Are You in a Gang Database?
This week, community groups and the American Civil Liberties Union in Southern California won a historic ruling in federal court that put on hold, as least temporarily, Los Angeles’ enforcement of gang injunctions. The injunctions, a staple of Los Angeles’ anti-gang strategy for decades, prohibited alleged gang members from things like carrying cellphones and in some cases from associating with other alleged gang members, like family members.
Young Black and Latino Los Angeles residents and the Youth Justice Coalition had argued, for years, that the injunctions were arbitrary, unfair and unconstitutional. The courts, at least for now, agree.
The landmark decision builds on other developments in California. In 2016, critics of anti-gang tactics gained some insight into how gang designations are made when auditors found that the state’s gang database, CalGang, was full of errors, at one point even listing toddlers as gang members.
In New York City, which has historically had less of a pronounced gang presence than cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, anti-gang tactics are intensifying but the NYPD’s gang strategy is shrouded in secrecy. The process by which New York City police tag someone a gang member may have many of the same problems that CalGang has but no one knows because the police department has so far failed to answer Freedom of Information Law requests that we and legal organizations filed last year.
So how would you know if you or someone in your family — particularly if you are Black or Latino — were in a gang database? The NYPD doesn’t use gang injunctions. Instead, utilizing a model known as Operation Ceasefire, the police send threatening letters, visit or compel people they identify as gang members to attend meetings. Police officials, sometimes accompanied by members of the clergy, communicate to their targets that if they or someone they know breaks the law, the police hammer will come down hard.
The police hammer has certainly been coming down hard in recent years. Thousands, according to the NYPD, have been arrested as a result of so-called gang raids in the past two years. While some may be contacted by the NYPD, others, including residents of the Eastchester Gardens section of the Bronx — which in 2016 saw the biggest gang raid in city history — never knew they had been deemed gang bangers. In fact, many of those arrested and their families have intensely disputed their gang association as well as the charges they’ve faced.
The problems with Los Angeles’ gang injunctions aren’t very different than what we likely have here in New York. For starters, no one is given an opportunity to challenge, legally or otherwise, their gang designation. Many arrested have only found that out when masked police and federal officers kicked down their doors. At that point, the legal challenges laid out in front of you aren’t simply for things you’ve been accused of doing — but what others have been accused of. The gang label makes it all stick together in the eyes of what are increasingly federal prosecutors and federal grand juries (in the Bronx, I suspect this may be to avoid Bronx jury pools, which has long been distrustful of cops.
There are other concerns with gang policing tactics in other cities that can extend to New York City as well. In New Orleans this week, local officials scrapped a partnership with Palantir, a big data firm linked to the CIA and founded by controversial billionaire Peter Thiel, after a series of investigative stories exposed a relationship so secret that local lawmakers didn’t even know it existed. Palantir helped the New Orleans Police Department surveil residents and make use of their social media activity to build questionable gang-related cases against them.
But Palantir enjoyed a partnership with the NYPD for years and may still provide data analysis for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, who has used the company’s intelligence in trials of young Black residents of Harlem who’ve been accused as gang members. In the 2016 trial of Taylonn Murphy Jr., who was ultimately convicted of murder despite the lack of forensic evidence or a murder weapon, Palantir’s reports of how many times Taylonn would post on Facebook certain days were used by prosecutors to try to convince the jury of his guilt.
Gang is a word loaded with political connotations and serious legal consequences. Gang databases, whether managed by the NYPD or shared with federal Trump administration officials, are inherently incompatible with justice and should be abolished. A police department embroiled in corruption scandals and that won’t even fire abusive cops cannot be trusted to mark someone a gang member with no way for someone to challenge that label.
At the heart of the story of Pedro Hernandez, the Bronx teen eventually freed after being locked up on Rikers for over year, was cop, David Terrell who was a supposed expert on local gangs.
Do we have toddlers on New York City’s gang database? New York City families should take note of what is happening in Los Angeles, New Orleans and elsewhere and seriously question if the city’s gang tactics are about public safety or scoring easy convictions in poor communities of color.
History suggests the latter.
