Orange County’s top prosecutor moved to dismiss all active gang injunctions Tuesday, making it the latest California jurisdiction to move away from the controversial court orders in recent years.
Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer said the decision came after a 2022 Assembly Bill significantly narrowed the legal definition of what constitutes a gang or gang activity in California. Injunctions against 13 gangs were dismissed, affecting 317 people in cities including Santa Ana, Anaheim, Fullerton, San Clemente, Garden Grove, Placentia, San Juan Capistrano, and Orange. Some of the injunctions had been in effect since 2006, Spitzer said.
“After numerous audits and years of proactively removing individuals from these injunctions, we are now satisfied that these 13 gang injunctions have served their intended purpose and have now sought their dissolution,” Spitzer said in a statement. “Gang injunctions are not intended to last for perpetuity; they are designed and implemented to correct criminal behavior.”
Gang injunctions are civil court orders that can bar a suspected gang member from wearing certain clothes or associating with other alleged members of the same gang set within neighborhoods that are considered gang territory.
They were meant to curb a gang’s ability to dominate a neighborhood by marshaling in public. A person does not have to be convicted of a crime to be subject to an injunction, but violating the orders can prompt contempt charges in criminal court.
Spitzer painted the move as “proactive,” but the district attorney’s decision came after mounting legal pressure from the Peace & Justice Law Center, which issued demand letters in March arguing that the continued use of the injunctions violated both California’s Racial Justice Act and the 2022 assembly bill Spitzer referenced in his news release.
Sean Garcia-Leys, the center’s executive director, said the injunctions were racially-biased because they only targeted alleged Latino criminal organizations despite Orange County being home to a number of white supremacist gangs who were never subjected to injunctions.
“Gang injunctions turned everyday activities into crimes for a generation. They were built on racial profiling, deliberately used to bypass due process, and for those reasons, abandoned in nearly every other county in California,” Garcia-Leys said in a statement.
“With the Trump Administration weaponizing this kind of racist gang suppression to undermine due process across the country,” he said. “It is more important than ever that we ensure all of Orange County’s communities are treated equally under the law.”
A district attorney’s office spokeswoman did not immediately respond to additional questions from The Times. Spitzer said his office could seek new injunctions, under the revised definition of gang activity under California law, if the need arises.
A relic of California’s 1990s efforts to battle a dramatic surge in gang crime, injunctions have been repeatedly challenged as overly broad and draconian by civil rights groups, especially as gang violence has dramatically plummeted over the decades.
A 2020 court settlement effectively barred Los Angeles from enforcing 46 different injunctions that targeted thousands of people. Years before that, a city audit showed more than 7,000 people were needlessly subject to injunctions.
In the past decade, officials in Long Beach, San Francisco, Oakland and San Diego either announced reviews of their injunction programs or ceased enforcing them altogether under legal threat.
Garcia-Leys said it was nearly impossible for people to get removed from injunction rolls under ex-Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas. But Spitzer instituted a review process that led to at least 200 people being freed from the court orders in recent years.
Garcia-Leys said injunctions often lead to absurd restrictions. He said one of his clients was arrested by Fullerton Police for taking the trash out after 10 p.m., violating a curfew element of one injunction.
Another was accused of violating a court order for attending a family function with his brother-in-law, since both men were subject to an injunction related to the same gang and could not gather together in public.
In Los Angeles, some injunctions barred people from wearing Dodgers merchandise in Echo Park, the neighborhood where Dodgers Stadium is located, because the baseball team’s jerseys were considered gang paraphernalia.
“Growing up without good role models in a neighborhood with a gang injunction, I made mistakes,” Omar Montes, who was subject to one of the Orange County injunctions, said in a statement. “But instead of helping me, the system put me on a gang injunction.
“Being on that injunction was humiliating,” he said. “It made me feel voiceless and less than human. I was regularly harassed by police.”
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