San Diego County law enforcement agencies added scores of people to the state’s database of suspected gang members last year, raising the likelihood that they will be arrested, denied bail and handed a stricter sentence if they are convicted.
All of them were singled out by police in San Diego and Escondido.
Newly released records from the California Department of Justice show that while more police agencies across the state are avoiding the controversial gang database, officials in San Diego and Escondido continue to boost their profiles.
San Diego added 55 people to the statewide register last year, and Escondido reported 18 new gang members.
Both departments ended the year with fewer gang members than in 2023, however, because state law requires names to be automatically purged after five years if no new evidence is produced to warrant a continued listing.
Advocacy groups and researchers have complained for years that the CalGang reports adversely affect communities of color. They say once people are listed, they are more likely to be arrested when stopped, more likely to be denied bail and more likely to be sent to prison.
A 2016 state audit of the database and how it’s used found that police abused their authority, failing to justify placement on the list or follow state and federal guidelines. The program also lacked proper oversight and transparency, auditors said.
But police officials in San Diego and Escondido defend the gang database as an effective law enforcement tool that is regularly updated and closely monitored for accuracy.
“It’s possible other law enforcement agencies don’t have the resources to keep up with the documentation process that SDPD has,” said Lt. Chris Tivanian of the San Diego Police Department.
“Other locations, despite a similar population, may not be impacted by criminal street gangs as much as San Diego,” he said.
Statewide, the number of people listed on the gang database has plummeted in recent years — largely as a result of sheriffs and police chiefs rethinking the effectiveness of the data and its impact on the people listed, who are overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic.
In 2017, for example, more than 100,000 people appeared in the statewide database, almost eight times as many as last year. The newly released 2024 report includes 13,691 people, down 40 percent from just a year earlier.
But even though the numbers are down by more than 85 percent over the past decade, people of color continue to be hugely over-represented in the state gang data. Of the 13,691 people listed, 9,490 are Hispanic, and 3,945 are Black. Fewer than 950 are White.
The decline in CalGang listings may also be due to stricter rules imposed after the state audit.
The state Department of Justice requires any name on the list to be automatically purged after five years — unless law enforcement can show new evidence that the person is a gang member. In those cases, the person’s inclusion on the list can be extended for five more years from the date of that evidence.
What’s more, the state requires police to notify people who are placed onto the list — and they are assured opportunities to contest any listing.
Leaders of police agencies also have to justify every entry at the command level, meaning that senior department officials must review each new addition. The entries also are subject to random and routine auditing by state officials.
For some police agencies, the rules governing CalGang have grown simply too cumbersome to keep using it.
National City, for example, was adding several people a month as recently as 2017, when the city reported 356 known gang members and gang-affiliated people.
But the numbers dropped steadily over the ensuing years. The latest CalGang data shows a total of 64 people on the list in National City, down from 120 in 2023 and 189 the year before that.
“There are a lot of legal issues surrounding (CalGang), so it’s not as utilized as it once was,” National City police Sgt. Joseph Camacho said. “We don’t typically add new people.”
Camacho said his department has turned to a regional database that tracks a much broader range of suspects.
The ARJIS network, short for Automated Regional Justice Information System, was formed as a joint-powers authority that keeps tabs on all kinds of suspects, field encounters, arrests and other activity.
“I wouldn’t say it’s superior, but it’s a different way to document,” Camacho said. “It collates every document that’s being generated, rather than only gang cases.”
Defense lawyers and others say landing in the gang database can have life-altering consequences. They also say the Department of Justice data makes clear that people of color are being added to the list at far higher rates than Whites.
“Being falsely labeled as a gang member does more than just impact a criminal case — it can follow a person for life,” said Escondido attorney Richard Sterger, who has represented numerous clients accused of being gang members or gang-affiliated.
“It affects jobs, housing and immigration status,” he said. “It threatens family stability. I’ve seen clients whose lives were completely derailed by a clearly erroneous and often unchallenged designation.”
1980s crackdown
The California gang database grew out of a project launched by the Los Angeles Police Department as part of a 1980s crackdown called CRASH, or Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums.
The idea was to create a system where suspected gang members and associates were tracked in a single database that recorded their activities, criminal histories, nicknames, contacts with police and more.
Other law enforcement agencies quickly followed suit. By 1998, the California Department of Justice created CalGang, a shared-intelligence resource that allowed police and sheriff’s deputies across the state to check the backgrounds of suspects new to their jurisdictions.
But the LAPD effort ended in ignominy when a brazen corruption scandal was exposed in the late 1990s. State officials revoked the department’s access to the database in 2020.
“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: CalGang is only as good as the data that is put into it,” then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra said at the time. “If a quarter of the program’s data is suspect, then the utility of the entire system rightly comes under the microscope.”
San Diego County leaders have taken other steps in recent years to adopt fairer and more productive ways to police gang members and their associates.
Four years ago, District Attorney Summer Stephan announced the elimination of civil gang injunctions — restraining orders that barred people from specific neighborhoods in an effort to prevent gang violence.
After hearing community concerns and studying the impact, Stephan said the injunctions were “not effective in protecting the public.”
Ana Muñiz, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine who has studied gangs and the state database for more than a decade, said there are still many problems with the CalGang program.
For starters, she said police only need to assert two factors before registering a name on the database. Some of those include potentially identifying clothing, tattoos or even sports team logos favored by millions of people.
“These criteria can be satisfied based on observations that an officer makes over social media, meaning that an officer can designate an individual as a gang member without ever speaking to or contacting them,” Muñiz said.
“What this means is that police can add an individual to CalGang literally just for standing in public in a blue shirt near someone else they consider to be a gang member,” she added.
Muñiz said her research has shown that police routinely over-enforce low-income, Black and brown communities — reinforcing longstanding patterns of racial and socioeconomic segregation and overlooking groups of white people who meet all the definitions of a gang.
“Authorities in Malibu refused to designate Malibu Locals Only — a group of wealthy white youth who committed assault and witness intimidation under a shared name and symbol — as a gang,” she said.
She also cited rogue bands of Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies whose members shared matching tattoos and engaged in violent and corrupt activities for years.
“They refer to them as ‘cliques,’” Muniz noted.
‘Treated differently’
For Lt. Ryan Hicks, who runs the Escondido police investigations division, CalGang is simply another tool available to his officers. But he appreciates the sensitivity of being listed and said the department is careful with the information it collects.
“We have a department specialist whose only role is controlling gang documentation and ensuring compliance and purging at appropriate dates,” said Hicks, who spent years working the gang detail in south L.A. before relocating to Escondido.
“CalGang is simply a computer system documenting stuff we used to do on paper,” he said. “When you lose checks and balances and the right training, this is where you have problems.”
Hicks predicted that CalGang listings in his community will continue to drop, even as some people are added, because fewer gang-related crimes are being reported.
“What we are seeing here since COVID is a major drop in the number of gang crimes,” the police lieutenant said. “There’s less dudes hanging out on the street corners who decide to rob houses.”
Still, last year, Escondido police jump-started its gang-enforcement team after a pair of killings they believed involved juvenile offenders.
Hicks said at the time the ramp-up was needed to engage young people who were on the cusp of joining gangs. Contacting them early and reinforcing positive role models and activities can keep teenagers on the straight and narrow, he said.
“We need officers who aren’t just doing the enforcement part, but are going to meet these kids on a daily basis,” Hicks told The San Diego Union-Tribune last summer. “You start seeing the same kids over and over again, and you’re saying ‘Hi’ every day.”
Cornelius Bowser welcomes outreach efforts by police in any community but remains suspicious of the gang database. In his experience, he said, police are not always there to help.
“I was robbed by the police. I was taken by train tracks and assaulted,” Bowser said.
The former West Coast Crip is now a bishop with the Charity Apostolic Church and runs an outreach program for young people. He said too many people are placed into the database — and suffer serious consequences.
“A lot of people have been pushing to do away with the gang database,” Bowser said. “It impacts individuals when they go to court, when they are being sentenced. They are treated differently.”
Mike Lucero also has doubts about the law enforcement benefits of branding people as gang members.
Lucero spent 16 years in prison for various offenses before turning his life around. Now he works as a program director at the Rise Up Leadership Academy, where he mentors young people away from gangs.
“Once they are on that list, no matter what type of infraction they have, not only are they going to be prosecuted, they’re going to be prosecuted at the highest level,” Lucero said. “A case that might have pled out, they want to make them get incarcerated.”
Police need to do more to win people’s trust, Lucero said.
“They just got rid of the injunctions, but they’re still documenting these kids,” he said. “These are realities for a lot of people in these communities who are underrepresented.”
Gang leaders are paying attention — and use gang listings to boost recruitment, Lucero said. Once people are listed, there is less incentive to stay out of gangs, he said, and word spreads quickly once someone is placed into the database.
“Kids need opportunity first of all,” he said. “They want to belong to something. They want to be safe. They want the abuse to stop, and sometimes they don’t find that in the home.”
This spring, Lucero will graduate from San Diego State University with a bachelor’s degree in sociology.
Originally Published:
