OFF THE WIRE
SUNITA VIJAYAN
thecalifornian.com
Jose Vasquez is shown in his wheelchair after being wounded in a gang-related shooting on Nov. 10, 2010, at the corner of Del Monte and Orchard avenues in Salinas. The shooting marked Salinas' 17th homicide of 2010. Conner Jay/The Salinas Californian
Salinas police officers investigate the scene of the Nov. 10, 2010, shooting. Conner Jay/The Salinas Californian
After a two-year hiatus, the National Gang Intelligence Center, through the FBI, released its 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment, analyzing trends and the pressure created by gangs in urban, suburban and rural communities nationwide. This is the third such report, with predecessors in 2005 and 2009.
"Gangs continue to expand, evolve and become more violent," said Kevin Perkins, assistant director of the FBI Criminal Investigative Division, upon the report's release in October.
"The FBI, along with its federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement partners, strives to disrupt and prevent their criminal activities and seek justice for innocent victims of their crimes," Perkins said.
The most notable trend for 2011, according to the report, is the overall rise in gang membership and new, creative ways crimes are being committed.
New gang enterprises
The report estimates there are about 1.4 million active street gang, outlaw motorcycle gang and prison gang members in the nation — up by 40 percent from about 1 million gang members reported in 2009. The rise is attributed to a combination of having more agencies reporting, increasingly aggressive recruiting by gangs, newly created gangs, new drug trafficking opportunities, partnership with rival gangs and drug-trafficking enterprises.The Monterey County Sheriff's Office estimated there were about 1,160 "registered" gang members locally in 2003. Gang members are usually registered through field interviews conducted by law enforcement officers.
Unregistered gang members are estimated at three to four times the number of registered gang members.
Since 2005, the number of gang members in the county has steadily increased. When the first report came out in 2005, there were reportedly a few thousand gang members in Monterey County. That same year, the Monterey County Joint Gang Task Force was created to combat rising gang violence. The task force was credited for helping reduce gang violence and bring down homicides to seven compared to 20 the previous year.
In the 2009 report, officials estimated the county had between 2,500 and 3,499 gang members.
As outlined in the 2011 report, Monterey County said it had about 5,145 gang members in 2010. While the county didn't make the list of Top 10 gang-infested counties across the nation or even the state, the increase remains worrisome.
Among the 15 Central California counties, Monterey County has the ninth-highest number of reported gang members, according to the report. At 24,482 individuals, Fresno has the most gang members of any Central California county.
Sureño gangs keep pace
While the greatest increase was seen in the northeast and southeast regions of the nation, the highest number of gang members lives in the West and Great Lakes regions, the report says.Sureño criminal street gangs were identified in the report as among the most rapidly expanding in many jurisdictions. Sureño gang members are regarded as mostly Mexican immigrants with ties to their native homeland. Their rivals are Norteño gangs composed primarily of U.S.-born residents of Mexican descent.
Salinas, long a stronghold for Norteño gangs, is seeing more Sureños coming into the area who are organizing in ways they haven't before, creating more violence in Monterey County.
Where in the past, Norteños made up about 95 percent of Monterey County gangs, the Sureños are starting to even out the population, said county Joint Gang Task Force Officer Jesse Piñon, also a sheriff's deputy.
"It's now more 60-40," Piñon said.
The rise could be connected to the increase in migration to the area, he said.
The report's analysis is stark as it opines that violence isn't letting up — in fact, gang members are growing more violent as they seek out other, less usual and lower-risk opportunities for criminal revenue, including prostitution and white-collar crimes.
Credit card fraud and identity theft are popular when it comes to white-collar crime, Piñon said, as returns are usually lucrative.
"Drug sales, ultimately, is their money-maker," he said. "They make a lot of money from this, where check fraud and identity theft is risky, but it can net good amounts of money."
Nonetheless, drugs and robberies remain among the top crimes for the county, Piñon said. Moreover, identity theft may go hand in hand with robberies, he said.
Learning from the past
Like most gangs across the nation, Piñon said, those here in Monterey County are evolving and becoming more threatening in their own ways. Gang members are learning how to avoid future detection from past law enforcement crackdowns, such as Operation Valley Star and Operation Black Widow, he said.Operation Valley Star in 2007 saw the capture of 22 suspected gang members along the Pacific coast from the San Francisco Bay Area through Monterey County. Operation Black Widow, a seven-year FBI investigation, resulted in eight members of the Nuestra Familia prison gang pleading guilty to federal racketeering and conspiracy charges in September 2004.
"(Gangs) are basically adapting to however they were caught in the first place," Piñon said.
Some of the findings in the report are so far irrelevant to the county, such as the expansion of Asian and hybrid gangs.
According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, hybrid gangs are considered mixed race and ethnic gangs that are loosely structured in rules and codes of conduct for their members. The gang members could also participate in a number of other gangs at the same time or team up with rival gangs in carrying out crimes.
Piñon said the area remains largely dominated by Norteño and Sureño gangs. But there is some presence locally of hybrid gangs, he said. In its report, the FBI names the "Juggalos," fans of the rap group Insane Clown Posse, as a hybrid group posing "a threat to communities due to the potential for violence, drug use/sales, and their general destructive and violent nature."
While the area doesn't have Juggalos, Piñon said, law enforcement officers have seen the hybrid group Peckerwoods, a pro-white gang.
One trend that has law enforcement concerned is the apparent collaboration of local gangs with Mexican nationals. The Salinas area has been tagged as a drug-trafficking artery connecting Southern and Northern California.
"They (the Mexican nationals) supply all the gangs in the area," Piñon said.
Another potential influence on gang activity in Monterey County still remains uncertain — the impact of "prison realignment" under Assembly Bill 109, in which some state prison inmates are being held in county jails to relieve prison overcrowding. The plan went into effect Oct. 1 across the state and is slated to send tens of thousands of lower-level criminals from state prisons to county jails — in the case of Monterey County, an already crowded jail.
Piñon said time will tell what impact realignment will have on gang members released under the plan and whether they will subsequently re-establish themselves into local gangs.
A counter movement
While gangs are expanding their reach and meting out violence, he said, there has been a movement in the past few years by law enforcement and other groups to counter their influence.In 2009, the same year the city of Salinas saw a record-breaking 29 homicides — all of which were blamed on gangs — the Community Alliance for Safety and Peace was launched. CASP is a coalition of organizations and leaders from Salinas and Monterey County formed with the aim of disrupting the culture of violence that continues to affect public welfare.
In April 2010, the multi-agency Operation Knockout culminated with the arrest of dozens of gang members and some of the most powerful gang leaders in the Salinas area.
Since then, officials have reported strides made — a circumstance that could be linked to the decrease in homicides. In 2010, the Salinas Police Department said, the city had 20 homicides. As of Dec. 8, there had been 12 homicides reported this year in Salinas — nine of them definitely linked to gangs.