Aug. 4, 2004

Having been the victim of gang strife for the past several years, the Oxnard Police Department and the city of Oxnard finally threw up their hands this year and called for the imposition of a Gang Injunction against the Oxnard Colonia Chiques, the group that the OPD claims is the largest and most dangerous of the youth groups in the Oxnard area.

Gang injunctions are the latest anti-gang tool in the field of law enforcement, pioneered by the city of Los Angeles in the 1980's. They basically target a list of local residents identified by the local police department as "gang members," and impose restrictions on movement and dress on those residents that would be unconstitutional in any other setting. Violating any of those restrictions gives the police a presumptive reason to arrest and convict the alleged gang member. Restrictions include things such as: Not being in the designated Injunction area; not wearing certain types of clothing or jewelry; Not meeting with one or more other alledged gang members. As practiced, none of this is subject to due process -- with gang injunctions, you're presumed guilty unless you can prove yourself to be innocent. And the Oxnard injunction reaches new extremes: It is one of the largest injunction areas ever created in the U.S.; and it bypasses the need for a person to appear on any "official" gangmember list -- if you fit a certain profile, then you're presumed to be a gang member. Finally, all pretense of due process is explicitly exempted from the injunction -- the police no longer need to read Miranda rights or serve arrest or search warrants, even inform the defendant's family of his custody.

It's even more disturbing that the Oxnard Police Department is near the top of the pile in California of negligent police shootings of civilians. In Amnesty International's 1999 Update on Police Brutality, Ventura County law enforcement, including the Oxnard Police Department, was cited for its high rate of negligent shootings by police officers -- a greater rate of negligent shootings by their officers than any other county in California. As a result, Ventura County told Amnesty International that it would implement the "Memphis Plan", whereby regular officers would be selected and trained by mental health professionals to form 24-hour crisis response teams. But this plan was never implemented. Since 1995, Oxnard police have been involved in eight killings and one wounding of Oxnard civilians. The question that must be raised: Should the Oxnard PD be placed under a "gang injunction" as well? Where is the accountability?

In the past 2 years, Oxnard has had a total of 28 killings. Of these, only 4 have been solved, but the remainder, the OPD insists, are "gang-related." This is used to justify the need for the gang injunction, that "gang activity" is "out of control." But this, after brutal and constitutionally questionable law enforcement methods of gang sweeps, of "weed and seed" programs, of tagging and identification of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Latino youth as "gang members."

Even though the California Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of gang injunctions, there is little to show that they are effective. While those in LA have been effective in reducing gang crime in the injunction areas, many studies have shown that that crime was simply displaced into other adjacent communities. And there is the problem of innocent youth being swept up simply because they sat in the wrong cafe or wore the wrong clothes or unknowingly affiliated with gang members. There are many such cases of this occurring in L.A., and now we are starting to hear such stories coming out of Oxnard.

One needs to look at the ultimate source of this gang strife, and what the ultimate result of these injunctions are. As has become all too common in the United States, the philosophy of law enforcement is to simply remove offenders from the community for as long as possible. This is essentially "throwing away" these lives, hiding them out of sight to pretend that the problem is "solved."

Current criminological research shows that programs which address the stunted education and vocational opportunities of underprivileged youth before they becomei involved in gangs are far more effective in addressing local "gang" problems. The city of Los Angeles has had in place an after-school program for at-risk youth, youth who have had some contact with the local police but have not been identified as a gang member. In this program, called Jeopardy, these youth are required, with their parents, to participate in a structured program 4 days per week to improve their study skills and provide vocational enrichment that assists them in becoming stable, productive members of the community. I know it works because I've been involved with the program for the past year. We have helped dozens of troubled kids and families to heal their dysfunction and develop hope for the future. These programs have existed only on a minimal level in Oxnard, and have never had full local government support. As a member of Congress, I would fight to see that resources are made available to local cities such as Oxnard to ensure that they can provide the foundation needed to support their city's youth.

The Oxnard gang injunction is simply an admission of failure by the city and the police department that they haven't done their job in providing education and opportunities to the city's youth. I would urge the city of Oxnard to revoke the injunction and instead direct their resources towards providing programs such as the LAPD Jeopardy program to build, rather than oppress, their community by the sea.

-Stuart Bechman