligence products that assess the potential threats
of crime groups or criminal activities and recommends methods to intervene in these threats.

Analysis is an integral part of every major investigation an agency opens. Often, small pieces of information that may appear
insignificant can be a major part of a larger picture. The analytical function organizes these critical pieces of data and creates
valuable and meaningful products to assist law enforcement in solving cases and prosecuting criminals. Personnel responsible for producing intelligence are professionals, civilian or sworn, whose training includes law enforcement analytical techniques and criminal analysis. The analytical function benefits law enforcement agencies in the following ways.

5. Trains law enforcement and other
intelligence personnel.
Staff develop course modules on intelligence and analytic
methods and provide awareness and methodology training
to agency members, executives, and managers.
6. Assists in the development of
computerized databases to organize
information and intelligence.
Personnel within the analytical function help in the
development and maintenance of systems that collect,
collate, retrieve, and disseminate information. Analytical
staff participate in departmental testing and acquisition of
investigative, intelligence, and analytical software.
7. Fosters meaningful relationships with
other law enforcement personnel.
Analytical staff interact with other law enforcement
agencies and build relationships with peers, allowing
them to quickly obtain information and efficiently assist
in multijurisdictional or complex cases. Through contact
with national programs and professional associations,
personnel are able to ascertain national issues that may
affect local agencies.
8. Ensures compliance with local, state,
tribal, and federal laws and regulations.
Analytical personnel provide expertise and knowledge in
the development of protocols to ensure compliance with
local, state, tribal, and federal laws and rules that govern
intelligence sharing, privacy, and civil liberties.
9. Provides support to fusion centers.
Personnel provide support to local, state, or regional
fusion centers by performing intelligence services such
as crime-pattern, association, telephone-toll, and financial
analysis. They create intelligence reports, briefs, threat
assessments, and other intelligence products to aid in the
prevention and deterrence of crime, including terrorism.

Accurate, timely, and relevant analysis is a critical component in crime prevention and crime-fighting efforts.

Fact Sheet The 2006 National Youth Gang Survey

2008-11-21T10:12:00.000-08:00

U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs

Editor's Note: The Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency and Prevention (OJJDP) published, on August 1, 2008, a comprehensive National Youth Gang Survey and a Fact Sheet, below, which serves as a highly condensed brief. For additional information about youth gangs, call OJJDP’s Juvenile Justice Clearinghouse at 800–851–3420, or contact NYGC at 800–446–0912 or http://www.iir.com/nygc/. Arlen Egley, Jr., Ph.D., is a Senior Research Associate and Christina E. O’Donnell, M.S., is a Research Associate with NYGC, which is operated for OJJDP by the Institute for Intergovernmental Research in Tallahassee, FL. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is a compo nent of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance; the Bureau of Justice Statistics; the Community Capacity Development Office; the National Institute of Justice; the Office for Victims of Crime; and the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking (SMART).

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
J. Robert Flores, Administrator July 2008 #05
Highlights of the

2006 National Youth Gang Survey

by Arlen Egley, Jr., and Christina E. O’Donnell

Annually since 1995, the National Youth Gang Center (NYGC) has conducted the National Youth Gang Survey (NYGS) of law
enforcement agencies across the United States regarding the pres ence and characteristics of local gang problems. This Fact Sheet summarizes NYGS findings from the 2006 survey. The current nationally representative sample was selected in 2002 and
includes the following agencies:

◆ All police departments that serve cities with populations of
50,000 or more (n=624) (larger cities).
◆ All suburban county police and sheriffs’ departments (n=740)
(suburban counties).
◆ A randomly selected sample of police departments that serve
cities with populations between 2,500 and 49,999 (n=695)
(smaller cities).
◆ A randomly selected sample of rural county police and
sheriffs’ departments (n=492) (rural counties).
NYGC asked survey recipients to report information solely for
youth gangs, defined as “a group of youths or young adults in
your jurisdiction that you or other responsible persons in your
agency or community are willing to identify as a ‘gang.’”
Motorcycle gangs, hate or ideology groups, prison gangs, and
exclusively adult gangs were excluded from the survey.

Survey Findings

Of the 2,551 survey recipients, 2,199 (86 percent) responded to the 2006 survey. Table 1 shows the percentage of agencies that reported gang problems by area type. Overall, it is estimated that 3,400 jurisdictions served by city (population of 2,500 or more) and county law enforcement agencies experienced gang problems in 2006. Based on survey results, it is estimated that approximately 785,000 gang members and 26,500 gangs were active in the United States in 2006. Readily available and reliable gang-crime data are difficult to obtain on a national level. Previous NYGC surveys reveal that agencies with gang problems often do not regularly record local offenses, with the exception of homicides, as “gang-related.” With these data limitations in mind, the 2006 NYGS requested each respondent to provide both specific gang-homicide data (i.e., number of homicides involving a gang member as either the perpetrator and/or the victim) and general trends (i.e., increasing, decreasing) for other serious gang-related crimes in the respondent’s jurisdiction. Among agencies reporting gang problems in smaller cities and rural counties, a large majority (89 and 86 percent respectively) recorded zero gang-related homicides in 2006. By comparison, most cities with populations over 100,000 experienced one or more gang homicides during the year.

Table 1. Percentage of Law Enforcement Agencies

Reporting Gang Problems, 2002–2006
Gang Problems Gang Problems
Reported in Ever Reported,
2006 (%) 2002–2006 (%)
Rural Counties 14.9 27.4
Smaller Cities 32.6 48.3
Suburban Counties 51.0 61.5
Larger Cities 86.4 90.5
Overall Estimate in
Study Population 33.3 47.3

Figure 1 shows the percentage of gang-problem agencies report ing that incidences of the specified gang crime had “increased” in the respondent’s jurisdictions in 2006 compared with 2004 and 2005. For two offenses, aggravated assault and drug sales, more than half of the agencies reported an increase in 2006. These two offenses were followed, in descending order, by robbery, larceny/theft, burglary, and auto theft. The 2006 NYGS requested each respondent to indicate the fac
tor(s) that influenced gang-related violence in the respondent’s jurisdiction. More than half of the law enforcement agencies
reported that intergang conflict (between-gang conflict) and drug-related factors directly affected levels of gang-related violence in their jurisdictions in 2006. Somewhat frequently reported (25–50 percent of the agencies) were the following three
factors: gang-member migration across U.S. jurisdictions, emergence of new gangs, and the return of gang members from secure confinement. Infrequently reported (less than one-quarter of the agencies) were factors associated with intragang conflict (within gang conflict) and gang-member migration from outside the United States.

Office of Justice Programs Innovation • Partnerships • Safer Neighborhoods: Go to www.ojp.usdoj.gov

Aggravated Auto Burglary Drug Larceny/ Robbery
Assault Theft Sales Theft

OJJDP’s Gang Prevention Activities
The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention:

(OJJDP) supports several initiatives to prevent and reduce gang activity. OJJDP’s Gang Reduction Program is designed to
reduce gang activity in targeted neighborhoods by incorporating a broad spectrum of research-based interventions to address the range of personal, family, and community factors that contribute to juvenile delinquency and gang activity. The program integrates local, State, and Federal resources to incorporate state-of-the-art practices in prevention, intervention, and suppression. In April 2007, Los Angeles announced the launch of a $168 million anti-
gang initiative model based on the Gang Reduction Program.

Other OJJDP gang prevention activities include:

◆ Gang-Free Schools and Communities Program seeks
to reduce youth gang crime and violence in schools and
communities.
◆ National Youth Gang Center, funded by OJJDP, conducts
assessments of the scope and characteristics of youth gang
activity in the United States, develops resources and makes
them available to the field, and provides training and technical
assistance in support of community-based prevention,
intervention, and suppression efforts.
◆ Gang Prevention Coordination Assistance Program
provides funding to enhance coordination of local, State,
and Federal resources in support of community partnerships
implementing two or more of the following anti-gang strate
gies: primary prevention, secondary prevention, gang interven
tion, and gang enforcement.

The latest gang-related resources may be found on OJJDP’s Web site (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/ojjdp) by searching using the
keyword “gang.” You can also visit that website for more information about the complete National Youth Gang Survey 2006, published August 1, 2008.

Columbine High School (Littleton, Colorado) Memorial Speech by Dr. Shaw

2008-11-19T21:24:00.001-08:00

Why Are We Here, Or: If not Now…When?
Dr. James E. Shaw
Address for the “Day of Commemoration and Change” Ceremony for Columbine High School, April 20, 2000
Littleton, Colorado

Good evening: My remarks are dedicated to all the victims of adolescentcide: children slain in acts of homicide committed by other children. We are a poorer nation bereft of: the leadership they might have provided; the cures they might have discovered; the books they might have written; the verses they might have penned; the songs they might have sung; the journeys they might have taken; and the voices they might have raised. May they rest in peace, for we, the living, must not.

We mourn the horrific deaths of 12 students and a teacher in Littleton, Colorado, and the two teen-aged student shooters who killed them before committing suicide themselves. But in our hours, days weeks, and years of mourning, we must require of ourselves that we do more than grieve over the tragic losses of Littleton’s “bright promises” and the other fallen children in the nation whose young lives and gleaming promise were extinguished when they fell victim to children-terrorists. Columbine High School is regarded by some as the Pearl Harbor of school violence. Yet, there are countless isolated, alienated, confused, depressed and angry children throughout the country who, in the last year, have tried, in their own words, to “out-columbine Columbine.”

Although it is only the second quarter of the new millennium, it is awfully late in the day, to use a figure of speech. We must act with a sense of urgency that gives us a truer perspective of “national security” when seen from the point of view of children so viciously and abruptly denied it. For when our children are not safe, neither, then, are we. Guns killed 75,640 children between 1979 and 1996 and injured over 340,000 more. These statistics mean there were more children who suffered gun injuries than Vietnam war veterans injured in combat.

Currently, every 48 hours in America, 26 children—an entire classroom full—are killed by guns. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that since the Columbine High School tragedy last April 20, guns have killed 4,745 children. Death’s clock continues ticking and, at the rate of 0.54 deaths per hour—as we are comfortably ensconced here in the Hilton Hotel—I must inform you that 10 children will not be safely tucked into their beds tonight or any night hereafter. By midnight, tonight, three more will have joined them in death, too.

What kind of inspiration, motivation, or direction do we need to make us protect our children against violence at home, in school, and in their communities? For the past nine years, since 1991, I have been studying what I call “adolescentcide,” a word I coined and mentioned earlier, meaning the phenomenon of children killing children. I spent four of those nine years inside the prison cells of boys and girls incarcerated for murder and homicide. And during those four years, 103 children tracked the trail for me as they graphically described their odysseys from life at home to life in prison. Despite their wide diversity of ethnicity, economic status, and social standing, all of these children were “united” in one respect: They had shown a dominant preference for violent behavior. They had all chosen to “solve” their problem by pointing a gun at “it”—usually another kid.

I figured that by talking to these kids, over and over, they might tell me the ways parents and teachers could have made a difference in their lives. You see, in 1991, when I began my research, in the country’s 75 largest counties, 370,424 juvenile defendants were formally processed through the juvenile courts; 22% of them were murder defendants, and 1,638 of these were prosecuted as adults! As a former teacher who had been threatened, attacked, whose classroom exterior had been strafed by gunfire, and who had to command my elementary school charges, playing outside, to take duck-and-cover maneuvers whenever screeching tires and gunshots were heard, I saw, with my own eyes, school yards being turned into grave yards.

A number of the incarcerated children I interviewed had been cradled in a culture of violence. Resorting to it was as natural as watching their mother, sister, aunt, or grandmother getting smacked around and brutalized by some insecure, ignorant barbarian, otherwise known as husband, lover or boyfriend. Six of “my” kids—as I came to view the 103 children over the years—had killed an immediate blood-relative.

Other children who talked to me from their prison cells and from their hearts, claimed to have grown up in “good” homes where they neither witnessed nor personally experienced violence or brutality. Yet they told stories of verbal and emotional abuse, and lives so bleak, that they desperately wished they could have lived away from their families or, simply, not lived at all.

Still, other children had been physically beaten and tortured, on a regular basis, almost from the time they cut their first teeth. Years of such child abuse conditioned them to be chronically angry, depressed, and waiting for an opportunity to avenge themselves. One of these admitted that, even today, she feels relaxed only “when I see the sight of my own blood.” That had always been her personal signal that whoever was beating her, would finally stop. Today, she regularly injures herself to the point of bleeding.

Still, others of my incarcerated children population stated the coldness, isolation, and indifference that passed for “parenting” in their homes “freaked” them out, drove them “up the wall,” “filled me with hate,” and used other expressions to mean they had been going insane because of the lack of love, warmth, and caring from adults responsible for their care and maintenance: their own parents.

These 103 children told me they killed because they felt alienated, isolated, unloved, unlovable, depressed. They also had experienced verbal, emotional, physical, or sexual abuse by an adult, or some other form of adult betrayal. And they had ready access to alcohol, drugs, and…guns! In 1995 4,236,942 firearms were manufactured. These included pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, and other miscellaneous firepower. Most of these weapons have nothing whatsoever to do with hunting animals. On the contrary, it is people, including children, whose lives have been snuffed out by this tonnage of firearms.

Gunfire killed 4,643 infants, children, and teens in 1996—134 murdered before their 10th birthday. More children under 10 years of age are killed each year by guns than police are killed in the line of duty or U.S. soldiers killed by hostile action. The Centers for Disease Control reports that American children under 15 are 12 times more likely to die from gun violence than their peers in 25 other industrialized nations combined.

As a nation, we have expended Herculean amounts of time, money and effort preparing to meet the twenty-first century by immunizing our ubiquitous computerized-technology systems against the notorious “Y2K Bug.” However necessary that crusade might have been, the larger issue is: How much time, money and effort are we prepared to continue to pour into the real “Y2K’s—Years 2000 Kids—who possess the power to change the course of American history forever? As the Honorable William Bennett, former White House Cabinet member stated, it is only young twenty-first century America that can legitimately be called “history’s most violent ‘civilized’ nation.”

How much longer are we going to put up with the constant magnification and glorification of violence and guns on our movie, television, Internet, and video game screens? Who was asleep at the switch when guns became the only unregulated consumer product in America? Why do we regulate toy guns, but not the real guns that kill a child every two hours? Why are real guns so easy for children to find…in many cases, as easy as toy guns? How much more child carnage and future “Day of Commemorations…” will occur before we decide enough is enough?

Will today be the day when parents across the nation demand changes in the public education format so that mental detectors become as important as metal detectors? If not now, when? Tests for depression, specialized counseling, and behavior monitoring might prove to be positive interventions for those students who are emotionally armed and dangerous.
Is this the day we realize and accept that security cameras take fine external pictures but fail to photograph what is in a student’s heart or what is lacking in his character? If not today, when?

A 1993 report published by the American Psychological Association stated: “There is absolutely no doubt that higher levels of viewing violence on television are correlated with increased acceptance of aggressive attitudes and increased aggressive behavior. Children’s exposure to violence in the mass media, particularly at young ages, can have harmful lifelong consequences.”

Television, in many homes is the electronic fireplace. I would strongly advise parents whose television sets have grown up with, and are now members of, the family to analyze the hours spent in front of the tube versus the minutes spent in real, heart-to-heart conversation. Then, turn that around: Spend minutes in front of the tube but hours in each other’s faces involved in engaging talks, stimulating discussions, and resolutions to problems.

Since last year, how many of you parents, or other parents across America, have increased the amount of time you talk to your children about moral principles, right and wrong behavior, good and bad choices? If you leave it up to the schools to do it, you’re copping out…big time. Moral education, moral direction, and moral intelligence begin at home. It has always been that way, and it will always be that way. It seems that schools would rather teach the right and wrong of Driver Training, or the right and wrong about fouling in basketball or clipping in football, than teach children good, safe, sane behaviors based on the “M” word: Morality. Some schools think that teaching morality is teaching religion. Yet, few people are ever hear complaining about how “straight-laced” and moral the Driver Training rules of the road are, or how strangulating the character-and-moral-development regulations that govern school athletics and other team sports are.

Is there anybody complaining about the smear that 6-year old Elian Gonzalez’s father made about American schools on “60 Minutes” last Sunday? Mr. Gonzalez, a self-admitted communist who embraces the communist regime of Fidel Castro, in a country where bread lines are so long they have “Stop” and “Go” signs and modern medicine got lost in the Bay of Pigs, said American schools are where kids go to get shot. Now, wait a minute. We don’t like to use the words “moral” or “moral education” because they are too closely-aligned with religion, with God. Yet, all of the nation’s state constitutions—and that’s 50—unabashedly acknowledge and otherwise refer to God, in reverential, devout and gracious terms. Are we going to declare those state constitutions unconstitutional?

Mr. Gonzalez’s belief system prohibits that he acknowledge a Supreme Being. Our country was built on freedom of religion. Yet, somehow, that cherished concept has eroded into freedom from religion—or moral teachings, or spiritual guidance. The result is a moral vacuum that breeds immoral children whose god is a gun. And from a backward country where it takes people like Mr. Gonzalez an hour-and-a-half to watch “60 Minutes”, he, who professes no belief in a Supreme Being, calls it like he sees it: “American schools are where kids go to get shot.”

Somebody once asked me if America’s turning its back on—and not fearing—God has put us in the position of now having to fear our very own children, as punishment. That is a very important question. And while I am not suggesting that we turn our schools into seminaries and monasteries, I am suggesting that we begin immediately instituting right-and-wrong concepts, character development frameworks, and life-ethics training in our nation’s kindergarten through 12th-grade school curricula. And some states already have. Incidentally, let’s not throw our hands up and join with Elian Gonzalez’s father in championing Cuba’s educational system.

But what you can do right away is suggest to your school administrators that World History can wait and children ought to be taught how to stop the bloodshed flowing over their modern history today. Tell school leaders that dry Mathematics and arid Algebra might be brought to life if students were repeatedly asked to link raw numbers, equations and theorems to the national daily child homicide death toll.

Tell them also that the Language Arts program might produce more scholarly, articulate, and effective journalists if they were given field assignments in visiting the morgue where juvenile corpses lay; observing court proceedings on juvenile homicide; and interviewing homicide cops in the local precinct.

Don’t forget to tell them that Social Science might be more relevant if students created their own Teen Court, under the watchful eye of a local judge, and heard cases on a variety of campus behavioral infractions, and levied fines and discipline sanctions. If you don’t begin all of this today…when would you?

In the meantime, instill principles of honesty and integrity in your child. Children appreciate knowing what the standard is and reaching it. Knowing right from wrong clears up heir thinking and develops their moral intelligence. Children lacking in moral intelligence do not have the capacity to make moral decisions. If no moral teaching has been instilled in them, there exists a void that will be constantly filled with anti-social thoughts and actions. There is a direct link between a child’s ignorance of life-ethics, his disregard for right and wrong moral behavior, and his decision to kill another child or other human being.

Help your child set clear attainable objectives and thus have the satisfaction of controlling his own future. That’s what really produces genuine self-esteem. Children who lack the capacity for self-love and self-esteem can never realize their full possibilities. One of the most important gifts you can give your child is to teach him to be “response-able”—able to respond.

Teach your child to seek and become aligned with a spiritual purpose. You may find that a church or house of worship can help you to dot his in an organized, efficient, and consistent way. You are the ultimate model for your child, whether you know it or not. You were his first teacher. From you, it is important that he learns there are more good people than bad people and more reasons to be happy and optimistic than sad and sullen.

Teach your child nonviolent communication strategies and peace-building skills. Repeatedly emphasize that a gun or other weapon is never, ever an acceptable alternative to nonviolent interaction and positive communication.

Your child is exposed to you but a fraction of the time, in contrast with his exposure to ideas, people and events outside the family. Try to make each of your interactive moments with him joyful, meaningful, rewarding, and loving experiences. Parents who are in touch with themselves and their loving attitudes and inclinations are more effective parents.

All children who make the decision to kill somebody else are alienated and isolated from important adults in their lives. We must constantly give our children a sense that they are loved and valued and safe. A recent study of students in grades 7-12 showed that teenagers who feel “connected” to their schools and families are less likely to engage in risky or violent behavior. This is hardly a surprise. We cannot underestimate the importance of family, teachers, and faith communities, and we must nurture that feeling of “connectedness” very early. Parents’ voices are the ones children recognize first and fastest. And parents, especially fathers, need to express their love to their children verbally and often. Silence may be all right for strangers, but not for families. Bad kids can happen to good parents, and it is better to take time and lovingly persist in coaxing your son to “talk out” whatever’s on his chest, so he won’t put a bullet into your or somebody else’s chest.

Emotion often drives behavior. Always consult your child’s feelings; how he feels will tell you how he is coping. Children’s emotions are dynamic and their flare-ups illuminate their feelings. Addressing the emotional needs of your child should be a constant priority. Teenagers appreciate and admire parents who patiently stick it out with them, no matter what they throw at their parents, in terms of behavior. Parents who never give up, no matter the emotional “weathers” of their teens, are highly-praised (yes, teens often praise their folks to others), highly-valued and –loved parents.

Parents, you should be able to say to your children:

"I am your parent, you are my child, and I vow, as of this moment and until time is no more, to love you. You are the best part of me. I hold you, hug your, touch you, teach you, and shine my eyes upon you in love. With patience, I joyfully share my strength with you. With kindness and praise, I show you right from wrong, good from bad. When you fall, I gently pick you up and the feather of my kiss brushes your tears away. The rhythm of our hearts is the beat of our love. It is with pride that I am your model of gentleness, your mirror of sensitivity. I am the grownup you will become. You are my joy and it is with total love that I touch and teach you, guide and lead you.

I promise you a home in which your spirits will lift you to newer and greater heights and where you are free to dream and express the full palette of your talents on the canvas of your personality. I will show you how your desire gives you the energy of angels; you will learn to soar with your enthusiasm. I will show you how to live well—with hope and vision, the confidence to climb any mountain, the trust to reach out and touch. You will learn to help others with a heart that heals. For you I must, and will always be, the sum of patience, the temple of goodness, the soft winds and silent springs of compassion.

I will teach you to love life fully, give to others generously and let your light shine. Perfect love replaces fear, and you will learn how to greet each day with love, salute the Universe with joy and thanksgiving, and to let the quiet night comfort your soul. We are one with this gift called Life, and heirs to the blessings of our grand and glorious Universe. The Universe is filled with abundance and I will teach you to desire only good from the Universe and give only good back to the Universe.

You will learn the importance of sharing the blessings the Universe pours upon you. I will teach you to never look back upon yesterday, nor pine away for tomorrow. You will learn that virtue comes from being thankful for the nowness and newness that is today, for it is the gift we call The Present.

You will learn that the mind is a great source of strength, love is the root of your character, and that life is filled with goodness. I promise to let your talents guide, cheer and support you, for that which you love is where your heart is; and where your heart is, there you will thrive. Through peace, you will learn to negotiate; through love, to communicate; and through respect, to articulate. For by giving to others what they need, you thus build the bridge to what you need. Thinking of others is a virtue you will always value. You will learn that laughter is often the best medicine. I promise you days filled with laughter and learning so that your sleep will be filled with dreams of joy. Life is not a lullaby but you will know that your humor is a music that gives life flavor.

You are an important, vital member of this family, a very necessary member of the human race. You help to make family and community strong. From this moment on, until time is no more, I promise to love you.

Thank you for teaching me what the truest treasure in life really is."

While America is not currently at war with any foreign power, we must know—by our presence here—that our children have declared war on each other. There are millions of children who are depending on us—for protection, for guidance, for the basic necessities. Before one more child is lost, we must promise ourselves that we will do all that is necessary to make our homes safer, our children more secure. For home is where the hate is. Children who kill are homegrown. There is no such as unsafe schools, only unsafe homes. Schools are only as safe as the homes they must serve.

Children are throwing the family gun into their school backpacks along with their peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and hauling this lot of problems to school to “share” their pain.

We need to mount an all-out campaign, which the Centers for Disease Control might appreciate: We must vaccinate our children against violence; immunize our children against intolerance; and humanize our children with love. That is the only way we will re-unite the United States in peace.

When a ship capsizes at sea and life boats are heaved overboard, the rule of rescue is “women and children first.” Our great ship of state is capsizing before our very eyes, and our children are drowning in their own bloodshed. When was the last time you heard anybody say, “Children first”? We need to become instantly and actively involved in the greatest rescue effort this country has ever known, saving our children from adolescentcide. Far too many children’s lives are being lost by the love of force, expressed through violence. The only way we can rescue them is with the force of love.

May God save the children. May the nation’s victims of adolescentcide rest in peace, for we, the living, must not. Our mission of saving our children has scarcely begun.

# # #

Broken Window Theory Behind Chicago's Gang Loitering Ordinance (Now Shattered Glass)

2008-09-04T15:02:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: Chicago, long known for its stockyards, the Haymarket Square Riot, political graft and corruption, and the police brutality at the 1969 Democratic National Convention, decided at the dawn of the new millennium, that it had had enough of its gangs. These anti-social groups were seen as the equivalent of walking dynamite wherever they chose to occupy themselves, as squatters, strollers, or loiters, throughout the Windy City. Operating on the "broken window" theory (broken windows, if not repaired, spawn a copy-cat contagion of more broken windows), Chicago enacted an ordinance prohibiting known gang members from loitering in public places. The following is an abstract published in "Oyez Project: Chicago v. Morales." It is noteworthy for the Kryptonite effect legal challenges had upon the ordinance. A barrage of arguments eventually torpedoed the onerous ordinance at the Supreme Court level. We, in the Defense Bar, need to periodically refresh our memories about these kinds of challenges to Constitutionally-defective laws and their eventual result.
# # #

Facts of the Case
Chicago's Gang Congregation Ordinance prohibits "criminal street gang members" from loitering in public places. If a police officer observes a person whom he reasonably believes to be a gang member loitering in a public place with one or more persons, he shall order them to disperse. A violation of the ordinance arises when anyone does not promptly obey a dispersal order. An officer's discretion was purportedly limited by confining arrest authority to designated officers, establishing detailed criteria for defining street gangs and membership therein, and providing for designated, but publicly undisclosed, enforcement areas. In 1993, Jesus Morales was arrested and found guilty under the ordinance for loitering in a Chicago neighborhood after he ignored police orders to disperse. Ultimately, after Morales challenged his arrest, the Illinois Supreme Court held that the ordinance violated due process of law in that it is impermissibly vague on its face and an arbitrary restriction on personal liberties.

Question
Does Chicago's Gang Congregation Ordinance, which prohibits "criminal street gang members" from loitering in public places, violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution?

Conclusion
Yes. In a plurality ruling, Justice John Paul Stevens delivered an opinion for a marjority on several key points. The Court held that Chicago's Gang Congregation Ordinance was unconstitutionally vague and provided law enforcement officials too much discretion to decide what activities constitute loitering. Justice Stevens wrote for the majority that the ordinance's definition of loitering as "to remain in any one place with no apparent purpose" does not give people adequate notice of what is prohibited and what is permitted, even if a person does not violate the law until he refuses to disperse. "'[A] law fails to meet the requirements of the Due Process Clause if it is so vague and standardless that it leaves the public uncertain as to the conduct it prohibits,'" noted Justice Stevens, "[i]f the loitering is in fact harmless and innocent, the dispersal order itself is an unjustified impairment of liberty."

Supreme Court Justice Opinions and Votes (by Seniority)
Decision: 6 votes for Morales, 3 vote(s) against
Legal Provision: Due Process

Full Opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens

The Oyez Project, Chicago v. Morales, 527 U.S. 41 (1999),
available at:

When Corrupt Cops and Gangbangers Get in Bed Together

2008-09-03T11:01:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: Jim Kouri, president of the International Association of Police Chiefs, penned the following article. For those of us who work in the Defense Bar, the article presents information that is current and useful. As we strive and endeavor to ensure the best defense possible for our clients, we might read carefully the information that is presented for points that might prove fruitful in their use.

A federal grand jury in Los Angeles indicted six gang members -- including three law enforcement officers -- on civil rights, narcotics and weapons charges for allegedly participating in an organized enterprise consisting of law enforcement officers and civilians who "invaded" private homes as though they were conducting legitimate law enforcement operations, but in reality were staging home-invasion robberies to steal drugs, money and weapons.

The case developed after feds arrested a suspended corrections officer with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Federal and local investigators discovered that the leader of the crime gang was actually a Los Angeles police officer named Ruben Palomares.

The more than 50 charges filed accuse the defendants of committing more than 20 robberies and burglaries from 1999 through 2001. The investigation into the gang began when Palomares and another member of his gang were arrested in San Diego on cocaine trafficking charges in June 2001.

The investigation, involving agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as officers with the Los Angeles Police Department and the Long Beach Police Department, found that the robberies were generally committed after Palomares received information that a particular location was involved in the narcotics trade.

After planning the operation and conducting surveillance, the robbery team -- which usually consisted of multiple sworn police officers in uniform or displaying a badge -- gained access to the residence by falsely telling any residents that they were conducting a legitimate search for drugs or drug dealers. Victims were often restrained, handcuffed, threatened or assaulted during the search, and on one occasion a man was hit with a stun gun.

Although many of the raids did not yield the anticipated narcotics, the crew allegedly stole any items of value found inside the residences. When the group did steal items, they divided profits from the sale of the stolen goods among themselves.

During the course of the conspiracy, Palomares provided associates with official LAPD badges, uniforms, radios, firearms and other equipment. Some of the robberies were committed after the thieves drove to the location in official LAPD vehicles. The robbers used the LAPD equipment to make victims believe they were the subject of legitimate law enforcement operations and to minimize the defendants' risk of being questioned if confronted by law enforcement officers.

"The depth of corruption and audacity among these law enforcement officers is nothing less than stunning," said United States Attorney Debra Wong Yang. "While having a badge imparts some degree of power to an officer of the law, it also imparts a great deal of responsibility. In addition to rejecting their responsibilities to the law, these officers rejected their sacred responsibilities to their communities and their departments."

Six defendants are named in a 54-count indictment returned by the grand jury. The three law enforcement defendants are:

- Rodrigo Duran, 35, of Tehachapi, a former deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department who has been employed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation since 1996 (he is currently on administrative leave;)

- William Ferguson, 33, of Huntington Beach, a former Los Angeles Police Officer who was terminated by the Department in 2003; and

- Joseph Ferguson, 31, of Garden Grove, who is William Ferguson's brother and a former officer with the Long Beach Police Department.

"The reality is, no police department is immune from bad cops," stated Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton. "I have no tolerance for intentional misconduct and will deal with it forcefully and aggressively. Supervision, safeguards and civilian oversight are used to monitor employees and ensure quality police service. No good cop wants to work with a bad cop. No good cop wants a bad cop in their Department. Today's announcement proves we are committed to getting rid of those who would tarnish the LAPD badge."

Long Beach Police Chief Anthony Batts stated: "When a police officer violates the laws that he has sworn to uphold, it erodes the public trust that we in law enforcement work so hard to build. The men and women of the Long Beach Police Department take great pride in their work and are fully committed to the safety of our community. Reckless actions by individuals that undermine the integrity of this department and damage the public trust will not be tolerated."

In one burglary, members of the gang allegedly stole 600 pounds of marijuana. In another incident, several co-conspirators allegedly stole television sets from an 18-wheel truck in Montebello.

And, in another robbery outside a Fontana market, Palomares and another man dressed as a police officer robbed a man of $45,000 worth of pseudoephedrine pills, which are a key precursor chemical in the manufacture of methamphetamine.

America's Most Dangerous Gang

2008-08-14T09:50:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: Writer Shelly Feuer Domash, in the article below, has chronicled some of the activities of the notorious "Mara Salvatrucha" (or "MS-13") gang. The gang is ferocious, violent, and holds even law enforcement officers in deep disdain and performs hits (known as "green lights") on them. They seem to have re-defined the term "street terrorism". They operate covertly, when necessary, and chameleon-like. They readily and easily change their signature blue-and-white gang garb to become more uniform and blend in with the communities they are taking over in the United States. Operating on a perversion of the corporate business model, they pride themselves on their ability to branch out, from state to state, land on their feet and instantly set up operations. With gang higher-ups monitoring law enforcement nationally, they thus acquire the intel necessary for branching into U.S. cities that have no prohibitions against gangs or are in denial about gang activities under their very noses. Unlike gangs whose economies are restricted to trading in narrow channels of contraband, MS-13 will commit literally any crime that promises profit. Although they are tightly organized throughout the United States, they are adamant about being branded and profiled by what they wear--be it clothing colors, styles or tattoos. They will change or get rid of such giveaways once they feel the heat of law enforcement--yet continue to operate illegally and invisibly.
# # #

Spreading from El Salvador to L.A. and across the United States, Mara Salvatrucha 13 is increasingly well organized and deadly.

Within one hour, two people were found murdered miles apart in suburban Nassau County, N.Y. After an intensive investigation, police officials learned the murders were the work of the violent street gang Mara Salvatrucha 13. It also soon became apparent the gang was sending a bold message to its members and associates. That message: “If you are not loyal, you are dead.”

But there was another message in the brutal slayings for the people of Long Island. And that message was that gang violence had moved into the upper middle class enclaves of the Island, into the kinds of communities where the locals assume that crime is somebody else’s problem.

Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13) is unfortunately becoming everybody’s problem. This plague that came to Long Island from El Salvador by way of the streets of Los Angeles follows the same migratory patterns as the Salvadoran immigrant community that it preys upon, fanning out across the United States from ethnic enclaves in California.

Coming Together

Until recently, MS-13 wasn’t that big a player in East Coast gang culture. The reason for its weak position in the East Coast crime world was obvious: It wasn’t very well organized. MS-13 was comprised of a group of cliques that operated independently of each other.

No more. Law enforcement officials now report that gang members from across the country have come together to unite affiliated groups up and down the East Coast. The leadership for these cliques is now coming from as far away as California and even from El Salvador.

Robert Hart, senior agent in charge with the FBI, says that when individual groups of MS-13 unite, the results can be devastating. “The cliques, instead of operating independently of each other, are beginning to come together,” Hart explains. “The difference is by doing that, obviously you have a much tighter organization, much stronger structures and, instead of having various cliques doing whatever they want, wherever they want, there is one individual who is the leader and is able to control the payment of dues and the criminal acts they engage in. The result is very, very similar to what you would see in what we refer to as traditional organized criminal families.”

Finding Sanctuary

Los Angeles and New York law enforcement and even politicians are aware of the impact of MS-13 on their streets and on their crime statistics. So they’ve taken action. The results are usually not stellar, but at least these cities have recognized that MS-13 is a problem. Unfortunately, the leadership of MS-13 is not stupid. Once the heat comes down hard in L.A. and New York, they head for new turf, choosing Midwestern and Southern and suburban cities where gangs “are not an issue” and local officials and authorities are in denial.

And once MS-13 takes hold in a community, it grows fast. The gang reportedly has some 300 members in suburban Long Island. A few years back it didn’t have any.

Once MS-13 shows up on the radar, some local officials and authorities will take action. In Nassau County, for example, a joint gang task force headed by the FBI and comprised of local police departments, has arrested 16 leaders of MS-13. They were charged with two murders, assault, conspiracy, and firearms violations.

Such investigations aren’t easy because MS-13 has a pretty strident zero-tolerance policy toward anyone who informs the cops of their activities.

Court papers reveal that one of the Nassau County defendants was captured in a secretly recorded telephone conversation detailing how he killed a male victim because he had provided law enforcement officials with information and that he had “put one in his chest and three in the head.” In another recorded conversation, a second defendant said he killed a young female because, in part, she had also provided information to law enforcement.

Fighting Back

The senseless violence of MS-13 has shocked the local citizens of Nassau County, so the Nassau County Executive appointed a “gang czar” to deal with the increasing gang problem.

A seasoned, dedicated officer, the new “czar,” in reality, will find it difficult to accomplish what he has been mandated to do. His department, like many across the nation, is at its lowest staffing levels in recent history, and he has been given no additional personnel or resources to combat the problem. The public was placated by the appointment, but while politicians put Band-Aids on deep cuts, the problem continues to escalate on Long Island.

And Long Island is not alone. Nationally, police departments are dealing with the surge in violence emanating from MS-13 members.

In Charlotte, N.C., 53 gang members were arrested as part of Operation Fed Up, which targeted MS-13 members. Officials in the medium-sized Southern city say MS-13 has been involved in at least 11 murders in the Charlotte area since 2000. And with a membership estimated at 200, MS-13 is by far Charlotte’s largest gang.

Some 400 miles north of Charlotte, the northern Virginia and southern Maryland communities around Washington, D.C., have become MS-13 turf. Local authorities estimate that there are between 5,000 and 6,000 MS-13 members in the metropolitan area.

And where MS-13 goes, violence follows. In July 2003, an 18-year-old federal witness was stabbed to death; last May, a 16-year-old boy had his hands almost completely chopped off with a machete; and a week later a 17-year-old was shot and murdered. All three crimes were tied to MS-13 members.

The rapid increase in MS-13 activity along the corridor between Charlotte and D.C. is simply explained by Det. Tim Jolly, a gang specialist with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. The area has the nation’s second highest population of Salvadoran immigrants.

Gang of Chameleons

One of the more unusual aspects of MS-13 when compared to other street gangs is that it is extremely flexible in its activity. While some gangs are only into drugs, MS-13 will do any crime at any time.

Sgt. George Norris, supervisor of the gang unit in the Prince George’s County (Md.) Police Department, says MS-13 doesn’t sling drugs in his jurisdiction. “We see mostly citizen robberies, auto theft, shootings and cuttings, and homicides,” he says, adding that drug sales by MS-13 may be just a matter of time.

Violent and Vicious

When MS-13 moves into a new community it tends to announce its presence with violence. The same can be true when a new leader takes over the local cliques.

Norris says gang members from other areas had once been able to join the new gang by simply being “jumped in.” But now that new leaders have moved into Prince George’s County and consolidated the cliques, the gang’s local culture has become more violent and vicious.

“According to one of our informers, things have changed,” says Norris. “Now in order to get your letters or clique [symbols] tattooed on you, you have to also put in some violent act to show your commitment.”

Cop Killers

And MS-13 violence is not restricted to civilians, rival gang members, and clique traitors; the gang will go after cops. Threats against police officers, known to gang members as “green light” notices, have increased so much in the past few years that the Virginia Gang Association has warned officers in Virginia and states to the north and south to be wary of MS-13 members.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s Jolly says he is aware of the threats against police officers in his community and in Virginia. Prince George’s County’s Norris says he’s heard them, too. “If you do something to them, their natural response is, ‘OK, I’m going to kill you,’” he says. “Or at least they talk like they will.”

Norris dismisses some of MS-13’s threats, but that doesn’t mean that officers should take all MS-13 threats lightly. The gang is extremely violent and it has attacked and will continue to attack anyone who gets in its way. That includes law enforcement officers.

Roots of Evil

Named for La Mara, a street in San Salvador, and the Salvatrucha guerillas who fought in El Salvador’s bloody civil war, Mara Salvatrucha 13 was organized in Los Angeles in the late ’80s. At first, the gang’s primary purpose was to defend Salvadoran immigrants from being preyed upon by other L.A. street gangs.

But like any other street gang that was created to defend a particular ethnic group, MS-13 was quickly perverted until its primary purpose was preying upon the Salvadoran community. It also violently defends its turf against any other gang that might seek to slice away a piece of its action.

Gang members sometimes wear blue and white, colors taken from the national flag of El Salvador. They can also sport numerous body and even face tattoos. However, some members are much less visible and therefore much more dangerous.

Recent reports indicate that MS-13 has expanded from California to Alaska, Oregon, Utah, Texas, Nevada, Oklahoma, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, Washington, D.C., and Florida. The gang has also been exported back to Central America.

Back Home

It’s estimated that there are 36,000 MS-13 members in Honduras alone. In Honduras, according to a March 2004 report prepared by the Washington, D.C.-based, right-wing think tank the Maldon Institute, MS-13 has, with increasing frequency, resorted to leaving a dismembered corpse, complete with a decapitated head, as a calling card. Recently, according to the report, such a grisly message was left with a note for the Honduran president.

The note is supposed to have stated the gang’s displeasure with an August 2003 law that made it illegal to be a part of a gang. Under Honduran law gang leaders can be sentenced to prison for up to 12 years and rank-and-file members from six to nine years, just for being in the gang. A gang member can be arrested for simply having a tattoo.

El Salvador has also launched a crackdown on MS-13. A police offensive called “Operation Strong-arm” has resulted in the arrest of more than 4,000 gang members.

For MS-13, these are small losses. The gang is nothing if not mobile. When it feels heat in the U.S., it moves to another state. When it feels heat in El Salvador and Honduras, it sets up operations in Mexico.

The Maldon Institute report indicates that MS-13 “appears to be in control of much of the Mexican border and, in addition to its smuggling and contraband rackets, the gang collects money from illegal immigrants that it helps [move] across the border into the United States.”

The ultra-conservative Maldon Institute is known for doomsday predictions when it comes to the U.S.-Mexico border. But there can be no denial that MS-13 is very active in smuggling people, drugs, and guns across the border. And independent reports indicate that many illegal immigrants have been assaulted, robbed, and even raped by MS-13 members.

Mexico is now taking steps to fight back against MS-13. In December, Mexican authorities arrested 224 gang members in response to what they called a threat to national security. Among the arrests were members of MS-13 who were charged with trafficking in drugs and firearms across Mexico and Central America.

Illusion of Cooperation

While some of the Central American countries appear to be cracking down on MS-13, serious problems still exist. And they are being missed by politically correct reporters who want to tout U.S.-Latin American cooperation.

For example, on Long Island, the media was quick to cover an agreement between El Salvador and Suffolk County to share information on MS-13. What the local reporters didn’t cover was a much more serious issue. If these gang members commit serious offenses, they can return home, and there is no extradition agreement. And, of course, they are doing so in increasing numbers.

“I would say that between Honduras and El Salvador, there are seven or eight people we are seeking to take into custody,” says Lt. Dennis Farrell, head homicide investigator for the Nassau County Police Department. “Proportionally, if you take that across the country, the numbers are astronomical, the number of people who have probably fled to these two countries.”

Farrell says that two gang members who his detectives are looking to arrest for two separate murders are now living in the same town in El Salvador. He calls the situation extremely frustrating. “You undertake a very in-depth and comprehensive investigation, pursue all possible leads, build a case, essentially conduct a successful investigation, only to have it thwarted by the fact that after having identified the killer or killers, you are unable, under the present international agreements, to return them to Nassau County to face murder charges.

“Even more than that frustration, how about the injustice and sense of desperation on the part of families who have lost loved ones? Where is the measure of justice? There is really no justice for those families, and absent some reworked or new initiative between our state department and those sovereign states, I don’t see any change in this condition in the foreseeable future,” Farrell adds.

In addition to extradition treaties, many gang investigators believe stricter and more uniform laws are needed here in this country. According to Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s Jolly, one of the reasons MS-13 has migrated to the East Coast is the strict anti-gang laws on the West Coast. He also believes that, with the stricter gang laws in Central America, many MS-13 members may be coming back to the United States illegally.

Long Arms

With the number of MS-13 members growing nationwide (some cliques now even accept non-Hispanic members), and the violence escalating, the future for law enforcement appears grim.

“They adapt to what the police do,” says Prince George’s County’s Norris. “They will change the way they operate, depending on the way things are enforced by the police. If there is no enforcement, they will wear their colors and bandanas because in the communities they are in it is common knowledge and the people fear them, so it is a form of intimidation.

“Once the police recognize and confront them, they will change and wear different colors from the blue and white, no bandana on their head, maybe now in their pocket, and instead of the number 13 they will wear 67 or 76 because it equals 13. They adapt so it is a continually evolving thing.”

While the nation focuses on terrorism, the issue of gang violence has taken a lower priority. But to many, the violent acts of MS-13 members are more of an everyday threat that is being overlooked.

Shelly Feuer Domash is a Long Island-based freelance writer and a frequent contributor to POLICE magazine

Defrauding the Nation's Lawyers

2008-08-04T22:02:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: The following essay was written on July 28, 2008 by internationally-renowned trial lawyer, Gerry Spence, and published at his own blog, "Gerry Spence's Blog." Please read it carefully, as his remarks and concerns are well-aimed and -timed. They are long overdue (no fault of his) and I hope that other lawyers nationwide will take up his cry. As a trial consultant and national expert witness who is frequently in Criminal Court, I think a core of the problem is a basic disrespect and unappreciation of jurors. Attorney Spence's theme that lawyers need training in relating and listening to people is, I think, secondary to that. If the jury system were regarded by lawyers as a chartered bus full of caring, attentive, sacrificing (some have jobs that are in jeopardy if a trial goes its full life cycle), and smart people, then lawyers would regard and listen to them as they regard and listen to their clients. Lawyers are trained to place their clients in high esteem and to bestow, if not lavish, utmost attention on them. It is PEOPLE who populate the best stories woven and spun by our court’s winning lawyers. When lawyers wake up and see and feel the jury box as being populated by some wonderful people, they will think of ways to loom, weave, spin and shape their stories with attention-getting beginnings, logical middles, and perfect and passionate endings every time. Lawyers, then, need to step outside the box and speak in court as if the jurors, whose ears everybody is betting on, are paying them--and the client is merely the messenger delivering the check.
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Most trial lawyers have been defrauded of their education.

On the average it costs more than $100,000 to get through law school. And after four years in undergrad and three more years in law school, the law school graduate doesn’t know enough to pass the Multi-state Bar and has to spend another $5000 or more to prepare for that. Even then many will fail the bar, some more than once.

The bar exam itself is a fraud. The exam does not help the law profession to determine those who will fight for people, who are honest and who have courage—the most fundamental requirements of a lawyer for the people. The bar exam only tests the applicants ability to play their mostly silly word games.

So we have law schools claiming they are educating lawyers when most lawyers, as they drag themselves out of the misery and boredom of those three empty years, are tragically unprepared to do anything useful. I have often said that for an assistant to help me in a trial I would rather have a nurse than most lawyers fresh out of law school.

The nurse has been trained to listen to the patient. Lawyers know little about listening. The nurse chose her profession because she cares about people. Lawyers are not taught to care. They are engorged with the rare niceties of legal gymnastics often taught by ponderous-headed professors who have never looked into the painful eyes of a client and who have never tried a single jury trial for a human being. If a student complains that a case he or she is studying does not render justice, the professor is quick to retort, “We do not teach justice here, Mr. Jones. We teach the law.”

I could teach an eighth-grader in twenty minutes how to brief a case. Yet for all three years in most law schools the casebook method of learning the law is still in. The matriculating young lawyer is as qualified to represent a client with the education he has suffered through as a doctor who has never seen a patient, who has never held a scalpel in his hand and who learns surgery by having read text books about it and becomes skilled in surgery, if ever, after having stacked up piles of corpses who represent his pathetic learning process.

“The trial of a case, in its simplest form, is telling a story jurors can understand. Yet most lawyers are taught little, if anything, about communicating with others.”

The trial of a case, in its simplest form, is telling a story jurors can understand. Yet most lawyers are taught little, if anything, about communicating with others. They are taught to deny their feelings and, at last, have so long shielded themselves against their feelings for that many find it nearly impossible to get in touch with them. Yet justice is a feeling and jurors (as do we all) make their decisions based on their feelings.

Most lawyers know little about classical literature and history, have never written a poem, have never painted a picture, have never stood before an audience and sung a song, have never been permitted to confess their pain or their love, and, in short, have been denied the stuff of personhood. One need not write poetry or paint pictures to be a successful human being. But some intimacy with the arts and the language and its use and with right brain functions of feeling and creativity are essential to the development of the whole person. Little wonder that lawyers, disabled by all of the stifling, mostly useless mental exercises they have suffered, have trouble relating to jurors much less to the rest of mankind.

Is it not a miracle that after having been defrauded of their education at the hands of the entrenched in our law schools that American lawyers haven taken on the fraudulent mindset of their educators who have defrauded them?

Gang's Acts Paralyze Hood, But Residents Fear Police More

2008-07-26T11:16:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: The following story by Los Angeles Times writers Joe Mozingo, Sam Quinones and Molly Hennessy-Fiske, illustrates how gangs dominate and suck the very life-blood out of a community. Residents who live among the notorious Drew Street clique of the Avenues gang, admit to the terror, fear and criminal acts by which the gang controls them. A key shot-caller for this population of thugs is a gang-mother whose own children are loyal soldiers. One was fatally gunned down, earlier this spring, in a battle with Los Angeles Police officers after he shot and killed, in cold blood, a man who was out walking his two-year old granddaughter. So deadly is this gang, and such was the avalanche of wire-tapped racketeering evidence against them, that 500 federal agents participated in the assault on the gang, netting 28 arrests.

The 10-month investigation leading to these arrests was conducted by a Los Angeles task force of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Questions that might spring to mind as you read this article are: Is a virtual declaration of war and military-like assault by law enforcement a neighborhood's only protection from the growth and paralyzing power of its gangs? Why did some of the residents feel more terrified by the police raid rather than by the permanent threat the gang posed to them? What protections and other tangible benefits do residents need to help rout out the gangs living among them? What kinds of inducements can law enforcement provide residents to motivate them to come forward and testify against gang members in court? How can the encrusted psychology of fear and submission be broken so that residents can realize the collective power they themselves have to determine the welfare, safety and future of their neighborhoods? What kinds of law enforcement messages (e.g., billboard public service announcements, radio bulletins, television flash releases) need to be devised and delivered consistently to break through and overcome the gang criminal mindset of deliberate, nonstop, premeditated and spontaneous law-breaking?

With a sweeping federal racketeering indictment, more than 500 agents, including 10 SWAT teams, arrested 28 people in an attempt to root out the Avenues gang members who have ruled the area with violence and near impunity. The indictment, which grew out of a 10-month investigation lead by a Los Angeles task force of the Drug Enforcement Administration, names 70 defendants -- mostly connected to the Drew Street clique of the larger Avenues gang. The gang dates to the zoot suit era in Northeast Los Angeles and is closely connected to the Mexican Mafia prison gang. Twenty-six defendants were already in custody and 16 are at large.

Prosecutors allege that the gang committed three murders, shot at police, extorted businesses, conducted home invasion robberies, taxed drug dealers for the Mexican Mafia and threatened potential witnesses -- all as part of an enterprise to distribute methamphetamine and rock cocaine in the area. Authorities say undercover agents conducted scores of drug purchases from the gang during the investigation.

U.S. Atty. Thomas P. O'Brien called the sweep "the largest gang take-down in recent L.A. history."

He said he was confident that by targeting so many defendants with heavy federal charges, the effort would accomplish what previous crackdowns, convictions, injunctions and evictions have so far been unable to do: break the gang's grip on the low-income neighborhood, which is heavily Latino.

Half of the defendants could face life in prison without parole if convicted, said Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office.

Francisco "Pancho" Real, 26, who was identified as the leader of the Drew Street clique, brought in $1,200 a day in drug money alone, according to a wiretap recording described in the indictment. He was arrested at his home in Glendale.

The gang stirred a storm of media coverage and police attention after a wild, rolling shootout in February.

The indictment suggests that the shooting stemmed from a brewing turf battle between the Avenues, backed by the Mexican Mafia, and the Cypress Park gang.

On Feb. 21, in order to prevent Cypress Park from dealing drugs in their territory, the indictment alleges, Real's cohorts shot to death one of its members, Marcos Salas, as he held his 2-year-old granddaughter's hand in front of her elementary school. Minutes later police pulled over the three suspected gunmen, who then opened fire with an assault rifle. Police fatally shot one of them, Real's half brother Daniel Leon.

Authorities had wiretaps on Real's phones at the time. The day after the shooting, Real shrugged off Leon's death, using a profanity to say "[stuff] happens," according to the indictment.

The gang didn't skip a beat after the shootout, the summaries of the wiretaps suggest.

In March, Real ordered the owner of a local tire shop to pay him $30,000 within 24 hours, prosecutors allege, or he would kill him and burn down his shop. When the owner of an adjoining tire shop told Real that he did not understand why they had to pay him, Real said they were operating in his territory, the indictment alleges.

Real is one of 13 children of Maria Leon, the matriarch of the gang and a defendant in the case, according to law enforcement. She has a criminal record with three drug arrests and was in custody Wednesday morning for reentering the country after a deportation.

The family hails from a sweltering, lawless part of the Mexican state of Guerrero, as does much of the neighborhood. Based on their shared roots, many residents maintain a fierce solidarity and loathing for the police.

On Wednesday, an 81-year-old woman on Isabel Street, Olga Martinez, called the police "gestapos" after they broke down her door looking for her son. Numerous other residents declined to talk.

"We don't know anything, we didn't hear anything, we didn't see anything," said a woman who lives on Drew Street and declined to give her name.

Evaluating Your Expert Witnesses and Witnessing Their Value

2008-07-25T13:55:00.000-07:00

Three friends of mine, all working expert witnesses, called me to recount their experiences with private investigators who interviewed them for prospective cases. One complained that the private investigator “asked me if I could stand up to a Daubert Hearing”; another seemed insulted that she was asked what her answer would be if the prosecutor “questioned my high expert fees”; and the third groused about being asked by the interviewing P.I. “why I prostituted myself in ‘criminal defense alley’ ”—the throng of law offices that occupied a corridor in and around the county courthouse. They accounted for more than 50% of his revenues the preceding year.

All of these colleagues demanded to know (from me) what was up! Why were they being grilled like this? Were they viewed as expert witnesses or as suspects? Could P.I.’s even ask such questions? They all claimed this was a “first”; but they suspected it wouldn’t be the last time they’d be so queried. I told them that they had the right to remain silent, if they chose, though by taking that tact their value in the P.I.’s eyes might cascade like Niagara Falls. What shocked them, however, was my telling them that P.I.’s could ask such questions—and that more P.I.’s should ask those kinds of questions and many more like them!

Questioning Prospective Witnesses…a Necessity
Questioning your prospective expert witness is vital. If you’re running defense for your hiring attorney by only scanning a pile of expert witness resumes, you should probably add a vital component to your examination efforts: Call the experts into your office or at least interview them over the telephone. You and the attorney for whom you work cannot afford to have them “drilled and killed” on the witness stand by a salivating prosecutor or other opposing counsel. Expert witnesses should expect questions about Daubert whether or not they are doctors, scientists, engineers, or economists. Daubert is the “gatekeeper” standard for testing in court not whether there is evidence, but whether that evidence was gathered properly.

So, your expert witnesses can bet their next breaths that their testimony about the method for gathering evidence will now and forever be deemed light-years more important than whether there is evidence. This “method-over-matter” point of view held by courts must be understood by all expert witnesses—regardless of their discipline and expertise—as a signal to include the intellectual method they utilize to arrive at their expert opinion. And it is their responsibility to be ready to address that. Daubert, inside courts, has evolved away from being merely THE Supreme Court threshold decision about the scientifics of fingerprinting (Daubert v. Merrell Dow) to its present-day “gatekeeper” evidence-controlling purpose: A Daubert Hearing alerts the expert witness that his or her thinking and reasoning about the evidence is critical to analyzing the method used for bringing that evidence into court and the light of day in the first place.

What, Who…Daubert and Me?
Don’t let your prospective expert witnesses cop out by telling you, “Daubert doesn’t apply to me. I’m not a medical doctor/engineer/scientist/economist.” Daubert, if nothing else, scrutinizes for due diligence in the evidentiary thinking processes of non-scientific pre-testimony expert witnesses. Daubert can either seat expert witnesses or strike them and send them packing. You can even advise prospective experts on some of the Daubert-type questions opposing counsel might ask them, to try to disqualify them: The theory or technique you’ve described, has it been tested and validated? This kind of question goes to the issue of how established, experienced, and even respected your expert witness is. Your attorney is paying him or her for their expert opinion; opposing counsel is not paying them a dime. Therefore, the big, imaginary “zero” opposing counsel sees on the expert’s forehead represents a target at which to aim and fire the toughest questions.

The responses your expert gives should be precise, non-argumentative, and without any arrogance or aggrandizement. He or she should sound as though they are well-experienced and, as appropriate, cite other sources in their profession who validate their opinion. What about peer review? Has your theory or technique been peer-reviewed and published? This question goes to whether and how your expert is perceived and regarded by his or her peers in their field of expertise: Is he or she known or unknown? Highly-regarded or an “also-ran”? Credible or discredited? Peer reviews are considered the litmus test.

Your expert should frankly—without boasting—define and describe those of his or her theories that have been peer-reviewed and published. What is the potential or previously documented rate of error of the method used? This question goes to the reliability of your expert’s theory. It is important to remember that a high error rate does not always mean the theory is unreliable; it merely means that the rate of error is something to factor in, not disregard. A significant error rate does not render invalid your expert’s theory. By the same token, if your expert’s theories or techniques are controversial, that is not necessarily a negative against your expert. Controversy is active and ongoing debate; it doesn’t mean your expert’s work and reputation are tarnished. Since opposing counsels often look for opportunities to do a verbal “Assault-and-Daubert,” you can tailor-make your own questions to acquaint your expert with and prepare him or her for Daubert issues.

Questions Are Critical—They Aren’t Criticism
Expert witnesses should not be put off or feel insulted about any questions the P.I. asks them. P.I.’s can make their interviewees feel more comfortable about answering their “twenty questions” by advising them that “I have to ask you several questions along the way. Better I do it before the prosecutor does; that way you and the attorney I work for can look good in court.” Or, “I hope you won’t be insulted, but the more questions you answer for me, the more qualified my attorney can make you look in court.” Or, “Prosecutors regularly dispute the qualifications of the expert witness. The Daubert Hearing gives them an additional tool to not only dispute but also to try to disqualify you. And we wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?” With this in mind, expert witnesses should also expect to be asked questions about their “high” hourly fees.

A private investigator friend of mine recalls a prosecutor grandstanding before the jury by haranguing the expert witness about his fees. He ended by telling the expert that his boss, the district attorney, “pays me only a fraction of what you make per hour.” To which the expert witness replied: “Well, the district attorney certainly knows your worth far better than I do.” The courtroom, including the judge and jury, erupted in laughter; the prosecutor, though, seemed not to be amused.

Human nature is often unpredictable, and just because an expert’s good-natured humor may incite laughter from a judge and jury, does not mean that the expert is favorably regarded at all. An embarrassed and insulted opposing counsel can often very skillfully turn a moment of levity against the expert. Indeed, the judge, while laughing and seeking to mollify opposing counsel’s bruised ego, might even discredit and dismiss the expert as off-base and impolite. That well-aimed response might—in jury deliberations—even be regarded as impertinent and rude. The jury might be ashamed of its spontaneous outburst of laughter and, with stony faces, try to rectify their “sin” by regarding the expert with mistrust…as somebody given to self-aggrandizing and discourteous responses.

It is better that opposing counsel expose his or her own feelings of annoyance about your expert’s so-called “high fees” and be the spectacle in their own circus of critical questions. Your expert need not be caught up in this game. You might wish to repeatedly and diplomatically advise the expert to tell the truth, to act naturally, not to exhibit arrogance or ridicule, not to joke, and certainly not to argue with opposing counsel. In this context, “Sharp tongues sometimes cut their own throats” is a maxim that describes what could happen to either an expert witness or the opposing counsel. A backlash could hurt the expert more than it hurts opposing counsel.

It’s Preparation…Not Ping-Ponging With the Prosecution
Rather than risk your expert’s trying to match wits, in the foregoing manner, with the prosecutor, I recommend that the expert be prepared to reveal to you why their hourly fees are the way they are. There are at least nine reasons your expert witnesses might find valuable support for questioned fees: (1) years of experience in the field; (2) court certification your expert has; (3) membership on any court’s Panel of Experts; (4) rank and tenure in your expert’s professional discipline, such as college and university teaching; (5) books, papers, or journal articles your expert has published; (6) the number of cases in which your expert has provided expert testimony; (7) your expert’s membership and rank (such as president) in professional associations; (8) your expert’s participation and presentation at professional conferences, particularly those where continuing education credits (e.g., CLE) are awarded to their audiences of licensed professionals; and (9) your expert’s media profile: how often he or she has appeared on television or radio providing their opinions on national topics. Juries can often follow a logical trail and understand why a judge allows expert witnesses into the court to opine about cases.

In other words, juries are not usually put off by carefully-explained and well-reasoned justifications the expert makes for his or her fees. The expert witness should never be gulled by the prosecutor’s comparison of his or her own salary with that of the expert. Tell your experts to treat their fees as a kind of evidence and to speak about them openly and frankly. Rather than be or feel vilified by the prosecutor, your experts can show themselves as vital to the case because of their fees.

Frank and Direct Answers Are Best
It is highly doubtful that a prosecutor would insinuate that an expert witness “prostitutes” himself or herself in certain financially-lucrative environs around the court. Most fish find their water in the ocean. Too, any number of expert witnesses might find prospective cases among a virtual “sea” of law offices around the courthouse. It’s only practical and makes good business sense to market themselves in and among such a constellation or cluster of law firms. What the P.I. means by the “prostitute” question (if he or she even chooses to use that word at all—however, one P.I. did when querying me!) is whether the expert witness shows a dominant bias—for either prosecution or defense—in the kinds of cases taken in, say, the past year. Again, it’s better that your prospective expert answer the question head-on and directly.

By stating the obvious—that most private law firms house only defense counsels—your expert can show he or she is merely answering legally-constituted calls for defense expert testimony support and not turning away prosecutors’ requests to provide expertise on cases. To be sure, prosecutors use expert witnesses. However, the number of cases for which they bring an expert into court is but a fraction of the frequency with which defense attorneys need and use experts. Even in those cases where the defendant has been pronounced by the court as “indigent” (impoverished and unable to pay) he or she is still the client of a defense attorney who thus may need an expert witness. There’s also the fact that prosecutors select their expert witnesses from the court’s approved Panel of Experts. If your expert witness is not on the panel, that may not be his or her fault. Thus, their answer to an inquiring prosecutor, regarding the percentage of prosecution and defense cases on which they’ve worked, can reasonably be: “I would probably work more prosecution cases if I were on the court’s Panel of Experts, but I am not; and thus far I’ve not been chosen by the district attorney to participate on a case.”

If your expert has completed the application process to be on the panel, he or she should certainly state that; that fact is good public relations. The prosecutor knows that an expert’s not being on the court’s Panel of Experts may have little or nothing to do with the expertise and qualifications of the expert. Often, the court’s panel is full and there simply is no room for another expert. Frequently, not all of the judges, or any single one of them, who comprise the team that chooses expert witnesses for the Panel of Experts, hears cases for which a given expert’s rare experience and expertise are needed. The court’s “problem” here is, of course, known by the prosecutor, and is not something to be held against the expert. Your expert is not responsible for any past or present circumstances inherent in the court. Again, if your expert witness has made application to the court, to be on its Panel of Experts, he or she should so state. That revelation can clear the air and deflect any “end run” the prosecutor might try to make in the effort to disqualify your expert.

Who Can Pre-qualify Your Experts Better Than You?
Both P.I.’s and expert witnesses provide a huge and valuable service to the attorneys who employ them. And every P.I. and attorney I’ve worked for has been highly appreciative. Expert witnesses should regard questions from P.I.’s as appropriate and necessary safeguards to protect the legal rights and interests of the client and fulfill the case objectives of the hiring attorney. As a Private Investigator, you know which way the winds inside the court blow (or are likely to) better than any roomful of expert witnesses. Take time to ask your prospective expert witness the hard questions, and to pose the tough issues. If possible, meet and confer with him or her personally. Go over their resume and interview them about the information it contains. Ask them to tell you about their four cases (“your top four”) that are unique and unlike any others on which they’ve worked; then ask them to define what makes these four cases stand apart from the rest. Show them a calendar, and ask them about their availability for trial as you highlight the anticipated trial dates. Determine whether they might have schedule conflicts.

Taking Time to Talk Now Increases Value Later
By taking the time to have at least a one-hour “sit down” discussion with any prospective expert, you can pre-qualify him or her for your attorney. Your prospective expert’s opinion is the purpose for which he or she might be hired, and it ought to be the rock-solid foundation upon which their role and reputation are established and respected by the court. Therefore, your reviewing and clarifying the opinions to which they will be testifying to, is key critical. It will do you both good to hear, in their own words, what opinions they hold about the case and what they will likely say in court. Equally important, their going over with you the facts and assumptions that frame the bases of their opinions is a practical step; it is the productive equivalent of a baseball player’s doing warm-up calisthenics and taking batting practice. One can never review one’s facts and assumptions too much or too often; such review prevents one from being caught off guard on in “the blind” by opposing counsel’s peppering questions.

You will need to hear and your prospective expert needs to say how, that is, in what way they derived their opinion: What methodology did they employ? This tracking the trail from beginning to end sets up a logical step-wise chronology that can be as impressive as it can be instructive. In my own experience, prosecutors have sometimes been left astonished and speechless before admitting, “No further questions, your honor,” to the judge, after I have carefully laid out the methodology that framed and informed my professional opinion. You will certainly want to ask your expert when his or her opinion was formed. You can stress the importance of their addressing the timing of the formulation of their opinion, as the opposing counsel will seek to find some kind of fault with the timing—holding it up to be premature or incomplete, and the resultant opinion as inaccurate.
Your thorough and intensive interviews and evaluations of expert witnesses can result in your attorney’s being able to witness their value in court.

Prosecutor Turned Persecutor: Can An Expert Save Justice?

2008-07-25T13:43:00.000-07:00

Late one night, my telephone rang, and on the other end was a high-profile criminal defense attorney with whom I have worked on gang cases and other kinds of juvenile justice proceedings. He said he had to meet me for lunch the following day. He explained he had an “urgent need” to pick my brain about controversial ex-district attorney for Durham County, North Carolina, Michael Byron “Mike” Nifong. A one-man perfect storm, Mr. Nifong is best known for his own thirty-four high crimes and misdemeanors in his 2006 prosecution (on rape allegations) of players on the Duke University lacrosse team. For months he garnered national headlines, culminating, in the end, in his fall from grace and the revocation of his license and disbarment, on June 16, 2007, by the state bar association.

Apart from the plethora of state bar allegations and the criminal charges against him, press accounts of Nifong’s very public behavior include placing persecution before investigation; jumping to false conclusions; improper self insertion into lineup procedures; conduct unbecoming a District Attorney by temper tantrum and foot stomping; menacing by verbal assault; inciting racial and social division in the community; electioneering; misappropriation of public trust; indecent exposure of Durham County to civil lawsuits; hijacking the District Attorney‘s office for his own personal fiefdom; and incompetence.

The attorney on the phone and I agreed on a time and place to meet for lunch, the following day. When we ended our conversation, I returned to watching “Shark,” the hit television show starring actor James Woods as a prosecutor who, in his obsessive desire to win at nearly all costs, frequently bends the law with his brand of Cirque du Soleil- like hijinks. During a commercial break, I pondered what “urgent need” the attorney wanted addressed. What I kept replaying, in my mind’s ear, was his last statement: “I know I said I want to pick your brain about former D.A. Mike Nifong. But what I really want to talk about are the roles and responsibilities of expert witnesses when hired by a prosecutor—especially a fire-breathing dragon like Nifong.”

It has been documented by the press that Mr. Nifong’s extraordinary actions—he is said to have committed over 50 various violations of law but charged with 34—even gave birth to a new term in the legal lexicon: “Nifonged.” The Washington Post Writers Group columnist Kathleen Parker, who coined this neologism, says, "Now we can 'Nifong' someone when we want to trump up criminal charges based on flimsy evidence allegedly for political purposes. In short, when we want to screw up someone's life." Said another way, the other side of the prosecution’s double-edged sword is burn-’em-at-stake PERSECUTION come alive and unbound—rampant, relentless, reckless, Draconian, unlawful, and uncontrollable.

The Expert’s Ethics
The anxious attorney and I met for lunch the next day and had a long talk. In the Duke University Lacrosse rape case, the designated expert witness had presented his report and opinion that the DNA evidence showed what he defined as “several other men” sexually involved with the purported victim of rape, none being any of the Duke University lacrosse defendants being tried by Prosecutor Nifong. The DNA from the Duke defendants on trial did not match the DNA “evidence” said to have littered the alleged rape victim. “Aren’t expert witnesses, like lawyers, regulated by a state board or commission?” the attorney asked me. “No, not exactly,” I replied, thinking he already knew the answer to that. He frowned, paused and then continued. “What, then, ought to compel an expert witness to blow the whistle on a prosecutor suppressing and concealing exculpatory evidence, like Nifong did?” I told him that an expert witness is not obligated to report a suppression-of-evidence crime he feels a prosecutor has committed and thus protect the right to a fair trial of the defendants. “Shouldn’t the expert have confronted Mr. Nifong and insisted he publicly disclose the exculpatory evidence the expert had discovered?” No, I said. It has yet to be established that the expert witness even knew District Attorney Nifong had suppressed the exculpatory evidence. It was the press corps that sounded the alarm about Nifong’s crime, when reporting his parade of other illegal acts. Prior to the blaring press headlines, what and where was the expert’s proof of Nifong’s evidence tampering, assuming he even had reasonable doubt about Nifong’s lawful handling of the exculpatory DNA evidence?

What Did the Expert Know and When Did He Know It?
Ex-District Attorney Nifong, in addition to having already been disbarred, will be tried in court for, ironically, a boatload of more felonies than those for which he wrongly prosecuted the innocent Duke Lacrosse defendants. As we lunched, the attorney allowed as to how it could well be that Nifong’s expert witness may be subpoenaed to testify about what he might have known about Nifong’s suppression of the exculpatory evidence the expert handed over to him, how he felt about it, and why he never came forward to report Nifong’s actions. I reminded the attorney that such examination, of course, would improperly put the expert on trial. The expert would be between a rock and a hard place and even assaulted with the question, “Why didn’t you know, and in what ways were you ignorant, about the prosecutor’s suppression and concealment of the exculpatory evidence that you gave him?” Nifong’s expert witness, like most expert witnesses, probably presented his report and opinion and, having thus discharged his designated and limited duty—he apparently was not asked (allowed?) by Nifong to testify in court—took a hike, knowing absolutely nothing of Nifong’s intent to suppress and conceal the exculpatory evidence in the report that would have freed the Duke defendants.

For Whom the Bell Tolls: When to Blow the Whistle
We spent the remainder of our lunch meeting discussing whether Mr. Nifong’s expert witness ought to have confronted Mr. Nifong and demanded that he publicly disclose the contents of the suppressed evidence. Consider this: wouldn’t such a strategy (a) suggest the expert knew and could prove that Nifong suppressed the evidence? and (b) place Nifong in a position of admitting both failure to exercise due diligence and belatedly (not to mention embarrassingly) disclosing his possession of exculpatory evidence? As a hypothetical, let’s say the expert knew that Mr. Nifong hid the exculpatory evidence under lock and key, which in fact Nifong did. Should the expert have confronted Mr. Nifong about the district attorney’s legal obligation to disclose the evidence? What if Nifong denied concealing and locking up the evidence? What if, angered, afraid and feeling intimidated, he threatened the expert, physically, called the Bailiff to arrest the expert, or vowed to destroy his career?

As a whistle-blower, what further recourse would the expert have had—the Judge? The Grand Jury? The State’s Attorney? What power does an expert witness have against an omnipotent district attorney whose use, mis-use and non-use of experts he can manipulate for his own ends? With a stroke of his pen, a prosecuting district attorney can delete—for any reason or simply no reason—any expert from his Witness List. In baseball, a feared hitter is thrown “balls” by the pitcher and given a free pass to first base. In the prosecutor’s office, a feared or unfavorable report written by the designated expert can send the expert home on a free pass and bury his report in the bottom drawer in the back of the prosecutor’s remote file cabinet or in the bowels of the basement archives.

These are complicated issues that immediately, if hypothetically, pit the expert and the prosecutor against each other, as dueling adversaries. Equally important, in the day-to-day, court-by-court trial testimony framing an expert witness’ work, there is infinitely more that an expert does not know about a case. This “case fog” (general or specific case ignorance, privileged closed-door discussions, negotiated deal-making) simply dwarfs the expert’s knowledge about his or her limited designation and opinion. Recently, I was an expert for the plaintiff in a personal injury lawsuit against a school district. During my deposition, the defendant-school district’s lawyer (Jeffrey Carlson, senior partner at Carlson, Messer, and Turner Law Group, Los Angeles), by way of countering and refuting an objection made by the attorney who hired me, turned to me and said, “Jim, you are not an attorney. There is so much about the case that you don’t know, case dynamics and the like, conversations in the law office, decisions, matters of discovery, and so forth to which you were not privy.”

Impact on the Expert’s Career
The attorney then asked me what professional or selfish concerns might impede or dissuade an expert from coming forward and blowing the whistle on a prosecutor he knows has concealed exculpatory evidence. Who, in the legal community, might resent an expert’s “brass balls” and Boy Scout zeal, and could therefore hurt the expert? I replied that the presiding question that ex-district attorney Nifong’s illegalities compel us to address is, who does an expert witness really work for? The judge of the court? The hiring attorney? The people of the state? The defendants on trial? The victims seeking redress? Or the plaintiff? Expert witnesses do not get paid for snooping around to verify whether and how their reports and opinions are being used. Who can say that Nifong’s expert should have followed up and investigated whether his unwanted evidence and exculpatory opinion would actually be used to free the innocent Duke Lacrosse defendants? In Los Angeles, California, music mogul Phil Spector is on trial for murder. His defense lawyer claims that the prosecution’s expert witness removed the murdered victim’s artificial, press-on fingernail from the carpet, evidence the defense claims would show that the victim handled the very gun that killed her. The defense’s expert witness, Dr. Henry Lee, a renowned national figure, in a spirit of revolt, said he would not return to court to be grilled by the district attorney. Expert witness flare-ups are rare. And defendant Phil Spector’s expert witness’s fury made headlines. We cannot afford to disregard the potential grief the Durham, County North Carolina expert would have spared the Duke Lacrosse defendants on trial and, equally important, how much money the state would have been saved if the expert had been able to come forward and blow the whistle on ex-district attorney Mike Nifong.

Justice at Last…or Just Delayed?
Ex-district attorney Mike Nifong went after the Duke Lacrosse players with unbridled vengeance, uncommon glee, and an unwholesome and rabid prejudice that knew no bounds. Regardless of the psychological framing of his actions (fortification of his political and personal agendas), he was a runaway train whose nearly forty counts, for illegal acts, now pending against him showed him to be more a persecutor who deliberately stacked his case and trampled the rights of the accused, and less a prosecutor discharging his legal obligation to uphold the law in the prosecution of the Duke University lacrosse defendants and their the right to a fair and decent trial. Despite his acts, it’s doubtful he will get a taste of his own medicine (“Nifonged”) in court. Indeed, he will receive a more fair and humane and decent trial in a court of law than he accorded the Duke Lacrosse defendants. Arguably, in some minds there is a fundamental unfairness about that, akin to suffering in luxury.

An expert witness can often be controlled and corralled—especially by a prosecuting district attorney who is drunk with his own hubris and driven mad by his premeditated goals for using a particular court case and its outcome to launch or solidify his personal and political career objectives. In such a prosecutor’s mind, “damn the evidence” becomes his mantra. To Nifong, the exculpatory DNA evidence in his hand seductively meant “Do Not Announce.” Unfortunately for the defendants on trial, he regarded his own expert witness as just another easily-dispensable player on his field of dreams.

Putting in Work: A Gang Obsession That Includes Hate Crimes

2008-07-24T14:39:00.001-07:00

Editor's Note: The gang obsessive-compulsion passion of "putting in work" is not restricted to crimes against persons who were either: (a) "slipping", that is, high, drunk, or otherwise vulnerable; (b) weak and easy prey; (c) rival gangsters; or (d) wrongdoers who had to be "DP'D" or "dee-peed"--disciplined. Putting in work is a non-negotiable requirement to commit criminal acts to maintain gang membership and strength, as well as maintain and increase respect, fear, prestige, and reputation. "Big Homies" who run gangs are rigidly conservative in their orientation toward life and generally untrusting in their suspicion-driven world view. They are "equal opportunity employers" who require all their underlings to put in work daily. They judge the quality and character of their "soldiers" (big homies favor military-type terms) by whether and how they put in work.

Putting in work includes the hate crime of assaulting, attacking, harassing or shooting somebody based on their race and ethnicity. Thus, the People's gang enhancement allegations might well be reinforced and argued in a clear and convincing manner if there is a hate crime component to the gangbanger's actions. Many gangbangers are totally unaware of the implications of gang activities, in general, and those gang acts fueled and driven by racial hatred. Big Homie simply does not take time to educate his underlings about how state prison sentencing is factored when one of his "little homies" is being tried in court on gang enhancement AND hate crime charges.

The barbaric and primal assaulting of persons who are of the same race and ethnicity as their attackers, is so customary among gangs as to be virtually a crime-cliche to the public at large. Whenever there were gang-against-gang conflicts, one could very nearly always presume the combatants to have been of the same race. That is why law enforcement and districts attorney are taking a hard look at gang assaults on persons whose race and ethnicity are markedly different than their attackers. Latino gang assaults on blacks figure prominently, in terms of frequency. Black gang assaults on latinos, although they do occur, do not happen with the same frequency.

A presiding question that may come to your mind is, since Big Homie is not tutoring his slave-flock of young gangbangers about the punitive and sentencing phases of court trials and the power of juries, who in the community is alerting these adolescents-wanting-to-be-men to the bigger-than-life danger of having their manhood aborted and abruptly curtailed by torturous terms spent in youth probation camps, state youth prison, and adult state prison (commonly called the "big house")? Who is really telling them what gang acts really mean, from a prosecutor's point of view? Who is telling them the truth about how the prosecutor, in the name of "The People," can argue convincingly and persuasively that a young defendant on trial is so hard-core that every act he does is in the name of the trinity known as My Gang, My Big Homie, My Hood. Once that argument is made, delivered, and buttressed with sundry pieces of evidence, a hate crime, in addition to being exploited and magnified by the prosecutor, for the jury, becomes the high-octane fuel that ignites, inflames, and confirms the gang-enhancement charge: acts done at the direction of, or for the benefit of, the gang, to enhance its reputation, inspire fear, and exercise control.

The defense never rests. And despite gangbangers' virtual nonstop activity, they deserve to have their right to a fair trial preserved, protected and honored by those of us who aid and abet said defense in a court of law.

The County Human Relations Commission reports a 28% increase last year, with assaults and vandalism the leading categories.
By Teresa Watanabe
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

12:32 PM PDT, July 24, 2008

Hate crimes in Los Angeles rose to their highest level in five years last year, led by attacks between Latinos and blacks, county officials reported today. The annual report by the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission showed hate crimes rose by 28% overall for a total of 763, with assault and vandalism leading the way.

The largest number involved Latino suspects against black victims; the second largest involved black suspects against Latino victims.

Despite the intense national debate over illegal immigration, hate crimes against immigrants decreased slightly. Incidents against Muslims, which increased after the 2001 terrorist attacks, also decreased slightly. The largest number of religion-based hate crimes were directed against Jews.

The rise in hate crimes contrasted with the decline in the general crime rate in Los Angeles.

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com

Testilying in Los Angeles

2008-07-18T13:10:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: Testilying is a word, coined by internationally-renowned criminal defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, to define fraudulent court testimony by sworn law enforcement officers. Professor (he's served on the faculty of Harvard Law School) Dershowitz chose a word that both instantly and accurately spells what sometimes happens under oath when police are on the witness stand. In spite of his research about and experience with this form of truth decay, Mr. Dershowitz was unjustifiably criticized by insulted prosecutors and law enforcement officers alike; moreover, he was attacked in the press. Truth is often accepted or acknowledged in small quantities, at unpredictable or inconvenient times. Despite this, the supply of truth seems to always exceed its demand. The demand for it must be created and sustained and nurtured for growth. Without question, Professor Dershowitz has performed an invaluable public service.

The following article sheds both light and heat on what Mr. Dershowitz recognized and publicly reported (he even wrote a book on testilying) when police distort justice and deform the constitutional process of according defendants a fair trial. Before Alan Dershowitz sounded the alarm, many of the nation's defendants on trial, particularly ethnic minorities, have for decades known about and experienced law enforcement's sabotaging and corrupting of their rights to a fair trial.

Charges of Police Lying Haunt Cases Whether officers' false testimony is deliberate or an innocent mistake is often difficult to prove. Officials contend such problems are rare.

By FREDRIC N. TULSKY, TED ROHRLICH, JOHN JOHNSON, Times Staff Writers. From: mnovick@laedu.lalc.k12.ca.us (michael novick)

The 11 p.m. news was on when gasoline-filled bottles came crashing through the window of an apartment in the Pueblo del Rio housing project. A woman and her 11-month-old daughter were engulfed in flames. Within hours, the police announced to an anxious community that the homicides were solved: An 18-year-old gang member had confessed.

But the case was not that simple. After Robert Vanke had spent four years in jail awaiting trial, an FBI expert determined that his taped confession had been altered. His attorney contended that police intentionally erased two crucial minutes of tape, making an innocent man appear guilty.

Detectives said the erasures were inadvertent and innocuous. But the prosecutor, voicing serious doubts about Vanke's guilt, dismissed the charges. The Vanke case and a series of other cases haunted by allegations of police misconduct were examined as part of a broader study of homicide in Los Angeles County.

The review was undertaken amid allegations that police had framed O.J. Simpson. These allegations fueled mistrust of police, particularly in minority communities. The examination focused on a dozen instances in which evidence established that Los Angeles Police Department officers had falsely testified or withheld crucial evidence. In four other cases, prosecutors dismissed murder charges after questions were raised about the conduct or veracity of police. How often police testify falsely or withhold evidence is impossible to know. Every day in court, witnesses and police accuse each other of lying about what police were told during their investigations. But seldom is there independent evidence to disprove the police version. In each case that was reviewed, there were lingering questions about whether the alleged police misconduct resulted from an intentional act or an innocent mistake.

For example:

* A detective testified about how he smooth-talked a murder suspect into voluntarily coming to the station for questioning. It never happened. The officer was on vacation. The error, he later said, arose out of confusion.

* A detective failed to disclose that he paid $100 to an eyewitness who identified a murder suspect. The payment was not disclosed, the officer said, because its disclosure could have endangered the informant.

* A detective swore that he had confirmed where a murder suspect lived before police raided the house. But the suspect had been dead for months, dead even before the murder occurred. The detective later insisted that he had checked the house and was given erroneous information by the suspect's mother.

To some, an officer's intent is irrelevant. For people who are victims of such conduct, "it doesn't matter that the officers say it was an innocent mistake," said Georgetown University law professor Abbe Smith. "It is a terrible thing to come into court and watch an officer testify falsely, and watch everyone else believe the testimony."

Smith said her years as a public defender and as deputy director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute convinced her that such instances happen most often to poor people and minorities. "Experiences like this make impoverished people convinced that the system is not for them," she said.

The magnitude of that mistrust was illustrated by Los Angeles Times polls in 1994 and 1995, which found that most people of color do not trust the police and most white people do. More than two-thirds of African American residents of Los Angeles County believe that police commonly testify falsely, the polls found. About half of the Latinos agreed, versus only a quarter of whites. The polls were conducted before and after the Simpson murder trial, in which allegations of police lying became a major focus.

--snip--

Police are authorized to lie during investigations in pursuit of the truth. Police can lie during undercover operations. They can use ruses to find out where people live so they can get search warrants. At homicide school, a reporter watched as officers were taught to bluff suspects into confessing by pretending to have evidence when they did not. They were taught to use falsely labeled notebooks, supposedly containing reams of evidence. Detectives put this kind of advice into practice. In one case, detectives went into an interview armed with the statement of Ivan Benad, a resident of Wish Avenue. Court records show that Benad existed only in the minds of the homicide detectives. His name was a play on words: "I've been had." As other detectives interviewed suspect Chico William Donnell, they told him they had plenty of evidence: A witness put him at the scene; his fingerprints were found on the murder weapon. He could trust them, the detectives said, because the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that they could not lie to suspects. But that assurance was only one more lie. As Deputy Dist. Atty. Brenda Burns told the judge in defending the technique: "The state of the law is very clear about what detectives can and can't do. They can lie, they can make up evidence, and they can say a lot of leading and suggestive things to defendants."

New York University law professor Jerome Skolnick says society has condoned such lies "ostensibly because the good end of criminal capture and conviction justifies the bad means of lying." But he questions whether a culture that encourages such ruses out of court is able to leave them at the courtroom door. "One could take the view that this [the courtroom] is a totally different context, so suffused with dignity and the sacred that police would inevitably find it abhorrent to lie in such a revered setting," Skolnick said. "Regrettably, the evidence suggests otherwise."

Former New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton said: "A lot of police chiefs would not admit there is a problem with 'testilying.' It is a problem--for the profession. You have to face up to it. What's the scope of it? The impact of it? That's debatable." In May 1995, LAPD Det. Andrew Teague took the witness stand and testified that two men on trial for murder had signed statements claiming that the chief witness against them, Racjon Floyd, was the real killer. Actually, the documents were phony, prepared as a ruse by Teague himself. Teague had taken the suspects' signatures and pasted them onto witness forms. He wrote in their supposed statements and copied them before he went to interrogate Floyd. The ruse was designed to convince Floyd that it was in his interest to cooperate with Teague and implicate the two suspects.

But asked in court about the documents, Teague testified that they were authentic. The defense had a handwriting expert appointed. When that expert asked Teague's partner for the original documents, Teague said there were no originals. He told the prosecutor he had forgotten about the forgery. Teague's admission caused the prosecution to dismiss the case. The case could not have come at a worse time. Det. Mark Fuhrman had been accused of lying in the Simpson case when he denied using the word "nigger"--an accusation that later led to his perjury conviction.

LAPD Chief Willie L. Williams--already faced with a public furor over police lying--publicly condemned Teague and suspended him. But a police review board later concluded that an overworked Teague had simply made a mistake because he had failed to review his investigative file before testifying. "It was not a mistake of the heart," said a civilian board member. "It was only a mistake of the mind." The finding seemed implausible to the defense attorney, Armando Wood, who wondered how Teague could have gone to so much trouble to create a ruse and then forgotten about it. "If my clients gave an excuse like that," said Wood, a deputy alternate public defender, "nobody would believe them." Teague has sued Chief Williams, claiming he was slandered by Williams' comments. That lawsuit is pending.

--snip--

Paying a Witness The case of Michael Carr shows how the actions of an officer can be viewed in dramatically different ways. Carr was accused of being one of two gunmen who burst into a hotel room before dawn and opened fire in 1991. A man and a woman were killed; a third occupant was badly wounded. Deputy Dist. Atty. Karen Thorp, like many prosecutors, was used to having terrified witnesses back away from identifications. But witness Terence Rose contended that he had only made the identification because LAPD Det. Rudy Lemos had paid him $100. Most shocking to the prosecutor was that Lemos acknowledged the payment. The detective said the payment was to secure the witness' help in finding another witness. "Why would you ever give an I.D. witness, or any witness, money?" Thorp recalled asking. After the prosecutor detailed the incident in a memo, the judge stopped the trial and held a hearing. Records showed that Lemos paid Rose the $100 on the same day, and at the same time, that Rose made the identification. The detective said the money and the identification were not connected. Just after Rose made the identification, he asked for money to buy Christmas presents for his children, Lemos said. Lemos got authorization for the $100 from a superior. But he did not disclose the payment to trial attorneys. He explained he had not wanted Rose labeled a "snitch." After hearing from Rose and Lemos, the judge said he found portions of both versions "incredible." Superiors at the LAPD investigated what they termed Rose's "preposterous" allegation. They concluded that Lemos was a veteran policeman with a reputation for integrity and that he had done nothing improper or unusual: Police often pay people who help them and do not list the payments in their investigative reports. The investigation concluded that Rose had backed away from his identification because Carr had intimidated him. The payment so contaminated the trial that the prosecutor decided against using Rose. That left only one witness against Carr--Kenneth Cole, who survived the motel room attack. The defense alleged that Cole too benefited from cooperating in the murder investigation; his bail in an unrelated attempted murder case kept being reduced, until finally he was released without bail. Lemos testified that he had nothing to do with Cole's bail reductions. He said that, to the best of his knowledge, neither he nor his partner had even talked about Cole's case with the judge or attorneys. However, Deputy Public Defender Douglas Goldstein testified that he had several conversations with Lemos or his partner and that they agreed not to oppose Cole's release on bail. In reducing bail, the judge had noted that the prosecution had no objection "if defendant continues to cooperate" with Lemos and his partner. After hearing Goldstein contradict Lemos, Judge Robert Perry had heard enough. "I have a significant doubt . . . to whether or not Mr. Carr committed these offenses," Perry said in taking the case away from the jury and finding Carr not guilty. The jury convicted the other alleged gunman, Eric Buford, and he was sentenced to two life terms.

Costly Search Warrant When two youths were killed for videotaping gang members cruising along Crenshaw Boulevard, the police planned a massive raid of 18 houses in 1993 to catch the suspects. Det. Mark Arneson was assigned to confirm that suspect Gregory Davis lived in a house in Inglewood. Arneson said that Davis' mother confirmed his residency. Based on that assurance, police obtained a search warrant and conducted a nighttime raid. But Davis was not home. He had died in a traffic accident months earlier, even before the killings. His mother, who still lived in the house, sued the police in federal court. Gloria Tave contended that they had "terrorized" her. Arneson testified in the plaintiff's suit that he had gone to the house and confirmed that Davis lived there--testimony that was backed up by his partner. U.S. District Judge Edward Rafeedie said before trial that he believed that verification was "completely whole cloth . . . invented as a matter of convenience to satisfy the requirements of the judge" who had been asked to sign the search warrant. Rafeedie urged the city to settle the suit. The city went to trial anyway. The jury awarded Tave $68,850 and--in a rare display of displeasure--ordered Arneson to personally pay $1,000 of the judgment. In an interview, Arneson insisted that he really had gone to the house. "She told me her boy was there," he said. "She didn't tell me he was dead. . . . I'm not going to fictionalize." Arneson speculated that the jury had been racially biased in favor of Tave and against him because she is black and he is white. Arneson, a 19-year LAPD veteran and gang expert, transferred out of homicide after his credibility became an issue in several other cases as well. Now a patrol sergeant in Watts, Arneson said he was fed up with "completely outlandish" attacks from defense attorneys who dislike him because of his success in catching killers.

Copyright Los Angeles Times

Compton Gang Does the Humpty Dumpty Under Attorney General Attack

2008-07-17T16:07:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: The following press release describes an unprecedented (in terms of prime, concentrated attention from the Attorney General) heavy-duty broadside on a Compton gang whose prominence among the press corps coincided with the rise of gangster rap, in the 1990's. Questions that might spring to mind as you read this are: Despite some of the arrestees having good jobs requiring some intelligence and training, is it possible they were so possessed by the gangster criminal mindset, that they were simply "gone" and beyond rehabilitation? Is there a direct link between criminal street gangs and gangster rap music? Does this major crackdown, approved by the Attorney General, suggest millions of dollars allocated for this, and unprecedented time and labor (person-hours) expended? Was this gang crackdown a priority for the entire state, that is, was the target representative of the most heinous and dangerous activity and community threat above and beyond other concurrent gang acts in the state? Will its unarguable success inspire more such crackdowns in Oakland, San Francisco, Long Beach, Riverside, San Diego, Pasadena, San Bernardino, East Los Angeles, Highland Park, Glassell Park, Ventura and Contra Costa counties, and elsewhere?

But before you read the Attorney General's press release, below, please read and reflect on some thoughts I have. And here they are:

For Expert Witnesses who work primarily for the Defense Bar, a State Attorney's public and pre-arraignment comments describing the social or employment status of arrested suspects may create a prejudicial profile in the minds of jurors against alleged gangbangers facing imminent trial. Heretofore, experts like myself have included in our defense arguments and opinions, "exceptional status" facts to show the Court that the defendant is atypical of and differentiated from the "jobless-marauder/criminal public menace" (my emphasis) profile traditionally framed in the District Attorney's arguments and allegations against members of gangs. Indeed, many districts attorney argue, often not so subtly, that a gangbanger-defendant's proper job should be as an inmate inside the state penitentiary. Jury verdicts, often driven by feelings buried within their unconscious mind, may show their pre-decision concurrence with this argument; because of that, such pre-trial comments that a State Attorney might make about a suspect's employment status ought to be deemed unconstitutional.

Expert Witnesses will need to look inside their quivers and use any arrows that, combined and compounded, may show the defendant in a contrastingly favorable light, and a far remove from any prejudice-toward-guilt/jury tampering public comments any elected official might make, while reeling under spontaneity and surprise about the social and employment status of arrested suspects. The California Attorney General's comments were, in effect, a self-admission that he subscribed to the mindset that having a "good job" automatically confers upon one a good-and-wholesome character profile, the social ideal. Said another way, the meta-talk by the California Attorney General seems to have really meant: "Jurors, beware of gangbanger defendants holding good jobs--they're as good as guilty."

Brown Announces Major Compton Gang Crackdown, Arrest of Killer Mail Carrier

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  Tuesday July 8, 2008 at 2:00 p.m.  Contact: Gareth Lacy, California Department of Justice, (916) 324-5500 or Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Deputy Bill Braudberger, (323) 267-4813   

Further escalating the state’s crackdown on violent gang activity, California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department today announced that 24 Mob Piru gang members were arrested this morning in the City of Compton.   The arrests mark the conclusion of a major gang investigation, Operation Killen Court, launched by the California Attorney General and the Los Angeles County Sheriff after Kyutza Herrera, an innocent bystander, was shot and killed during a drive-by shooting involving rival gang members. Kyutza’s suspected killers and associates, Maruice Bennett, 19, Alex Graves, 23, Robert Maxwell, 19, and a fourth suspect who is a juvenile, were arrested during the course of the investigation into the Bloods-affiliated Mob Piru gang.

  “The California Department of Justice launched an investigation into the Mob Pirus after four gang members gunned down an innocent woman,” Attorney General Brown told a news conference at the Compton Youth Athletic League. “State agents joined with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to crack down on this dangerous street gang that has terrorized Compton with constant violence and gang rivalry. We are proud to announce that sheriff’s deputies apprehended the killers and the state’s investigation led to dozens of additional gang arrests.”   The attorney general’s office launched its investigation after suspected Mob Piru gang members shot and killed Kyutza Herrera who was a parked in front of Ace Liquor at 12211 Long Beach Boulevard in Lynwood. Herrera, who was not affiliated in any way with either gang, was shot in her car when the suspects opened fire on rival gang members.   

The attorney general’s Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement special agents joined the case to investigate Mob Piru gang members suspected to be connected to this shooting and other violent activity. During the investigation, state agents stopped an attempted murder outside of a nightclub and derailed a plan to rob a local post office by a gang member who was also a mail carrier. The gang was recently preparing to import at least 20 firearms from Georgia to sell to other gang members.   One of the gang members, Alex Graves, 23, a United States Post Office mail carrier, was arrested in connection with the drive-by shooting of Kyutza Herrera. Warren Phillipus, 28, also a mail carrier, was wanted in connection with the robbery of the Rancho Park Post Office and was caught by state agents as he was preparing to rob the Rimpau Post Office, both located in South Los Angeles. Phillipus has been charged with robbery, conspiracy to commit robbery, conspiracy to commit assault with a deadly weapon, and conspiracy to traffic marijuana.   

“These gang members had regular day jobs but their gang affiliation was so strong that they continued to roam the streets, terrorizing the community,” Attorney General Brown said. “It is shocking that gang identity is so powerful that even good paying jobs are not enough to turn these suspects from their criminal activity,” Brown added.   Today’s gang crackdown, Operation Killen Court, is the culmination of a six-month investigation into the Mob Piru gang, an organization that killed, robbed and assaulted people in the City of Compton. Piru gangs first established themselves in Compton in the early 1970s to fight rival Crip gangs. The gang members named themselves after Piru Street, in Compton and called themselves “Bloods.” The Mob Piru gang, which gained national recognition in the 1990s along with the rise of gangster rap, has approximately 200 members and has connections to Oregon and New York.

During today’s crackdown, special agents identified 49 targets and made 24 arrests for offenses including murder, conspiracy to commit assault with a deadly weapon, robbery, conspiracy to commit robbery, marijuana trafficking, parole violations, and weapons violations. The Multi-Agency Response Team for Drug Endangered Children participated in today’s operation and were responsible for rescuing three children from felony child endangerment at two residences, one of which had a shotgun accessible to a child. Two of the children are 4-years-old, one is 10-months-old, and one is 1 and ½ years-old.   At approximately 6 a.m. today nearly 450 state, local and federal law enforcement personnel executed 33 search and arrest warrants and conducted 20 probation and parole searches in Los Angeles and San Bernardino Counties. Although agents seized small quantities of marijuana and “rock” cocaine, the gang’s foothold involved rival gang violence and subsequently, law enforcement seized 7 handguns, 4 rifles, and 1 sawed-off shotgun.   

The California Department of Justice Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement led today’s operation in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The Los Angeles Interagency Metropolitan Police Apprehension Crime Task Force, known as LAIMPACT, which includes Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Los Angeles County Probation, California Highway Patrol, DEA, US Customs, Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office and Police Departments in Alhambra, Baldwin Park, Culver City, Downey, El Segundo, Gardena, Glendora, Hawthorne, Hermosa Beach, Inglewood, La Verne, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Manhattan Beach, Monrovia, Monterey Park, Pasadena, Pomona, Redondo Beach, San Gabriel, Santa Monica, Torrance, Vernon, West Covina and Whitter, also participated in today’s operation.   According to the most recent statistics, there are more than 1,000 gangs operating in Los Angeles County.

Between 2003 and 2007, there were 7,482 gang-related crimes in Compton including murders, rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, arson and motor vehicles thefts. In 2007, the city had 37 homicides of which 18, nearly 49 percent, were gang-related. Approximately 20 percent of all homicides in California are gang-related. Between January and April of this year, Compton has had a total of 13 homicides, 14 forcible rapes, 175 robberies and 326 assaults.   The California Department of Justice assists local law enforcement when gang problems have become so severe that the crime is bleeding into neighboring jurisdictions. State agents recently shut down a Norteño street gang and a violent Cambodian street gang in Stockton, a Sureño gang in Atwater and the Varrio Central Poros, a brutal criminal street gang that had terrorized the City of Porterville. State special agents have also participated in recent crime crackdowns in Oakland and East Palo Alto.   For an information wanted bulletin detailing the facts of the Kyutza Herrera shooting and photos of guns seized during the operation, please contact the Attorney General’s Press Office at (916) 324-5500 or the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department at (323) 267-4813.
# # #

NFL Steps Up Monitoring of Players for Gang Signs

2008-07-16T23:13:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: The following article reports that the National Football League (NFL), concerned about the flashing of gang signs among angry players, is ratcheting up its monitoring of such signs. Questions that might leap to mind as you read this are: Why has it taken so long for the NFL to recognize that a significant number of its players consider themselves gangsters? What does "stepping up its monitoring of...flashing...hand signals" mean, that the NFL will take disciplinary measures against players who are witnessed by others and caught on video flashing? What kinds of disciplinary measures will the NFL take? Will the NFL have enough courage to take a firm stand against gang hand-sign flashing or will it elect to tip-toe a waltz around the player's representative and draft vague, muddled language that nobody can understand and, as a result, confuse folks about what it is that's supposed to be against NFL rules and deserving of sanctions?

Is the NFL prepared to ask player-aspirants or draftees, before showering them with contracts, if they are now, or ever have been, affiliated with any criminal street gang? Is the NFL itself prepared to undergo thorough and complete training on gangs, gang culture, and telltale signs of gang membership, including the wearing of certain kinds of tattoos? Is the NFL prepared to usher in a new wave of acceptable-looking players--clean-cut and minus tattoos and gang hand signs--publicize this and then practice what it preaches (this could lead to some NFL hopefuls NOT getting signed, despite families' and agents' expectations)? Does the NFL ever run criminal background checks on players before signing them? If you think about the numbers of NFL players who have been arrested, or have been victims of homicide, you would have to agree that such backgrounds checks might have revealed past gang activity, histories of abuse of spouses or significant others, cruelty to animals, and other crimes, including weapons violations.

NEW YORK (AP)—The NFL is stepping up its monitoring of on-field player activities to ensure that no one is flashing the hand signals of street gangs.

The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that the league had hired experts to look at game tapes and identify players or team officials who might be using suspected gang signals. Violators would be warned and disciplined if the episodes recurred.

League officials said Tuesday that avoiding gang-related activities has long been stressed.

They said the scrutiny was intensified after the shooting death of Denver cornerback Darrent Williams in 2007 after Williams was involved in a dispute with known gang members. Anti-gang information is included in orientation literature and stressed in the annual mandatory league meeting for rookies.

The NFL took further notice after Paul Pierce of the NBA’s Boston Celtics was fined $25,000 in April for what the league said was a “menacing gesture” toward the Atlanta Hawks’ bench. “I 100 percent do not in any way promote gang violence or anything close to it.” Pierce said in a statement. “I am sorry if it was misinterpreted that way at Saturday’s game.”

The Times said that was the precipitating incident for the NFL.

“We were always suspicious that might be happening,” it quoted Mike Pereira, the NFL’s vice president of officiating, as saying of gang-related signals. “But the Paul Pierce thing is what brought it to light. When he was fined … that’s when we said we need to take a look at it and see if we need to be aware of it.”

Most senior NFL officials were at a league outing Tuesday and could not immediately be reached for comment.

Would You Rather be Free or Have Your Miranda Rights Read?

2008-07-16T17:16:00.000-07:00

Society's view is that gangbangers perceive themselves to be icons of intelligence, current models of brilliance as they move at their speed of life. "Both" views are correct: society's perceptions about how the gangbanger sees himself, and the gangbanger's attributing of great powers to himself. Much of this self-idolatry has been forged through acts of violence.

In response to their endless testosterone-saturated braying and bragging, I occasionally told the hard-core gangbangers in my classroom at the Los Padrinos Juvenile Court School (Downey, CA): "All I hear you guys talk about is how smart, strong, fast, and sexy you are. But tell me, why did you get caught? Yeah, I heard laughter at somebody bragging about how the cop fell on the street, skinned his knee, and tried to run, half-crippled, before he quit and gave up the chase. But, somehow, despite that overweight, out-of-shape cop, you still got caught and now you're here." Needless to say, they had no answer. So, I continued with: "In poker, they say if, in the first 30 seconds of playing, you can't tell who the sucker is, then the sucker is you." More than a few squirmed uncomfortably and some even gave out with a hard, bitter, knowing and humorless laugh.

Truth, although there all along, is often "discovered" by gangbangers too late. Like when they're locked up, as was the situation with my hard-bitten, cynical, street-wise-but-life-stupid gangsters.

I am no longer at the Los Padrinos Juvenile Court School teaching hard-core gangbangers. I work full time for defense lawyers as an expert witness in gang cases being tried in court. Usually, the clause "in the company with" is what gets several of my gangbanger clients busted. Why? Being "in the company with" other known gangbangers is a proven threat to the community: Like savaging wolf packs, this "company" of gangbangers often marauds through neighborhoods, robbing, fighting, shooting, intimidating, and threatening ordinary, law-abiding persons. "In the company with" is a major plank in the platform of the City Attorney's Gang Injunction. Most of my clients argue that they were not doing anything with that other person, they were merely just being with him. Well, obviously, they are so stupid they don't realize that's exactly what they are specifically NOT supposed to be doing. D-u-u-u-h! The Gang Injunction does not say that it's okay to be with another known gangbanger so long as you are not engaged in a criminal act. Hello! The criminal act is being "in the company with" that other gangbanger. These gangbangers apparently are too stupid to obey the law, and yet they try to "re-write" (rationalize) the law by explaining they weren't doing a crime (yet).

Occasionally, I am told by clients that they didn't understand their Miranda Rights, even though the arresting officer advised them of these fundamental rights and read the Miranda script to them. Perhaps, in the excitement of getting arrested, they simply forgot the caveat: "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law," and so forth. My suggestion to law enforcement would be to say the following, after reading an arrestee his/her Miranda Rights: "Did you understand what I just read to you? Now, tell me, in your own words, what the rights, that I have just read to you, mean." Listen to his own wording of and utterance about his Miranda Rights. Then, make the following minor change to the official form on which the arrestee is supposed to attest that he has had his Miranda Rights read to him: Add this language: "I acknowledge by my signature that I have repeated, in my own words, the rights that I have and therefore communicated my understanding about those rights." Thus, the gangbanger arrestee has killed two birds with one stone--or rather, fed two birds with one hand (we don't want to suggest violence, do we?): He has confirmed that the Miranda Rights were read to him by the arresting officer and, equally important, that he understood them. If and when he is arrested again (often the case), he will probably be read his Miranda Rights.

My advice to him would be to stop doing the crazy, illegal and barbaric acts that result in his getting arrested. Losing his Miranda Rights is a lot more tolerable, if he's free, legal and law-abiding, than if he's arrested and incarcerated. Miranda Rights do not hold a candle to being free. (Do you hear that, my classroomful of young gangbangers who argue over whether or not the arresting officer "read me my Miranda Rights"?) You ought to be debating over a multi-dimensional strategy you can execute to get a job, keep yourself gainfully employed, go to school and finish your G.E.D. requirements, help your family, and give back to the community. Decide to stop being a prisoner of your own achievements.

Are Gangbangers Too Smart to Get Arrested?

2008-07-16T17:10:00.001-07:00

Prosecutors are probably wondering who intelligent gangbangers really are. Criminal acts definitely enslave one to his own misdeeds. He becomes a prisoner of his own achievements and, through drug and alcohol use, gives up his brain to be sacrificed. The following story may prompt prosectors to ask, "How shrewd is this Drew Street crew?" (As an expert witness for the Defense Bar, I am primarily interested in whether the gang enhancement allegations made against my gangbanger-clients are grounded in credible evidence and true witness statements.)

On Tuesday, June 24, 2008, more than 500 federal agents participated in a raid that netted 70 defendants of the Drew Street clique of the Avenues gang on charges of racketeering. Apparently, like turkeys who welcome a downpour of rain by craning their necks, opening their mouths and drowning, these Drew Street non-wonders didn't see 100, 200, 300, 400, or even 500 dressed-for-battle agents coming to nab them. What were these leaky brains smoking?

Heavily armed police and federal agents stormed into a Glassell Park neighborhood Wednesday morning to wrest control away from a street gang -- and loyalists with deep family ties to its members -- that has in effect turned the sequestered swath of run-down apartments into rogue territory.

With a sweeping federal racketeering indictment, more than 500 agents, including 10 SWAT teams, arrested 28 people in an attempt to root out the Avenues gang members who have ruled the area with violence and near impunity.

The indictment, which grew out of a 10-month investigation, names 70 defendants -- mostly connected to the Drew Street clique of the larger Avenues gang. The gang dates to the zoot suit era in Northeast Los Angeles and is closely connected to the Mexican Mafia prison gang. Twenty-six defendants were already in custody and 16 are at large.

Prosecutors allege that the gang committed three murders, shot at police, extorted businesses, conducted home invasion robberies, taxed drug dealers for the Mexican Mafia and threatened potential witnesses -- all as part of an enterprise to distribute methamphetamine and rock cocaine in the area. Authorities say undercover agents conducted scores of drug purchases from the gang during the investigation.

U.S. Atty. Thomas P. O'Brien called the sweep "the largest gang take-down in recent L.A. history."

He said he was confident that by targeting so many defendants with heavy federal charges, the effort would accomplish what previous crackdowns, convictions, injunctions and evictions have so far been unable to do: break the gang's grip on the low-income neighborhood, which is heavily Latino.

Half of the defendants could face life in prison without parole if convicted, said Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office.

Francisco "Pancho" Real, 26, who was identified as the leader of the Drew Street clique, brought in $1,200 a day in drug money alone, according to a wiretap recording described in the indictment. He was arrested at his home in Glendale.

The gang stirred a storm of media coverage and police attention after a wild, rolling shootout in February.

The indictment suggests that the shooting stemmed from a brewing turf battle between the Avenues, backed by the Mexican Mafia, and the Cypress Park gang.

On Feb. 21, in order to prevent Cypress Park from dealing drugs in their territory, the indictment alleges, Real's cohorts shot to death one of its members, Marcos Salas, as he held his 2-year-old granddaughter's hand in front of her elementary school. Minutes later police pulled over the three suspected gunmen, who then opened fire with an assault rifle. Police fatally shot one of them, Real's half brother Daniel Leon.

Authorities had wiretaps on Real's phones at the time. The day after the shooting, Real shrugged off Leon's death, using a profanity to say "[stuff] happens," according to the indictment.

The gang didn't skip a beat after the shootout, the summaries of the wiretaps suggest.

In March, Real ordered the owner of a local tire shop to pay him $30,000 within 24 hours, prosecutors allege, or he would kill him and burn down his shop. When the owner of an adjoining tire shop told Real that he did not understand why they had to pay him, Real said they were operating in his territory, the indictment alleges.

Real is one of 13 children of Maria Leon, the matriarch of the gang and a defendant in the case, according to law enforcement. She has a criminal record with three drug arrests and was in custody Wednesday morning for reentering the country after a deportation.

The family hails from a sweltering, lawless part of the Mexican state of Guerrero, as does much of the neighborhood. Based on their shared roots, many residents maintain a fierce solidarity and loathing for the police.

On Wednesday, an 81-year-old woman on Isabel Street, Olga Martinez, called the police "gestapos" after they broke down her door looking for her son. Numerous other residents declined to talk.

"We don't know anything, we didn't hear anything, we didn't see anything," said a woman who lives on Drew Street and declined to give her name.

The layout of the small neighborhood -- cut off by San Fernando Road, backed up against Forest Lawn Memorial-Park -- helps this separation from mainstream society persist just four miles from downtown Los Angeles. With few entrances, spotters easily monitor who comes and goes. Gang interventionists, common in other tough neighborhood, don't even go there.

"The Drew Street gang ordinarily is vigilant to the presence of 'outsiders,' " the indictment says. "Gang members are likely to identify and physically threaten to kill them."

The Avenues, which police estimate has about 400 members, had a bout of infamy in 1995 when members shot and killed 3-year-old Stephanie Kuhen, whose family made a wrong turn into a dead-end street in Cypress Park.

The dense configuration of apartments on Drew Street allows gangbangers to disappear when police roll in.

"This is a claustrophobic neighborhood, and the gang members use it to their advantage," City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo said.

Delgadillo's office shut down Maria Leon's house on Drew Street last year with a nuisance abatement lawsuit. More than 40 arrests had been made there in 2006. During a raid in 2002, police found cocaine, marijuana, a Tec-9 assault weapon, ammunition, a small explosive and a cellphone that was ringing with customers' drug orders, according to court records. Six children under 10 were inside, including Leon's youngest child, a 3-month-old boy.

Leon and her family moved to Victorville, where the Internal Revenue Service recently seized their home as part of this investigation.

Eighteen agencies were involved in the probe, including the LAPD; federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, FBI, IRS, Glendale police and the Los Angeles city attorney.

On Wednesday, Delgadillo announced 10 more nuisance abatement lawsuits to clean out properties in the area. The suits aim to force property owners to provide armed security guards, security cameras, strict tenant screening and the eviction of anyone involved in drug sales or use.

"The people who live in this neighborhood are prisoners in their own homes," he said.

Authorities said the gang routinely threatened witnesses to their crimes, creating a climate of fear that allowed members to operate freely.

In one allegation detailed in the indictment, three members robbed a residence on Marmion Way, using a 9-millimeter handgun and an M-11 assault rifle.

When Real got word that the victims were to appear at a police lineup, he directed a subordinate to "instruct the victims . . . that they were to 'keep their mouths shut' and not identify any of the Avenues or Drew Street gang members at the lineup that day or [he] would retaliate against them," the indictment said.

Two of the victims did what he said, but one did not, the indictment said. Real allegedly drove to that person's house that night and threatened to retaliate against them or their family if they went to court again.

U.S. Atty. O'Brien said his office was investigating allegations that an attorney for one of the gang members tipped Real off when witnesses showed up at police lineups.

Police and state prosecutors often complain that the gang cannot be brought to trial because witnesses are intimidated. Because much of the 157-page indictment is based on federal wiretap evidence and drug buys by undercover agents, prosecutors hope to circumvent that obstacle.

This story was written by Joe Mozingo, Sam Quinones and Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers, June 26, 2008. (My comments are editorial only.)

joe.mozingo@latimes.com

sam.quinones@latimes.com

molly.hennessyfiske @latimes.com

Being Smart About Life Better Than Being Street Smart

2008-07-16T11:25:00.001-07:00

Society's view is that gangbangers perceive themselves to be icons of intelligence, current models of brilliance as they move at their speed of life.

In response to their endless testosterone-saturated braying and bragging, I occasionally told the hard-core gangbangers in my classroom at the Los Padrinos Juvenile Court School (Downey, CA): "All I hear you guys talk about is how smart, strong, fast, and sexy you are. But tell me, why did you get caught? Yeah, I heard laughter at somebody bragging about how the cop fell on the street, skinned his knee, and tried to run, half-crippled, before he quit and gave up the chase. But, somehow, despite that overweight, out-of-shape cop, you still got caught and now you're here." Needless to say, they had no answer. So, I continued with: "In poker, they say if, in the first 30 seconds of playing, you can't tell who the sucker is, then the sucker is you." More than a few squirmed uncomfortably and some even gave out with a hard, bitter, knowing and humorless laugh.

Truth, although there all along, is often "discovered" by gangbangers too late. Like when they're locked up, as was the situation with my hard-bitten, cynical, street-wise-but-life-stupid gangsters.

I am no longer at the Los Padrinos Juvenile Court School teaching hard-core gangbangers. I work full time for defense lawyers as an expert witness in gang cases being tried in court. Usually, the clause "in the company with" is what gets several of my gangbanger clients busted. Why? Being "in the company with" other known gangbangers is a proven threat to the community: Like savaging wolf packs, this "company" of gangbangers often marauds through neighborhoods, robbing, fighting, shooting, intimidating, and threatening ordinary, law-abiding persons. "In the company with" is a major plank in the platform of the City Attorney's Gang Injunction. Most of my clients argue that they were not doing anything with that other person, they were merely just being with him. Well, obviously, they are so stupid they don't realize that's exactly what they are specifically NOT supposed to be doing. D-u-u-u-h! The Gang Injunction does not say that it's okay to be with another known gangbanger so long as you are not engaged in a criminal act. Hello! The criminal act is being "in the company with" that other gangbanger. These gangbangers apparently are too stupid to obey the law, and yet they try to "re-write" (rationalize) the law by explaining they weren't doing a crime (yet).

Occasionally, I am told by clients that they didn't understand their Miranda Rights, even though the arresting officer advised them of these fundamental rights and read the Miranda script to them. Perhaps, in the excitement of getting arrested, they simply forgot the caveat: "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law," and so forth. My suggestion to law enforcement would be to say the following, after reading an arrestee his/her Miranda Rights: "Did you understand what I just read to you? Now, tell me, in your own words, what the rights, that I have just read to you, mean." Listen to his own wording of and utterance about his Miranda Rights. Then, make the following minor change to the official form on which the arrestee is supposed to attest that he has had his Miranda Rights read to him: Add this language: "I acknowledge by my signature that I have repeated, in my own words, the rights that I have and therefore communicated my understanding about those rights." Thus, the gangbanger arrestee has killed two birds with one stone--or rather, fed two birds with one hand (we don't want to suggest violence, do we?): He has confirmed that the Miranda Rights were read to him by the arresting officer and, equally important, that he understood them. If and when he is arrested again (often the case), he will probably be read his Miranda Rights.

My advice to him would be to stop doing the crazy, illegal and barbaric acts that result in his getting arrested. Losing his Miranda Rights is a lot more tolerable, if he's free, legal and law-abiding, than if he's arrested and incarcerated. Miranda Rights do not hold a candle to being free. (Do you hear that, my classroomful of young gangbangers who argue over whether or not the arresting officer "read me my Miranda Rights"?) You ought to be debating over a multi-dimensional strategy you can execute to get a job, keep yourself gainfully employed, go to school and finish your G.E.D. requirements, help your family, and give back to the community. Decide to stop being a prisoner of your own achievements.

Manhood...or Madness?

2008-07-16T11:20:00.001-07:00

Perhaps the dominant view among prosecutors is that gangbangers seem to run on 100-proof Testosterone. Prosecutors appear to think that they are literally intoxicated by their towering arrogance and ignorance. Shackled by their dinosaur-like brains, empty of both imagination and intelligence, they think anything unwanted, out of order, or just wrong can be addressed and resolved by yelling at it, cursing it, physically resisting it, fighting and battering it, or simply shooting it dead. Some of my gangbanger clients had thrown their Gang Injunction Violation citations on the sidewalk in anger and defiance when the police officer who had stopped them requested their signature on the citation as acknowledgment that he had cited and arrested them for violating one or more of the many prohibitions of the City of Los Angeles's criminal group suppression order named the "Gang Injunction."

My untimely advice to them was that they should have signed the police form and, more important, filled out its "Investigative Action/Statement" page that provided space to write their side of the story. Yes, I know. This advice is better given as a preventative to being arrested, not after the arrest has occurred. Some of my clients get arrested repeatedly; so the next time that happens, perhaps they will fill out the portion of the form that gives them almost three paragraphs-worth of space in which to tell their side of the story. Should they walk around with a pen or pencil just in case they are arrested? Well, that's better than walking around with a gun...right? "I didn't have a pencil to write with" is a poor excuse for not writing--versus telling and yelling--your innocent side of the story. You can ask the arresting officer for his pen and write your version of events to your Tupac Shakur's heart's content. Officers probably have a pen extended at the ready, in case the person detained needs it.

Why is it so important to fill out the portion of the Gang Injunction form wherein you can dispute the officer's version and declaim your own account of the goings-on that precipitated your arrest? First, because the opportunity to do so is given to you, by the arresting officer, as your legal right. Second, it is the written, not verbal, accounts that get heard and dealt with in a court of law. So, get your statement in writing; that way, the jury must hear it. The prosecutor (district attorney) arguing against you cannot suppress it. He or she has to bring up your side of the story in court. And you only have a "side" if you write it down. It does not exist otherwise. Arguing your non-involvement, yelling your innocence, braying like a mad bull, and cursing the police are not the behaviors of an innocent temporarily lost or a savior desperately seeking a phone booth in which to don his flying cape but merely the crazed antics of a human-meteor headed directly for the state pen.

In the end, where the drama is really played out (in court), the jury will merely see that act of anger and defiance as evidence of guilt. "If he is so innocent of the charges, why didn't he write out his version of events? They gave him almost half a page to tell his side," will be the driving opinion that supports a verdict of guilt. Certainly, an argument can be made (as it often is) that the arresting officer wasn't polite or courteous, or exhibited other behaviors that baited the anger of the arrested gangbanger and set him "off". Before we go there, though, let's go back to square one: The arrested gangbanger had already previously been served with a Gang Injunction; it is a court order set in motion by the City Attorney that prohibits the commission of certain illegal acts. These acts have been well-known and well-defined as imperiling the lives and limbs of individuals and shooting fear through and paralyzing entire communities. The arresting officer is not on the staff of Publisher's Clearinghouse; he or she is only required to cite and arrest the gangbanger, after ascertaining that he has broken one of the prohibitions of the Gang Injunction. The arresting officer's behavior is not required to be that of a person excitedly brandishing your winning million-dollar ticket or thrusting a congratulatory spray of robust roses in your face.

Because most gangbangers are desperately holding onto their idea of manhood and, in their distorted imaginings, think that force, violence and rudeness are the tools for surviving life, their refusal to sign the citation places them in a position of having the last word, whatever the Sam Hill that means. However, by not filling out the generous space for telling their side of the story is their way of not being "punked" or giving in to a system that they feel constantly torments and brutalizes them, and denies them fair trials in its courts. Said another way, they view their Neanderthal-like stance as being far preferable than explaining anything. Or, as they might say: "I ain't gonna ask nobody for nuthin'!" Telling their side of the story, in writing, is the equivalent of a weak person asking somebody in a dominant position for something. Oh, yes. They will complain, but they won't explain (in writing). Go figure. Again, it is important to note that the jury will see this omission as defiance and evidence of guilt. Totally lost on the jury will be counterpoints or hypotheticals about the police officer's demeanor at the time of the arrest, the manner in which he served the citation, and whether or not he proclaimed it a good day for baseball or fishing.

In this same vein, a good many of my clients are waiving their McLaughlin Rights. Very important. Very fundamental. Why? It is the "McLaughlin Probable Cause Hearing Rights" that afford an arrestee/detainee the right to have the circumstances of his arrest reviewed by a Judge or Magistrate of the Court to determine if there was probable cause for his arrest. It is this "Probable Cause Hearing" that may or may not benefit his case. But it is worth a try, especially for persons who harp about their innocence and enlist their families and friends to besiege the police department, district attorney, and city hall with torrents of claims about their innocence and the false grounds upon which they were arrested. If the gangbanger does not waive his McLaughlin Rights, but instead, takes advantage of them and states his desire for a Probable Cause Hearing, what can happen? Well, if the Magistrate determines that there was not probable cause for the arrest, the gangbanger will be released from custody immediately, as long as there are no other "holds" (legal restraints to detain) or warrants on the person. It must be noted that waiving one's rights to a "McLaughlin Probable Cause" hearing is not seen as evidence of guilt, nor does it affact the gangbanger's right to arraignment on the charges. Again, however, I would emphasize that if the gangbanger doubts there was probable cause for his arrest, he ought to go forward with the "Probable Cause Hearing." He should not let his arrogance, any feelings about weakness, or thoughts that he'd be asking the system for something barricade him against taking advantage of his legal rights.

What Incarcerated Juveniles Really Need to Know

2008-07-16T11:02:00.000-07:00

The following is an impromptu lesson I devised after receiving repeated signs of intense and toxic boredom with the usual lesson plan for teaching the "Cornell Method of Note-Taking." Most of these young thugs could scarcely read--anything: their own names, street signs, instructions for assembling something. Why, then, would it follow that these dummies could learn to take notes? As a result of a class action lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Probation Department, brought by parents claiming their kids were locked up and deprived of equal educational access, some high-minded (or simply high) administrator ordered the "Cornell Method of Note-Taking" be part of a progressive-sounding curriculum called "Accelerate My Future." After working in a locked room in the Special Handling Unit (SHU) with boys whose mental states were so dangerous and risky that they were labelled Level One, Level Two, and so forth, I was given a classroom and told to teach the "Accelerate My Future" curriculum. This program was university-level stuff.

In addition to my becoming infuriated with the boorish behavior of my young charges, I was equally angry with the administration. The education director should have known that when you try to teach kids something for which they have no background, no prior exposure, no skill sets, and no interest to learn, they immediately become the teachers, showing off their bad behaviors and foul mouths in excess, until times get better. They let me know I would never get their attention with the institutional detritus I was serving them. As I began to write the words you see below, the classroom became quieter and quieter. When their whispered arguments became animated murmurs about the meanings of the words, I felt relief and elation. Not only did I have their attention; they were also ready to learn. And these words, part and parcel of their everyday lives, challenged and fascinated them more than any dry university-level material ever could. In spite of their street experience, gang lives, and police encounters, most did not know what ninety-percent of the words meant. I had found an equalizer, and I was determined to use it to my and their advantage.

Juvenile Crime Words to Know

Define the following Words and write two sentences for each word, showing its correct use.

Crime
Allegation
Sentence
Juvenile
Probation
Gang
District Attorney
Gang Enhancement Charge
Counts
Felony
Battery
Status Offense
Curfew
Incorrigible
Public Defender
Violation
Gang Injunction
Thug
Hoodlum
Unfit
Controlled Substance
S.T.E.P. Act
Three Strikes
Assault
Gang Injunction
Stalk
Lying in Wait
Commit
Special Handling Unit (SHU)
District Attorney Reject
McLaughlin Probable Cause Hearing Rights
Re-violate
Status Offense
Contraband
Hearing
Verdict
Conspiracy
Misdemeanor

Parents: Are Your Young Destroying You?

2008-07-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

In the aftermath of the LAPD shootout with the AK47-armed gunman in Glassell Park who shot an unarmed man twelve times, as he was out strolling hand-in-hand with a two-year old toddler, and killed him, Tuesday (February 26) morning's television news showed a small parade of angry parents berating the Los Angeles Police Department for "not letting our kids use the bathroom," "telling our children to move along, this is an emergency," and "nobody gave our kids anything to drink."

The dead gunman was a member of the notorious Avenues gang. In his honor, his gang "homies" quickly erected a shrine, replete with colorful flowers and burning candles. They drank to his memory and mourned him as a "loyal, fallen soldier who represented the Avenues."

Angry parents, instead of repeatedly criticizing the Los Angeles Police Department for taking extraordinary measures to protect school children from a gang barbarian walking around shooting off a AK-47 semi-automatic military weapon, ought to storm the Avenues members' homes and gathering spots, in a moving blitz, and verbally denounce them for the fear, intimidation, and destruction they continuously cause the Glassell Park community. Then they ought to go to the Los Angeles Criminal Courts and testify on the witness stands against them to ensure their long "vacations" in state penitentiaries like San Quentin, Tehachapi, Corcoran, Folsom, Wasco, Tracy, and Pelican Bay.

Parents, it is NOT the honorable, courageous, and public-serving members of the Los Angeles Police Department at whom you should direct your anger. Can you not give the police any kind of credit for securing the elementary school, so horribly close to the gun battle, as a place of refuge and protection for your children? You should be forever angry at the primitive cowards and barbarians who, posing as "loyal soldiers," are the criminal street gang known as the Avenues. These death-wishing LOSERS control and dominate your neighborhoods, your lives and, worst of all, your MIND. And these unfit humans do all of this with YOUR permission.

My Resume

2008-07-16T10:55:00.000-07:00

James E. Shaw, Ph.D.
Criminal and Civil Court-Certified Expert: Litigation Support and Trial Testimony
Gangs; School Safety; Youth Violence; Child Sexual Abuse Reporting Protocols
(310) 678-6950 (cell.); (310) 649-5118 (fax). Email: courtexpert@gmail.com. Website: http://expertincourt.blogspot.com. Commentator for NBC, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC, and author of the nationally-acclaimed book, Jack and Jill, Why They Kill (peer-reviewed by RAND Corporation), and the forthcoming book, GANGrene: Lost Souls Poisoning Homeland Security

Federal Appointment: Dr. Shaw is on the Faculty of the United States Courts Office of Defender Services Training Branch.

Dr. Shaw is a member of the Oversight Committee of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa’s Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development (GRYD).

Dr. Shaw is a 2009 Graduate of the Los Angeles Police Department Community Policing Academy.

Dr. Shaw is a member on the Panel of Experts of the Los Angeles Superior Court, Criminal Division, Foltz Criminal Justice Center.

Dr. Shaw holds the State of California License No. 030129796: Pupil Counseling, Grades K through 12.

Under Williams v. State of California, Dr. Shaw, as one of the California State Legislature-appointed Professional Team Leaders, went into public schools to ensure school administrator-compliance with the stipulations and terms (re school safety, teacher certification, and sufficient textbooks/curricular materials) of the massive and historic class action litigation affecting the CA’s 58 counties.

Dr. Shaw served as Director of Child Welfare for the Norwalk-La Mirada Unified School District, and as Prosecutor in the Norwalk Superior Court’s Truancy Court.

Dr. Shaw served on the Multi-Agency Task Consortium Against Gangs.

Dr. Shaw served as a member of the Child Death Review Committee of the Los Angeles County Interagency Council Against Abuse and Neglect (I.C.A.N.).

For many years Dr. Shaw, through the Los Angeles County Office of Education, was a Consultant-Trainer on “Child Abuse Mandated Reporting Requirements”, and trained the county’s 81 school districts on mandated reporting materials provided by the State Attorney.

Dr. Shaw, as an invited keynote speaker, addressed the audience and media at the Columbine High School memorial ceremony in honor of the slain victims.

Dr. Shaw was the keynote speaker at the annual, nationally-renowned St. Mary’s Medical Center’s Child Abuse Conference, in Walla Walla, Washington.

During his four-year in-person/in-prison research on children who killed, Dr. Shaw coined the term “adolescentcide” (the phenomenon of children killing children) used by the media following the Columbine High School and other campus tragedies.

Dr. Shaw is a member of the California State Sheriff’s Education Association.

Dr. Shaw, for a number of years, taught the law course, Administration of Justice: Juvenile Delinquency and Legal Procedures, at the El Camino Police Academy.

Dr. Shaw is the author of the copyrighted “Homicidally-at-Risk Adolescent Profile,” or H.A.R.A.P., instrument used, in People v. Marcus Adams, by the Law Office of the Los Angeles County Alternate Public Defender.

Dr. Shaw is a member of the American Society of Trial Consultants.

Dr. Shaw is a member of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice.

Dr. Shaw is a member of the National Lawyers Guild.

Dr. Shaw is associate member, #00711062, of the American Bar Association.

As a Mandatory Certified Legal Education (MCLE) Trainer, Dr. Shaw conducts accredited continuing education seminars for lawyers.

A PARTIAL LIST OF CASES, INCLUDING THOSE INVOLVING JUVENILE AND ADULT GANGS, FOR WHICH DR. SHAW WAS DESIGNATED COURT EXPERT:

FEDERAL

• United States Immigration Court v. Carlos Ayala. (Gang activity and Street Terrorism: Injunction to deport) [For Attorney Dana Mendelson.]

• United States v. Arceneaux (Gang-Heist Bank Robbery) [Federal Court case; for Attorney T.E. Warriner.]

MILITARY

• In re United States Military Academy, West Point. (the “Del Rey Eleven” case: Assault and GBI/Gang Enhancement/FirearmsViolations) [For Captain Jessica Conn, Office of the Staff Judge Advocate.]

• In re United States Navy. (Court Martial: Gang-related Weapons incident) [For Judge Advocate General Ryan Torgrison.]

STATE

• People v. Grays, Reese, and Williams. (Shooting into Occupied Building/Gang Enhancement) [For Law Office of the Sacramento County Public Defender; Ryan Jay, Esq.]

• People v. Charlotte Woods. (Gang Allegation) [For Romina Aghai, Esq., Law Office of the Los Angeles County Public Defender.]

• People v. Yovany Pensado (Robbery & Assault With Deadly Weapon/Gang Allegation) [For Attorney Fred Ricco McCurry, Bar Panel.]

• People v. Nicholas Real. (Gang Enhancement Allegation) [For Sef Krell, Esq., and Alex Kessel, Esq.] Bar Panel case.

• People v. Jerron Harris. (Felon Carrying Weapon/Gang Allegation) [For Lucia Gonzalez, Esq., Law Office of the Los Angeles County Public Defender.]

• People v. Gilberto Martinez (Attempted Murder/Spec Alleg Gang Enhancemt) [For County of Sacramento Office of the Pub Def; David Lynch, Esq.]

• People v. Johnnie Davis. (Home Invasion/Gang Terrorism) [For Kern County, Bakersfield Public Defender; Mark Raimondo, Esq.]

• People v. Antonio Webster. (Attempted Murder/Gang Enhancement) [For County of Los Angeles, Office of the Public Defender; Pamela L. Jones, Esq.]

• People v. Rodrigo Bernal. (Gang Injunction Violation) [For Elizabeth Hodgen, Esq., Law Office of the Los Angeles County Public Defender.]

• People v. Munoz. (Weapons Violation/Gang Allegation) [For Jorge Guzman, Esq., Law Office of the Los Angeles County Public Defender.]

• People. V. Gray, Williams & Reese (Gang & Street Terrorism Allegation) [For Ryan Jay, Esq., County of Sacramento Public Defender.]

• People v. Robert Gaylord (Gang Injunction Violation) [For Yajahira Martinez, Esq., Law Office of the Los Angeles County Public Defender.]

• People v. Christian Rodriguez (Murder/Gang Enhancement) [For Denise Bousley, Esq., Law Office of the Los Angeles County Public Defender.]

• People v. Stefan Taylor (Gang Injunction Violation) [For Elizabeth Hodgen, Esq., Law Office of the Los Angeles County Public Defender.]

• People v. Kenneth Harris (Gang Injunction Violation) [For Elizabeth Hodgen, Esq., Law Office of the Los Angeles county Public Defender.]

• People v. Rodney Morris (Gang Injunction Violation) [For Elizabeth Hodgen, Esq., Law Office of the Los Angeles County Public Defender.]

• People v. Luis Pineda. (Armed robbery/Gang Enhancement) [For Attorney Val Rada, Office of the Los Angeles County Public Defender.]

• People v. Durrell Davon Melchor. (ADW W/Firearm on Peace Officer) [For Attorney Frank Di Sabatino, Bar Panel.]

• People v. Phillip Masters. (Assault with deadly weapon/GBI/Gang Enhancement) [For Attorney Dane Cameron, Bar Panel.]

• People v. Jason Pezant. (Possession of Firearm by Felon/Gang Enhancement) [For Attorney Mark Williams, Bar Panel]

• People v. Delatorre. (Gang Injunction Violation) [For Ana Elmi, Esq., Law Office of the Los Angeles County Public Defender]

• People v. Charkhian. (Terrorist threat-to-kill/“Third Strike” Predicate Act for Gang Enhancement; [For Attorney Allison Margolin.]

• In re Alfredo M. (Street Terrorism/Gang Enhancement) [For Attorney Tracy Tully-Davis.]

DEATH PENALTY and/or LIFE W/O PAROLE CASES

• The People of the State of California v. Marcus Adams (Uzi Assault Triple Murder/Gang Enhancement) [For Attorney Patrick Thomason, Law Offices of the Los Angeles County Alternate Public Defender.]

• The People of the State of California v. Santiago Martinez. (Double Murder) [For Defender Martinez, acting In Pro Per.]

• People of the State of California v. Cesario Vasquez. (Murder/Gang Allegation) [For Attorney Seymour I. Amster. Bar Panel]

• People v. Roderick Milner (Murder/Gang Allegation) [For Attorney Stanley Z. White, Bar Panel.]

• People v. Jimmy Hunter. (Double Murder) [County of Ventura Office of the Public Defender; Joe Villasana, Esq.]

• People v. Gabriel Arceo. (Triple Murder/Gang Allegation) [For Attorney Charles Patton, Bar Panel.]

• People v. Jamal Payne, Jerry Sorrels, Damon Garrett, & Roderick Jenkins. (Murder/Gang Allegation) [For John Blanchard, Esq., Bar Panel.]

• People v. Richard Tovalin. (Attempted Murder/Gang Allegation) [For Attorney Seymour Amster, Bar Panel]

• People of the State of California v. David Mariscal (Gang-related Murder) [For Attorney Craig Wormley.]

• People of the State of California v. Gonzalez (Murder/Gang Allegation) [For Attorney Seymour Amster, Bar Panel]

• People v. Quincy Edward Giles. (Attempted Double Murder/Gang Allegation) [For Attorney Frederick Lacey, Law Offices of the Alternate Public Defender.]

• People v. William Joseph (Gang-related Shooting/Attempted Murder) [For County of Los Angeles Office of the Public Defender; Kendi Ravsten, Esq.]

• People of the State of California v.Robert Masiel III. (Murder/Gang Enhancement) [For Attorney Karen Lockhart.]

• People v. Francisco Orozco. (Attempted Murder/Gang Allegation) [For Attorney Art Goldberg, Bar Panel.]

CIVIL

• Jane C.R. Doe v. The Roman Catholic Bishop of Orange, et al. (Sexual Assault and Battery; Negligent Hiring/Retention; Negligent Supervision/Failure to Warn) [For Manly, McGuire & Stewart Law.

• Murray & Cox v. Egremont Schools. (Sexual Assault and Battery; Negligent Hiring/Retention; Negligent Supervision/Failure to Warn) [For Kessel & Associates Law Group.]

• Catherine Porter-Luttrell v. Ojai Unified School District. (Teacher’s use, in her 5th-grade class, of obscene, lewd and lascivious adult-level book; Negligent Supervision) [For Jones & Briggs Law.]

• Del Cid v. Los Angeles Unified School District. (Assault and Personal Injury/Gang-Related) [For Attorney Brian Vogel.]

• State of Nevada v. Paul Anthony Rice. (Gang homicide) [For Attorney Kyle Swanson.]

• Robert and Diane Roy for Travis Roy v. Murrietta Valley School District. (Wrongful death) [For Attorney Daral Mazzarrella.]

• Sismilich v. Academy of Our Lady of Peace Catholic Girls School. (Teacher’s unlawful sex with minor) [For Gordon & Rees Law Group; Linda Mullany, Esq.]

• Williams v. California Department of Education. (Civil Rights/Equality in Education) Professional Expert/Team Leader for: State of California, California Department of Education, and Los Angeles County Office of Education.

• Anise Arteaga v. Los Angeles Unified School District. (Assault and Personal Injury). [For Attorney Joseph Avrahamy.]

• “Marie S.” v. Alameda Unified School District, et al. (Administrator Assault on Student and Personal Injury) [For Attorney Trudy L. Martin.]

• Corales v. Bennett. (Middle School Student Suicide) [For Attorney Jacqueline De Warr.]

• Jackson v. Conga Room (Gang-related Homicide) [For Attorney Gary Jacobs.]

• In Re a Minor v. Los Angeles Unified School District (Gang-related Homicide) [For McNicholas and McNicholas Law Group; Juan Victoria, Esq.]

• Campolini v. Ventura Unified School District (Assault and Personal Injury) [For Attorney James Prosser.]

• In re Assault and Personal Injury v. Hayward Unified School District (Gang-related Assault and Personal Injury) [For Attorney Robert Abel.]

• In re Bonfire Injuries v. Fault & Yeates; TX A & M, Et Al (Non-assault/Personal Injury) [For Attorney Marty Rogers.]

• Carpenter (for Pierce) v. Tumwater School District, et al. (Assault and Rape) [For then-Attorney General of Washington: Christine Gregoire, Tort Claims Div.]

• Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of Bronx, Henderson v. Smith, et al (Student assault/Personal Injury) [For Attorney James Marino.]

• Rubideaux v. Los Angeles Unified School District (Student Non-Assault Personal Injury) [For Carlson, Messer, & Turner Law Group; Edgar De Vera, Esq.]

• Bryant v. Willard (Juvenile Homicide/Gang & Drug Event) [For Attorney James Lozinski.]

• Martinez v. Los Angeles Unified School District (Student Assault/Gang-related) [For Attorney Andrew Ellis.]

• Plumlee v. Fullerton Joint Union High School District (Student Assault/Personal Injury [For Attorney James Rainboldt.]

• Yvonne and Gregory Smith (for Isiah Smith) v. San Juan Unified School District. (Child Abuse; Negligent Supervision; Failure to Report as Mandated) [For Kahn, Brown & Poore Law.]

• Royce Volkmann v. Capistrano Unified School District (Assault and GBI) [For Attorney Mitchell Stein.]

• Lester v. Department of Health and Human Resources(State of V. Virginia) (Assault and personal injury) [For Attorney Keith Gamble.]

• Tapia v. City of San Rafael. (Assault and traumatic personal injury at high school) [For Attorney Liza de Vries.]

• Gibson v. Los Angeles Unified School District. (Child Molestation) [For Carlson, Messer & Turner Law Group; Jeanne Zimmer, Esq.]

• Cindy Perez v. Los Angeles Unified School District. (Sexual Assault and Battery) [For Attorney Thomas Edward Wall.]

• Molina v. Los Angeles Unified School District. (Sexual Assault on campus) [For Carpenter and Zuckerman Law Group; Michael Stone-Molloy, Esq.]

OTHER PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Nationwide Book and Media Tour, Jodi Solomon Speakers Bureau, Boston, MA. As a result of the research for and publication of my book, Jack and Jill, Why They Kill, I appeared repeatedly as guest educator and school safety/youth crime/child abuse expert on NBC’s “The Today Show,” CBS’s “Eye Witness News,” “CBS Utah,” CNN’s “Talk Back With Bobbi Battista,” MSNBC’s “Live With Mitch Albom,” ABC’s “Good Morning America,” FOX News, “The O’Reilly Factor,” and other television and radio media outlets. Delivered keynote addresses at national conferences comprising judges, attorneys, law enforcement personnel, educators, psychologists, sociologists, the clergy, and politicians. At the request of states’ elected representatives, I consulted on and assisted in the design of violence education-and-prevention and school safety programs. B.R.A.V.E. (“Be Resilient Avoid Violence Everywhere”), my violence education-and-prevention curriculum, was written during this time at the suggestion of a Wasatch County, Utah high school principal. B.R.A.V.E. has been reviewed and cited by the FBI/ATF Philadelphia Regional Office. At the invitation of Littleton, Colorado parents, I delivered one of the keynote addresses at the first annual commemoration ceremony, in Littleton, Colorado, in honor of the slain victims of the Columbine High School massacre. (A copy of my speech is available upon request.) July 2000 to October 2005.

Teacher, Los Padrinos Juvenile Court School, operated by the Los Angeles County Office of Education. Taught high school-level subjects, per State Department of Education curriculum frameworks. Counseled gang members and other incarcerated juveniles on court etiquette, legal language, probation behavioral standards, administration of justice and juvenile delinquency; goals/visions/values; and legal, personal and social responsibility. Served as Los Angeles County’s “Dollars for Scholars” board member and fundraiser for scholarship awards to juvenile wards desiring to improve their lives. Served as the Los Angeles County Office of Education and Los Angeles County Probation Department liaison for the LEAPS (Life Excellerator Assessment of Personal Skills) Facilities-Wide Behavior Management Program. Served as vice chairperson of the Los Padrinos Shared Decision Making Council. Served as academic coach in the annual “Academic Bowl” fete. October 2005 to present.

While studying for CLAD (Cross-cultural Language and Academic Development) certification, and in a nod toward linguist Jim Cummins’ “cognitive academic language proficiency” theory of academic success, I coined the phrase, “symptomatically-compromised academic language deficiency” (SCALD), and wrote a paper describing this linguistic phenomenon and cause of school failure among LEP (Limited English Proficient) street gang members. Symptomatically-compromised language deficiency results from everything that is dysfunctional, unhealthy, and legally-encroaching in their lives: e.g., family members incarcerated, witnessing or engaging in violent gang acts, illegal drug use.

Gang Consultant and Media Expert for the made-for-television documentary, “Homegirls,” produced by Luis Colina and Father Gregory Boyle (The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles and founder of “Homeboy Ministries.” Ongoing/in-progress.

Instructor, Master’s Degree Program, the University of Phoenix. Courses: Child and Adolescent Development and Teacher-training courses. July 2003 to present.

Instructor, Police Sciences Curriculum, El Camino Police Academy (operated by El Camino Community College), Torrance, CA. Course: Administration of Justice: Juvenile Delinquency and Legal Procedures. February 2002 to present.

Director, Pupil Personnel Services, Norwalk La Mirada Unified School District
(24,000 students – 31 schools.) and Director, Student Attendance Review Board (S.A.R.B.) No. 21, at the Norwalk Superior Court. Prosecuted, for the L.A. County District Attorney, parents and children in violation of school attendance laws. Designed and co-conducted, with Sheriff Dept., “Stop-Crimes-on-Campus” programs: Drug-Dog Sniffing Program; Juvenile Citation-into-Court Program (for gang activity, graffiti-tagging, vandalism, fighting, alcohol possession, profanity, drug possession and use); and specialized gang diversion programs such as G.R.I.P., “Gang Reduction Intervention Program” and the “Gang Awareness Project” (G.A.P.), both of which were coordinated with local law enforcement. July 1999 – July 2000.

Consultant, Public School Law, L.A. County Office of Education. Advisor to 81 school districts on L. A. County, state laws pertaining to child welfare and school attendance, student violence, suspensions and expulsions, gang activity/violence and parents’ roles and responsibilities. At request of retired Supervisor Deane Dana, I helped to write the L.A. County” Anti-Truancy Ordinance, No 96-0009.” September 1996 – June 1999.

Consultant, GAIN (Greater Avenues for Independence) Welfare-to-Work Program, L.A. County Office of Education. Supervised four Job Developers and 80 Job Search Specialists in the development of employer requirements, employment preparation, job market surveying, personal skills inventorying, job readiness, and personal responsibility courses; case follow-up and evaluation. September 1995 – September 1996.
Producer, Educational Television. Los Angeles County Office of Education. Produced focused programs: gang awareness and education; interviews with the State of CA Superintendent of Schools; curriculum series involving Institutes of Higher Education (IHE’s): USC, Claremont Graduate University, and UCLA; and a widely-acclaimed special program I conceived, produced and hosted following the 1992 Los Angeles riot: “Let’s Not Experience it Again.” January 1991 to September 1995.

EDUCATION

Dr. James E. Shaw earned his Ph.D. degree (focus: Curriculum) from the Claremont Graduate University and received the Phi Delta Kappa (Mt. Baldy Chapter) "Best Dissertation of the Year" award for his pioneering study of a spectrum of children—including gang members—incarcerated in state prisons for murder and homicide. His 4-year in-person/in-prison research of 103 girls and boys was the subject of his doctoral dissertation. (1993 – 1997.)

The University of Southern California, Teacher Corps Cycle VII. Two-year graduate studies program focused on Troubled Youth/Gangs. Studies included classes and programs at the Delinquency Prevention Institute. Los Angeles, CA. Master of Science in Education (MSEd) Degree: 1972-1974.

California State University at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA. B.A. Degree: 1965 -1972.

PROPRIETARY PUBLICATIONS and INVOLVEMENT WITH OTHERS

Ph.D. Dissertation: Maturity and Choice in Adolescents Incarcerated for Murder and Homicide (Ann Arbor; University Microfilms; 1997)

Jack & Jill, Why They Kill (Seattle; Onjinjinkta Publishing Co., 2000)

Bully-Proofing Your Child (eBook, published in 2001).

B.R.A.V.E. (Be Resilient Avoid Violence Everywhere). Field-tested (2001-2002, CA) by Downey Unified School District and the Los Angeles County Office of Education’s Juvenile Court and Community Schools (JCCS). B.R.A.V.E. has been cited by the FBI/ATF Philadelphia Region as an example of “best community practices” for its violence education and prevention curriculum for grades 6 – 12.

Los Angeles County Anti-Truancy Ordinance (Public Law No. 96-0009, co-written in 1995, with other educators and lawyers, at request of then-County Supervisor Deane Dana).

Los Angeles County Master Plan for School Safety (1998; Co-Editor).

Advisor on the Los Angeles County Office of Education and California State Department of Education “Classroom Management Guide” (2000).

Advisor on the Los Angeles County Office of Education, the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department, and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors manual, “Helping Improve Police Practices” (H.I.P.P.). A guide on improving relationships between law enforcement and students, particularly student gang members.

“Prosecutors as Persecutors: Can an Expert Save Justice?” (first published by T.A.B., Technical Assistance Bureau for attorneys).

“Evaluating Your Witness and Witnessing Their Value.” Article for National Defender Investigator Association’s Eagle Eye magazine.

“In Loco Parentis: the Hot Stock Du Jour.” This article first appeared at www.Calif-Legal.com, and was the subject of my interview with editor Andrew Brownstein of TRIAL magazine (published by American Association for Justice, formerly the Association of Trial Lawyers of America).

“Expert Witnesses May Find Schools Hazardous to a Child’s Health.” Article for Consumer Attorneys of California Forum magazine.

“Drop the Fiction of Safe Schools,” published by the Los Angeles Times.

“The Cruel Arithmetic of Adolescentcide,” published by the Long Beach Press Telegram.

“Armed School Police Don’t Equal Safer Schools,” published by the Los Angeles
Times.

“Kids Killing Kids,” the Boca Raton (FL) Times.

HONORS, PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS AND ACTIVITIES

“Certificate of Recognition” from the California State Legislature, for book: Jack and Jill, Why They Kill

Letter of gratitude and congratulations from President George W. Bush for book: Jack and Jill, Why They Kill.

The Neil Matsumora Scholarship, University of Southern California

The Phi Delta Kappa, Mt. Baldy Chapter, “Best (Doctoral) Dissertation of the Year” Award for four-year in-prison/in-person research on children who killed.

President-Elect of the California Association of Supervisors of Child Welfare and Attendance (CASCWA)

Association of California School Administrators (ACSA)

The California Teachers Association (CTA)

Member of the American Society of Trial Consultants

Member of the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice

Associate Member of the American Bar Association

CIVIC ASSOCIATIONS

Board member of G.O.O.D. (“Gangs Out of Downey”) Organization. Other G.O.O.D. members with whom I worked include Judge Roy Paul, Judge David Perkins, Judge A. Lord, and Judge Manuel Rodriguez.

Member of the Multi-Agency Task Force on Gangs, Norwalk, CA.

Rotary International District No. 1774

AFFILIATIONS WITH EXPERT WITNESS REFERRAL ORGANIZATIONS

• Technical Advisory Service for Attorneys (T.A.S.A.)
• Technical Assistance Bureau (T.A.B.)
• ExpertWitness.com
• eWitness.com
• California Attorneys for Criminal Justice
• Experts.com
• Forensis Group
• Expert Resources, Inc.
• National Expert Witness Network
• Summit Professional Resources
• Forensic Expert Advisors
• Consolidated Consultants Company
• The Chatham Group
• DJS Associates, Inc.

OTHER INFORMATION

Dr. Shaw began studying the social phenomenon of troubled, bad-ass and criminal youth while a graduate student (1972-1974) in the nationally-acclaimed Urban Teacher Corps VII program at the University of Southern California. His training at USC’s Delinquency Prevention Institute led to further gang education training by (1) the Department of Justice (at the L.A. County Office of Education and Inglewood USD “Gang Summit”); (2) the Norwalk Sheriff Department’s Multi-Agency Task Force on Gangs; (3) the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Youth Leadership Academy; (4) the Gang Awareness Project (GAP); (5) the Gang Risk Intervention Program (GRIP); (6) Juvenile Delinquency Summits conducted by California State Senator Betty Karnette (Long Beach); and (7) professional conferences across the nation hosted by law enforcement agencies and educators.

Dr. James E. Shaw is considered one of the nation's foremost gang, troubled youth, school safety and youth violence experts, and is still a regular guest expert on television and radio (Good Morning, America; NBC Today Show; O’Reilly Factor; MSNBC Live; CBS EyeWitness News; ABC News; CNN; and Associated Press Radio). He is quoted by a range of publications, from TRIAL magazine to the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post Media Group to the Baca Raton Times to the Atlanta Journal Constitution to the Long Beach Press Telegram to the Sacramento Bee Newspaper to Seventeen Magazine. He spent 48 months inside California Youth Authority state youth prisons interviewing and studying 103 girls and boys, among them gang members, incarcerated for committing murder and homicide.

The only researcher in the country allowed to go inside prisons and behind bars to get the life stories of a spectrum of children who killed, Dr. Shaw wrote the landmark, nationally-acclaimed book, Jack and Jill, Why They Kill, as a result of his four-year study. Referred to on CNN as the "the smart answer for today's troubled times," Jack and Jill, Why They Kill has a wide readership among school administrators, teachers, social workers, attorneys, law enforcement officers, districts attorney, probation officers, members of the clergy, psychologists, medical doctors, judges, colleges and universities, and students themselves. The book is used in colleges and universities nationwide. Dr. Shaw coined the word “adolescentcide,” meaning children who kill other children. He has presented gang awareness and school safety programs for the California Attorney General, elected officials, law enforcement associations, and school administrators nationwide.

SOME WRITTEN COMMENTS ABOUT Dr. Shaw’s Jack & Jill, Why They Kill
Reviewer: The Honorable Lee Baca, Sheriff, Los Angeles County
“No public safety policy maker can afford to overlook this common sense uncovering of the cause, terror, and nature of this human tragedy.”
Reviewer: The Honorable Nancy D. Daniels, Referee, Los Angeles Superior Court
“Jack & Jill, Why They Kill should be in the maternity packet of expectant and adoptive parents and on the desk of every school teacher, child welfare worker and juvenile court judge.”
Reviewer: The Honorable Pamela Davis, Judge, Santa Monica Superior Court
“Bravo, Dr. Shaw, for a finely-crafted book that will inspire parents and may yet save the lives of countless children!”

Probation Conditions for Juvenile Delinquents

2008-07-16T10:53:00.000-07:00

When loud profanity, arguments, gang threats and near-fights signaled to me that my high school class of hard-core gangbangers would not sit still for the "Cornell Method of Note-Taking" or even the California State Curriculum Framework for English/Language Arts, I had to make the decision that a radically different educational route had to be taken to calm them down and instill some degree of learning purpose in them. Despite their arrogance, it was their ignorance that told me what they really needed and wanted to know. As before, with my "Juvenile Crime Words to Know" lesson, most of the class did not know ninety-percent of the following official conditions of their probation. Yet they all admitted that at some previous time in their arrest/incarceration/probation cycle, they had received this set of probation conditions and signed their names, as required to acknowledge receipt, on special forms. What was the "secret" for sparking their interest in learning? I had to find something they needed to know. As all of them had court appearances looming in the near future, I had little difficulty in convincing them that they needed to know this to "stay-in-jail-or-go-home" knowledge. I persuaded them that no matter what they were incarcerated for, these conditions would be the "Verse and chorus of the song the judge is going to sing to you at your hearing. And for you who have never been on probation before, you better listen hard, with both ears. Because when you are charged with violating your probation, it is these conditions that they're talking about."

Juvenile Conditions of Probation

1. Obey all laws. Obey all order of the Probation Officer and of any court.
2. Obey all instructions and orders of Parents/Guardians; Teacher(s); School Officials; and Other_______
3. Report to the Probation Officer as directed.
4. Notify the Probation Officer before changing address, school, school schedule or place of employment.
5. Seek and maintain training or employment as directed by the Probation Officer.
6. Do not engage in____________
7. Do not leave camp or suitable placement without permission.
8. Perform ______ hours of work under the supervision of the Probation Officer.
9. Attend a school program approved by the Probation Officer. Maintain satisfactory grades and attendance, and citizenship. Promptly notify Probation Officer of every absence.
10. Do not be within one block of any school ground unless enrolled, attending classes, on approved school business, or with school official, parent or guardian.
11. Do not be out of residence between 6:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. except with parental consent.
12. Do not stay away from residence for more than 24 hours, nor leave Los Angeles County except at times and places specifically permitted in advance by the Probation Officer.
13. Do not associate with co-minors, anyone disapproved of by ____Parent; ____ Probation Officer; _____Other
14. Do not participate in any type of gang activity.
15. Do not have any dangerous or deadly weapon in your possession, nor remain in the presence of any unlawfully armed person.
16. Do not contact or cause any contact with, nor associate with the victim(s) or witness(es) of any offense alleged against you.
17. Do not associate with children under ______ years except in presence of a responsible adult.
18. Do not drink any alcoholic beverages.
19. Cooperate in a plan to control abuse of alcohol, controlled substances or poisons.
20. Do not use or possess narcotics, controlled substances, poisons, or related paraphernalia; stay away from places where users congregate.
21. Do not own, use or possess an electronic paging device.
22. Do not associate with persons known to be users or sellers of narcotics/controlled substances, except with the prior written permission of the Probation Officer.
23. Submit to urinalysis and skin checks as directed by the Probation Officer to detect the use of narcotics/controlled substances.
24. Submit to testing of blood, breath or urine to detect the use of alcohol, narcotics/controlled substances or poisons whenever requested by any peace officer.
25. Submit person, residence or property under your control to search and seizure at any time of the day or night by any law enforcement officer with or without a warrant.
26. Cooperate in a plan for psychiatric/psychological testing or treatment.
27. Pay $_____ fine to the general fund of the county through the Probation Officer in such manner as the Probation Officer shall order; plus penalty assessment and surcharge (1464 Penal Code and 76000 Government Code).
28. Make reparation on all related losses as determined by the Probation Officer, including a service charge as authorized by 276(c) WIC.
29. Make restitution to the Restitution Fund in the amount of $ _____ (no VICTIM LOSS).
30. Do not drive a motor vehicle unless licensed and properly insured as required by law.
31. Do not drive any motor vehicle.
32. Do not drive a motor vehicle except to and from ____ school; ______work.
33. Do not use any name other than ____; do not possess or display any identification in any other name.
34. Do not have blank checks in possession; do not write any portion of any check; do not have bank account upon which you may draw checks; do not use or possess any credit card.
35. Participate in a program of counseling with or without Parent/Guardian.
36. Minor’s parents are ordered, pursuant to 727 WIC, to complete ten class sessions of a Parent education program on or before ____and file proof of completion with Probation.
37. Spend not less than ____days nor more than ____days in Juvenile Hall.
38. Participate in the Juvenile Alternative Work Services Program for a period of ___days.
39. Participate in the High school Graduate/GED/WIN program and make continuing progress towards completion of high school.
40. Conditions of Probation as ordered on ____remain in full force and effect except where modified herein.
41. Register with the local law enforcement agency in the county in which you reside, within 10 days. [186.32]
42. Do not possess any lighters, matches, or other incendiary devices. _____ Do not possess any spray cans, markers or other marking devices.
43. Report to Juvenile Hall for ____Medical exam; ____DNA testing on____. ____Central (East Los Angeles) _____Nidorf (San Fernando); _____Los Padrinos (Downey)

The Shot Caller: He's The Key Police Want to Lock Up

2008-07-15T19:09:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: Shot callers are the physical nerve centers of gangs. These persons have clawed, climbed or killed their way to the top of the heap. In Darwinian terms, their presence represents the survival of the fittest. Because they regularly resort to violence to reinforce their orders, they command almost bottomless awe and respect, whether in jail/prison or out on parole. Respect is sometimes even accorded them from those in the top echelons of rival gangs. Said another way, a shot caller's word is law; he is the chief "law" enforcement officer in his gang. The first and final authority. Many shot callers are called "big homie." Why "big"? Because others, devoted to carrying out his orders, view him as larger than life. Gang underlings, in a show of deference and high respect, will sometimes name themselves after a shot caller. Before Crips co-founder Stanley "Tookie" Williams was executed in the San Quentin Prison, in December 2006, several young men were running around Los Angeles referring to themselves as "Little (or Lil' ) Tookie."

Shot callers, intoxicated by their own reputations (as both the givers and takers, by their verbal decrees, of life), view themselves as invincible, and act as virtual demi-gods. Because of their extraordinary (in sociological and law enforcement terms) rise to power (through criminal acts and brutalities), they arrogantly view the world around them as theirs; anything they want, they simply take it. Better yet, they call the shots--order others to get it for them. "You must not know who you messin' with--do you know who I am?" is a shot caller's occasional warning threat to persons who seem unaware, indifferent, or just plain stupid. Shot callers understand a basic, psychological fact and exploit it constantly: Power belongs to the one who takes it and then replicates that power by bossing and commanding others. It does not matter whether he takes it from one or from one hundred. All that matters is that he takes it. That's why gang shot callers are not particularly bothered if their "crew" is smaller than other rival gangs. They are committed to calling the shots, and they will exert the necessary energy to grow their gang by claiming territories, battling rivals, stealing, robbing, drug-trafficking, killing, jumping in young men, and sexing in young woman. A shot caller is not the man behind the gun. Rather, he is the man behind the man behind the gun.

Virtually nothing is sacred to a gang shot caller, except himself and those he loves. Therefore, he will issue orders to avenge and bring justice to loved ones injured or felled by a rival gang. Rigidly conservative, once he issues an order (calls the shots) he has no tolerance for failure to execute it; he is as responsive as an iceberg to pleas to have mercy or negotiate. Frequently, lower-level gang members who fail to carry out and complete an order are "DP'd". That means they are disciplined for their failure. Such discipline can take many forms. Some of these have temporary effects--physical assaults; others, permanent effects--like death from a new 9mm Berretta a devoted underling has just given as a present to the shot caller. Gang shot callers are truly "public enemy number one", an old yet always timely term coined in the beginning years of the FBI. It is little wonder that the FBI has now begun researching how the backbone of the Mafia was broken. Increasingly, the findings show that the sooner the shot caller is discovered, the quicker law enforcement is able to exert control over the criminal and his crime. When the FBI found out who the Mafia's shot callers were, it was able to move on the Mafia decisively and effectively.

The following article, written on June 2, 2008, by Dina Temple-Raston, FBI Correspondent for NPR (National Public Radio), discusses how and why gang shot callers are increasingly under scrutiny after law enforcement's realization of the enormous power they wield.

Los Angeles is the most gang-saturated city per capita in the world.

In the nine square miles that make up Los Angeles' Watts neighborhood alone, there are 65 different gangs and roughly 15,000 hardcore gang members. If you are a cop working the streets of Los Angeles, most of the calls you respond to are gang-related.

Gangs have been a problem in Los Angeles for generations now, but they weren't as lethal in the past. It used to be that gangs were more concerned about tagging and turf than committing crimes. Now gangs are more like criminal syndicates — like the mafia. And law enforcement is changing its techniques to break them up.

In a four-part series, NPR is taking a close look at street gangs and why gang violence is climbing.

A Cop's Changing Job

Sergeant Herb Cirilo sits in his squad car with the police radio crackling. He supervises the Los Angeles Police Department's 77th Street Area Gang Unit and has been an LAPD member since 1987. He worked gangs as a police officer for about four years during the early 1990s.

Cirilo has a shock of dark hair, a neatly trimmed mustache and is the kind of guy who ends a cell phone call to his wife with the phrase, "See you later, kiddo."

One evening in May, Cirilo weaved through rush hour traffic to provide some backup on a robbery call. Police officers in Los Angeles' Harbor area had tracked some suspects into an apartment complex. Cirilo drove 110 mph down the Harbor Freeway as a police dispatcher provided a blow-by-blow account of what was unfolding on the ground.

"We'll try to get up there and back them up," he said, keeping one ear to the radio. "I don't hear any other units backing them up just yet."

The dispatcher dispassionately described the three robbery suspects bailing out of their car and taking off in different directions. One after another, they were apprehended.

By the time Cirilo rolled up in his squad car about four minutes after the first radio call, the suspects had been all rounded up.

The police cars were all parked at odd angles. Residents were lined up along the sidewalk, wearing those sheepish expressions that people wear when they are staring at something they know they shouldn't be staring at — but they just can't help themselves. Their eyes all seemed to be trained on one man: the suspect sitting handcuffed in the back of a squad car.

"This gangster they have in the back seat, I recognize him from back in the early mid-1990s," Cirilo said quietly.

The suspect was a longtime member of the East Street Wilmas, a Latino gang in the Harbor area.

"It is funny, now dealing with the Hispanic gangs, they commit crimes, go to jail. They get out of prison and they come back to their neighborhoods and prey on the people still," he said. "It is their daily conduct."

Breaking Up Gangs in a New Way

Now, gangs shake down merchants in their neighborhoods. They commit brazen robberies like the one they had allegedly committed the day Cirilo rolled up. They are into drugs and guns.

"At the turn of the century the [Mafia] families were just beginning to come together and organize," said Supervisory Special Agent Robert Clark, the point man in the FBI's Los Angeles gang division. "That's the stage Latino gangs are at now."

It is with that pattern in mind that federal authorities began looking at breaking up gangs in a different way. In the Mafia break-up days, the authorities didn't just go after the mob bosses. They were more strategic. They looked for key players — important cogs in the operation.

Borrowing from that playbook, law enforcement isn't just targeting top dogs in the gangs. They are focusing on the shot callers who were responsible for most of the violence, or the drug dealers with the biggest connections. They have found that arresting these players does more to hobble gangs than big sweeps or cracking down on leaders.

"It does seem smarter to me," said Connie Rice, a gang expert and civil rights attorney in Los Angeles who happens to be Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's cousin. "It seems like they are going after it like they finally figured out how to go after the Italian mob. And it seems to work best with the hierarchical criminal syndicates that are primarily organized for crime."

The Death of Brandon Bullard

No recent incident illustrates this change in mindset — and closeness of the new federal and local partnership — more than the reaction to the killing of a gang member named Brandon "BL" Bullard a couple of months ago. He was gunned down at a Watts housing project called Jordan Downs during a party. Apparently, the fight was over a girl.

Bullard was one of the key players in a gang called The Grape Street Crips. Grape Street is one of the main thoroughfares through the 103 two-story shotgun-style buildings that make up Jordan Downs. The Grape Street Crips basically rule the complex.

Jordan Downs is depressing in the extreme. There are few trees and just patches of dirt between the structures. The buildings themselves are labeled Building 42, Building 43 and so on, giving the whole place a prison-camp feel.

Bullard was known for taking care of people in the Downs. He gave them money and provided protection. He cut such a figure that when he was wounded by a rival gang three years ago, it sparked six weeks of tit-for-tat violence between the East Coast and the Grape Street Crips. Twenty-six people were wounded and nine died before the violence stopped.

This time, when news of his murder spread, police braced for the worst.

Within 36 hours of the Bullard killing, police responded to 10 different shootings in Watts — 17 people were wounded, four were killed. As the death toll started to mount, LAPD Chief William Bratton responded by pulling together an unusual meeting.

Thomas O'Brien, the United States Attorney for the Central District of California, was one of the people Bratton called. O'Brien said he sat at long table with people from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"Chief Bratton threw it out: Here's our problem, how are we going to fix this?" O'Brien said.

To understand just how revolutionary this is, you need to know that federal agents and local cops traditionally spend a lot of their time throwing elbows. Local cops see federal guys as condescending, telling them what to do and how to do it. So calling the feds in so early in the process was a bit of a departure.

"We were there to talk about the strategy long-term, how we could stop that kind of thing from happening again before it ends up in that kind of violent weekend," said FBI Assistant Director in Los Angeles Salvador Hernandez. "And that, while not unprecedented, was somewhat new to us."

Partnership Yields Results

Charlie Beck, the deputy chief of the LAPD, said the meeting was an indication of things to come. He has been working gangs in Los Angeles for more than 30 years, and he sees a role for the feds in the fight.

"This is our sandbox and we know when things are going to develop and we're good at that," he said. "But we need to bring more resources to bear than the Los Angeles Police Department alone. We're able to do that because of partnerships that have developed."

The FBI's Hernandez said this kind of change and these kinds of partnerships were inevitable.

"You do this for 20 years, you start to realize that you are doing the same time over and over again," he said. "And while that is your job and you do it well, it is not necessarily the answer and I think people have started to understand that."

Bratton's cross-jurisdictional meeting yielded results. Within a month, the U.S. Attorney's office brought indictments against 18 of the gang members Chief Bratton said were responsible for the bulk of the violence.

While it is too early to tell if using the techniques that disbanded the Gambino family in Little Italy will be able to help disband the gangs of Los Angeles, law enforcement officials say it is important to change their techniques.

The partnership between federal officials and local ones is part of that strategy.

2008-06-27T14:15:00.000-07:00

2008-06-26T10:40:00.000-07:00

2008-06-26T10:07:00.000-07:00

2008-06-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

2008-06-26T08:48:00.000-07:00

2008-06-25T14:34:00.000-07:00

2008-06-25T11:58:00.000-07:00

GANG TIMES

2008-06-20T10:53:00.000-07:00

The purpose of this Blog is to provide clear and continuing education about street gangs. Gangs are a criminal street enterprise whose numbers are growing nationwide. Gangs are "equal opportunity employers." There are male gangs and female gangs. Most gangs are based on racial lines; that is, there are strictly Black gangs, strictly Hispanic gangs, and strictly Asian gangs. Infrequently, however, a gang may decide to accept a person of a different ethnicity. My goal is to add at least one new piece of information to this site daily. Sometimes that information will be no more than a powerful thought, an urgent statistic, or substantive recommendation. At other times, that new piece of information will be communicated to you via entire paragraphs, essays, or informational material that I presented while conducting a training seminar. As a result of new information and material being added daily, you will see this Blog grow. That makes only good sense: Since gangs are growing throughout America, our understanding about gangs must also grow. We cannot solve a problem by remaining stagnant and stunted in our growth of knowledge about that problem.

Gangs are a form of domestic terrorism. According to Rockard (Rocky) Delgadillo, the Los Angeles City Attorney, there are 732,000 active street gang members in the United States. That is a staggering number! And you know something? That number is one-half the present size of the United States Army. The Army's census is about 1.5 million soldiers. The nation's gangs are growing and are close to eclipsing the size of the nation's Army. We ought to hang our heads in shame, every time we look at the Statue of Liberty, our symbol of the countless blessings that living in a free country provides. While our Army is dedicated to protecting us, the gangs that maraud through our streets and wreak havoc and devastation in our communities are dedicated only to criminal acts and forms of terrorism. In your mind's eye, visualize a half-dozen members of the Army standing straight and tall before the Statue of Liberty. Now, visualize a half-dozen gangbangers standing before that wonderful Statue of Liberty, facing the six members of the Army. Do you have any confusion about who is dedicated and committed to serving and protecting you, your neighbors, and everybody else in this great nation of ours? Do you have any difficulty in viewing, in your mind's eye, the six gangbangers in front of the Statue of Liberty as treasonous saboteurs of our rights and freedoms and only doers of crimes of terrorism? Do you have any difficulty in understanding that criminal street gangs, not so far from being one million in number, are domestic, community terrorists? What about a threat to our national security? Yes, without question! Criminal street gangs are as great a threat to America as Al-Qaeda is.

As a Superior Court-Certified Expert Witness on Gangs, I am frequently asked to make presentations to attorneys in the area of my specialization. The following information comes from a training seminar I recently conducted for attorneys on the staff of one of the nation's County Public Defense offices; these attorneys provide legal representation to clients who have no funds or ability to pay. I work with the Defense Bar. As a Constitutionalist, I am committed to the idea that everybody deserves a fair trial, no matter what the allegation against them is. I think you will find the following questions and the answers that sprang from our vigorous discussion, to be enlightening.

How can the Defense explain conduct that the Prosecution alleges amounts to participation in a criminal street gang pursuant to Penal Code Section 186.22? This statute as you know is an enhancement and requires evidence the accused committed a felony “for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with any criminal street gang, with the specific intent to promote, further, or assist in any criminal conduct by gang members... .”

The suspect or person of interest has to be persuaded to co-manage his defense and provide contradictory clear and convincing evidence that the appearance of gang activity was not at all what it looked like, even falling short of the legal standard that defines a gang enhancement act. A couple of measures a defendant can take are (1) fill out the form that gives him McLaughlin Rights to question/challenge the “probable cause” employed by the police in procuring and using evidence with which to arrest him; and (2) regarding a Gang Injunction Ordinance, the person of interest should fill out the blank part on the citation form that gives him an opportunity to tell his side of the story, explain his presence, actions, behavior, role, and so forth. More than merely verbalizing his “innocence” and spinning countless arguments against his arrest, documenting his defensive declarations, vis-à-vis the legal forms (cited above) provided him assure that his refutation of the police incident report gets read and addressed in Court.

If, in a typically-male and bull-like way, he merely brays angrily and hurls testosterone-driven accusations at the police (blaming them, inter alia, for “gangism”, “racism,” and “povertyism”) when he appears in court, his position could be highly vulnerable, legally speaking. Why? The Jury will review the incident report and note that he was offered opportunities to explain and document his side of the matter. Failing to take this opportunity might appear to the Jury to be evidence of guilt, while, ironically, his view (of his act of defiance) was that he was doing the least he ought to do to protect his manhood. Sound strange? Not really, when you consider that at the criminal street gang level, the measurement of and judgment about masculinity is a hyper-neurosis among gangbangers. They are neurotically shot through with fear about loss of manhood and driven by that pernicious fear to assert and proclaim their notion of masculinity through their distorted vision of climbing Mt. Everest: committing acts of violence.

Since the statute (PC 186.22) states that a gang act is, inter alia, one that produces a “benefit” for the gang, police officers ought to be questioned in court about what, actually, was the benefit the gang obtained. Not a hypothetical benefit, but an actual benefit. And how did the gang publicize or demonstrate that benefit to others, in act(s) of self-aggrandizement? What did the gang actually do in the community to communicate the word (street intelligence) that it derived that benefit? What advantages diminished, that others enjoyed, as a result of the gang’s obtaining this new benefit? In gangdom, there is a constant teeter-totter effect; so police officers need to be asked, by the Defense, in court about who gained benefits and who lost them as a result of the defendant’s alleged act. What proof did the gang throw out to show it created or drove the particular act that resulted in that benefit? That the police officer being questioned may not be able to cite the concrete benefit(s), may be enough to create reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors.

In the murky world of gangdom, appearances of guilt/complicity/violation are sometimes not what they seem to be; and while they may not be close to being false, the fact that they are not in perfect integration with truth, either, is reason enough, in a nation governed by the rule of law, to vigorously pursue the defense of one so cited/detained/arrested/incarcerated, as though there was a Grand Canyon-like span between his innocence and putative guilt.

When I was on the witness stand in the Butte County courthouse (Oroville, CA), the prosecutor pounded away at me and kept questioning why I would not agree that the shooting into my client’s home, by a gang, only proved my client was himself a gang member. “Are you going to sit here and tell this court, Dr. Shaw, that you disagree?” When I said yes and explained that his assertion was not supported by my research or that of others, nationally, he asked, “Isn’t it true that when somebody’s house gets shot into, that only means they’re involved in illegal acts, are members of a gang, and actually brought heat upon themselves?” When I said no, that that was not true, he asked, “How could you sit where you are and tell this court that none of this is true. How could you do that?” I replied: “About two years, a California Highway Patrol Officer by the name of Tom Steiner was at the Pomona Courthouse, in Southern California, taking care of some law enforcement business. When he finished, he was about to descend the steps of the courthouse when he was suddenly shot in the head by a wanna-be gangbanger (it was later determined) who got out of his car, stopped at a red light, and, standing in the midst of lunch-hour traffic and among witnesses, pulled out a handgun, aimed it straight at Officer Steiner and pulled the trigger. Officer Steiner left a wife, a two-year old child, and a baby on the way. Counsel, according to what you have just asserted, and if I might use your exact wording, Officer Steiner was engaged in illegal acts that ‘brought heat’ upon himself, and was thus to blame for that bullet that came crashing into his skull from the gun of some wanna-be gangbanger.” At this, the prosecutor’s face turned so red he could have lit a match with it. He pulled at his hair, looked frantically at the judge and sputtered out, “Y-y-y-our Honor, I-I-I have no further questions of t-t-t-his witness.”

Additionally, it is important to keep in mind that persons of interest are now saying that, because they were stopped or detained in the midst of putting in gang work, they were not engaged in activities to further or benefit their gang. Said another way, they would [theoretically] only acknowledge their gang enhancement acts only if they would not caught in the act. In their distorted thinking, being arrested stops the act and, therefore, by their reasoning, they were not engaging in it.

What in your opinion is “enough” evidence for an expert to opine that particular conduct constitutes “in associate with” under 186.22?

Occasionally, a defendant will admit to an act that was—per language in the statute--“in association with.” I know a defendant, who was part of a case on which I worked, and got 10 years peeled off his sentence because he performed as an informant for the district attorney (northern California) and testified that he co-founded the “Mob Eleven” group with my client and that the group, in fact, was not a club as the Defense asserted but was a full-out criminal street gang with all the characteristics defined by the Penal Code. The attorney who hired me asked me, in court, what I thought of the document showing the D.A.’s handwritten, two-line agreement that such testimony would hold in abeyance, for the benefit of the informant, the 10-year sentence for which the D.A. would otherwise have argued.

Other forms of “enough” evidence are, of course, concurring statements by one’s co-gang members who, for various reasons and pressures, opt to testify or provide information against the person of interest/defendant. Though the prosecution throughout the country insists on using sworn law enforcement officers as their expert witnesses, I have often found that they are incomplete and insubstantial in their citation of the professional qualifications and background that purportedly qualify them as gang experts.

How do we respond to evidence that asserts that certain conduct was committed to promote, further, or assist? Is having a tattoo enough evidence, a moniker? Do young men by necessity have to adorn these trademarks just to survive in their neighborhood and thus such evidence isn’t really dispositive? Is there any research that would indicate this postulate true?

A tattoo is a symbol. In gangdom, it is a highly suggestive graphic or logo. But having one is not a violation of law, although law enforcement officers’ and jurors’ presumption of guilt might indeed be catalyzed and heightened at the sight of tattoos on the person of interest detained for suspicion of gang activity. For some officers, it rather appears that tattoos enhance confusion about whether the tattoo itself is or embodies an “act” that promotes and benefits a gang, or if there are other concrete and distinct acts that—in, of, and by themselves—legally elevate the person of interest to the level of “suspect.”

The “Three T’s About Tattoos”: Tattoos (1) Tattle (inform); (2) are Taboo, to law enforcement and city officials, as well as to rival gangs; and (3) list or describe the toll. Frequently, tattoos advertise the person wearing them; that is, they inform others of his or her gang affiliation and status. “Assassin” is a gang name that tattles on the currently-living person proudly wearing this appellation. Because gang names (also called “hood names”) are deliberately graphic concoctions meant to be read and taken literally, others reading the name “Assassin” are immediately informed that the person so branded is regarded by himself, his gang, and rival gangs as a human killing machine. The tattoo, “Body Parts”, is the hood name of a currently-living gangbanger in Los Angeles. He likes to shoot persons in their limbs and extremities, to disable them. The tattoo “Baby Clever” bespeaks the wearer’s vaunted street intelligence. And the inscription “Livin’ to Die”, currently worn, in 5-inch block letters on his chest, by a San Gabriel Valley Foothills resident, is meant to proclaim his notion of bravery to the world at large.

The Los Angeles Fire Department has prohibited the wearing of tattoos by its personnel; effective immediately, formerly-obvious tattoos are required to be concealed with long-sleeved shirts or band-aids. The Los Angeles Fire Department apparently does not want its personnel to be perceived as salaried gangbangers, nor does it want known gangbangers, in search of employment, to be attracted to the Los Angeles Fire Department.

There is a gangbanger running around South Los Angeles who has eleven names of gang rivals on his chest. All of them have “x’s” etched through them, his symbol to the world that they are no longer around—dead. When some of the gangbangers in my classroom at the Los Padrinos Juvenile Court told me this, they also stated that he didn’t care whether he lived or died, he had seen so much death already in his young life. Most of the time he ran around the streets without his shirt on, deliberately calling attention to himself, inviting death. As strange as it might seem, no law enforcement officer used this human billboard’s “evidence” against him, and I have not yet heard whether he’s been hauled into court as a perpetrator of or witness to the fate of the persons whose names he etched into his body and then, defacing them, thus memorialized their deaths.

What is your view/critique of law enforcement officers who claim to gang experts? How do we attach the premise of their credentials?

On several occasions I have had to provide testimony to counter or challenge what a law enforcement officer has testified to in court, regarding his professional background as a gang expert. I found holes in: (1) the testimonies assessing and quantifying the “hours” of training purportedly completed; (2) who the training staff was (I am suspect of training done only by the officer’s own department—I place a higher value on P.O.S.T training or on a consortium approach some departments use with other police agencies; (3) the lack of officers’ ability to cite literature and other written references that shaped and formed the predicate for their expert opinion; and (4) officers’ lack of having a direct role as gang training officers (one officer I followed in court merely had been a “gopher” for a training officer, and had done everything from securing flipcharts to making sure PowerPoint could be activated from flash or jump drives. On another occasion, one police officer was clearly stymied when the defense attorney asked him to list the publications, such as university research he had read about gangs, exclusive of department memos. He drew a blank and was genuinely perplexed that department memoranda were questioned as seemingly insufficient as a permanent and irrefutable source of gang culture, gang activity, and gang identification. Police officers ought to be informed that, to be seen as an expert in gang culture, part of that [viewpoint] requires that you train others: other police departments, attendees at professional conferences, school officials, park and playground coordinators, and school resource officers (SRO’s). Said another way, if you think you’re leading, but nobody is following, you’re merely out taking a good stroll.

What kinds/types of discovery should we ask for?

(1) Copies of citations or written documentation of gang activity by a school administrator, teacher, or SRO; (2) probation officer’s report; (3) Field Interview Cards (F.I.C.’s) duly noting whether and if the person of interest identified himself as a gangbanger, gave the name of his gang, and stated when he was “jumped in” or “put on”; (4) photographs of body tattoos showing: (a) name of his or her gang; (b) the number, alphabetical letter, street/avenue name, or other graphic symbol owned by that gang; (c) his or her own peculiar gang name; or (d) slogans, threats or other menacing scrawls; for example, “Killer for Hire” would be such. It is also highly important to possess copies of police documentation or court reporters’ transcripts stating the exact job titles of gang officers. For example, “Head of the African-American Gang Unit” versus “Head of the Gang Unit” has distinct, separate, racial and possibly deleterious implications for African-American defendants facing trial as gang members. The connotation in the former job description might inspire a prejudice toward guilt in the minds of jurors. The officer bearing the latter job title, by contrast, might be seen as an expert in all things gang-related, not merely as somebody focusing on a part or fragment of the whole.

What’s the difference between being a member of a gang versus a “tagging crew” or “party crew"?

Gangs require that all of its members “put in work,” a term that means to engage in criminal activities that promote, benefit, or otherwise further the objectives of the gang. Gang objectives are to dominate, control, inspire fear, suppress, enhance its reputation and be viewed as all-powerful over and above other rival gangs. The constant requirement to put in work is driven by the need to achieve all of these objectives. Putting in work encompasses all forms of criminal activity, from car-jacking, dealing drugs, to murder. Gangs pride themselves on being “equal opportunity workers.” Said another way, there is no crime that a gang would not do, so long as committing that crime enhanced the gang by facilitating the achievement of its objectives.