LA got a firsthand look at a gang bust last week with the takedown of the 18th Street gang, or the “Barrio 18.”
In the bust, police arrested Keiko Gonzalez, or “Moms,” who is wanted for murder and racketeering.
She runs the gang while her husband, Mexican Mafia boss Jorge Gonzalez, a.k.a Huero Caballo, is in state prison.
Police also arrested a variety of gang leaders and enforcers.
That was the good news.
The bad news: this sort of takedown is all too rare.
LAPD officers tell The California Post that they are no longer allowed to use CalGang, their own intelligence database on gang membership.
Some 80,000 alleged gang members are in the database. But police can’t use it.
That’s because of changes adopted at the height of the hysteria of the Black Lives Matter riots by former Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Garcetti had tried to appease the mob, even kneeling with them at one point. (They targeted his house for months anyway.)
In a speech during the riots in June 2020, Garcetti announced a moratorium on new names being added to CalGang.
It was quite a memorable speech, because it was constantly interrupted by police sirens, as cops spread throughout the city to chase rioters and enforce a citywide curfew.
In the same speech, Garcetti proposed cutting the police budget by $150 million.
Crime skyrocketed in the city for years.
LA voters took their city’s fate in their hands,, tossing out radical District Attorney George Gascón and replacing him with Nathan Hochman in 2024.
Crime has dropped significantly — thanks, also, to the deployment of ICE to remove criminal migrants, though no one wants to admit that.
But there are still lingering effects of the Black Lives Matter era.
One is that the CalGang database is off-limits, ostensibly because it includes too many black and Latino people..
That is like saying police shouldn’t have gone after Al Capone and his gang because the Mafia was too Italian.
CalGang had been a crucial tool for law enforcement.
It was used by 6,000 officers in 58 counties, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The ACLU complained that the CalGang database was inaccurate and had vague criteria for including people on the list.
That’s a reason to fix the system — not to throw it out or to stop using it altogether.
Yes, even gangsters have civil liberties. But crime destroys the liberties of the people who are forced to live with it — including, especially, people in the black and Latino communities.
CalGang is a useful tool for police and prosecutors. It allows them to trace gang activity through networks of individuals.
That means it might include people who are not guilty of any crime — but who might be linked to people who are.
We need our police and prosecutors to be able to do their jobs.
We need to put the handcuffs on the gangsters — not on law enforcement.
We need to end Garcetti’s moratorium — almost six years later.
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