Gang Intervention

By Dennis Herrera

Gang violence has taken a terrible toll on San Francisco in recent years. That's why City Attorney Dennis Herrera brought a new tool to assist the efforts of police, prosecutors and community organizations: civil gang injunctions.

In November of 2006, Herrera obtained San Francisco's first-ever civil gang injunction against the Oakdale Mob, a violent street gang that had threatened the safety of the Bayview/Hunters Point district for more than a decade. The civil gang injunction, which became permanent in March 2007, prohibits enjoined adult members of the Oakdale Mob from engaging in gang-related activity within a four-block safety zone around the Oakdale housing development, the area claimed by the Oakdale Mob as its turf. Prohibited activity includes: possession of any dangerous weapon, drugs or drug paraphernalia; loitering with intent to sell or distribute drugs; undertaking any form of intimidation against witnesses, or victims; use of threats to recruit or retain members; defacing property with graffiti or possessing graffiti-making instruments; and trespassing. Under its terms, violations of the injunction may be pursued civilly by the City Attorney or criminally by the District Attorney.

In October of 2007, Herrera broadened the effort by obtaining civil injunctions against four additional criminal street gangs that have plagued San Francisco's most violence prone neighborhoods, the Western Addition and Mission districts. In the Western Addition, Herrera targeted three gangs suspected by police to be involved in several shootings. In the Mission District, Herrera targeted a nationally recognized violent criminal street gang suspected of multiple crimes, including approximately 18 homicides in San Francisco. As with earlier injunctions, only adult members are enjoined.

But Herrera was also sensitive to concerns from civil libertarians that innocent people could be subjected to court ordered restrictions. So, he went to work with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, and in March 2008 announced a first-of-its-kind agreement. Under the negotiated memorandum of understanding, enjoined gang members can administratively petition for removal from the injunction based on a showing that they have ceased gang-related activity. The carefully crafted agreement maximizes civil liberty protections while ensuring the continued effectiveness of the civil injunction to thwart the gang violence and nuisance activities that victimize vulnerable San Francisco.

From the beginning of the program, Herrera conceded that civil gang injunctions are no panacea to end gang violence. But they're already making a real difference: In the year following the injunction in the Mission, 60 percent of the enjoined gang members had not had even one arrest in San Francisco. And the numbers were even better in the Western Addition, where 64 percent had been without an arrest.

Maybe that's why Herrera's program won praise from the San Francisco Examiner, which wrote: "it appears as if the city attorney's gang injunctions have been doing the job they were supposed to do: making The City's high-crime neighborhoods measurably safer for the law-abiding majority of their hard-pressed residents."