City under siege

After Gwendolyn Jones’ daughter LaShanda paid a visit to her home in Monrovia Sunday, Jones decided it would be a good idea to follow her child back to the Foothill (210) Freeway, just to make sure she made it there without incident.  

There’s currently a gang war raging in Monrovia, a few miles east of Pasadena, that’s left four people dead — three in one month, including Brandon Lee, 19, and Samantha Salas, 16, neither of whom were involved with gangs.

But Jones wasn’t worried about her 33-year-old daughter running into any violence. The elder Jones told the Weekly that she was really concerned that her daughter might encounter Monrovia police officers, who are rigorously enforcing a temporary anti-gang injunction recently imposed by an LA County Superior Court judge — prohibiting anyone within the boundaries of a six-square-mile so-called “safety zone” from drinking in public, congregating with others, loitering and a number of  already illegal activities, like unlawfully possessing firearms and other weapons, and vandalizing property with graffiti.

Monrovia, Gwendolyn Jones said, now “locks down” from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., resulting in numerous people — mostly people of color, like LaShanda, who is African American —being pulled over and questioned by police.

“They just came with the cowboy style,” said Jones of the city’s leadership. She acknowledges that the city’s problems with gangs are serious and present a danger to the community. However, she also believes the injunction is a broad-brush approach to a much more complex problem that will only lead to more problems, especially for innocent people, like her daughter and herself.

“The injunction says ‘John Does 1 to 200 inclusive,’” Gwendolyn Jones explained about the court order specifically targeting 38 alleged members of the Duroc Crips and Monrovia Nuevo Varrio gangs, whose years-long feud has resulted in numerous shootings and deaths.

“That means they can add 200 extra people to the injunction without an additional hearing. The police could stop you, and if you fit the profile or talk back, they can add you to the injunction. If your cousin is a gang member and you have never done anything wrong and you give him a ride to the store and they stop you, they could add you. If they see you talk to your neighbor and your neighbor fits the profile, they can add you,” she said.

“Everybody is a suspect and you can be served at any time. They are locking down the whole town and that places us all under injunction.”

City officials say the injunction — signed Dec. 18 by Judge David Yaffe — is aimed at ridding the city of 21 alleged members of the Duroc Crips and 17 alleged members of the Monrovia Nuevo Varrio gangs, restricting their movements and those of the people they associate with.

Besides the other activities mentioned, the injunction also bars them and their associates from blocking sidewalks, alleys and building entrances or intimidating anyone in the safety zone, the boundaries of which are roughly Foothill Boulevard to the north, between Mountain and Fifth avenues on the east and west, and Live Oak Avenue to the south.
Yaffe also imposed an 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew on minors named in the injunction. Anyone violating any of those conditions, including the curfew, could be arrested and charged with a misdemeanor.

The LA County District Attorney’s Office has announced plans to seek a permanent injunction against the two gangs and their associates later this year.

Jones attended a meeting in November with Monrovia Mayor Mary Ann Lutz, Monrovia Chief of Police Randy Johnson and Joe Brown, president of the NAACP Pasadena Branch, who became involved in the controversy after several Monrovia residents approached him for help.

“This is as close to martial law as you can get,” Brown said. “Drinking in public, weapons possession and graffiti are already illegal in every city in California. Putting all that in there is just a smokescreen that says, ‘I am just reacting to something that I don’t want to deal with anyway.’”

Lutz did not return phone calls for this report. In a prepared statement posted on the city’s Web site, Lutz said the injunction may not be the total answer, but it is an effective tool with which local officials can combat gangs.

“This is a major step in our long-term strategy to eliminate gang violence from Monrovia,” Lutz wrote. “It is not a panacea. The injunction alone does not solve the problem. But it adds an important new element to our anti-gang arsenal and, over time, it’s going to make a difference.”

Monrovia city officials worked closely with the DA’s office in seeking the injunction, compiling a list of crimes committed by the gangs, the names of people convicted of those crimes, other suspects and accessories, and the areas where the crimes were committed.

The documents were submitted to the court and the alleged gang members listed reportedly had an opportunity to be represented by counsel and then heard by Yaffe.

Three men tried to get off the list, but Yaffe refused to remove their names because he found there was significant evidence that they actually were affiliated with the Duroc Crips.

The Monrovia Police Department, the LA County Sheriff’s Department and the District Attorney’s Office will evaluate the injunction’s impact and report back in the next few months to the Monrovia City Council and Judge Yaffe.

Brown said that many of the people on that list were on parole and probation and probably could be arrested for their parts in any illegal activity without an injunction against gangs.

“Gang injunctions are a mixed bag,” said USC Law Professor Thomas Griffith. “There are at least two problems: It is not a crime to belong to a gang, and people can be placed on the gang database improperly. There is no due process.

Police departments decide how they place them, and there are no requirements for notification or updating the database. Some departments do a better job than others, but in general, the process is far from accurate, and it can lead to really unfair results. I prefer not to criminalize legal behavior. Two gang members could be arrested for riding in a car to see ‘Avatar,’” he said.

According to Griffith, the LAPD has not removed anyone from its gang database — which contains more than 11,000 names — over the past 20 years, despite studies which show that most gang members only remain in a gang for about a year. Griffith also pointed to studies showing that injunctions did not reduce crime. Rather, they caused crime to spread to nearby areas.

A crime migration scenario played out in Pasadena after the city obtained two gang injunctions in the wake of the brutal Halloween Murders of three innocent teens in 1993 by members of the P9s — a subset of the Pasadena Denver Lanes.

That injunction barred 35 alleged gang members from committing illegal activities, owning beepers, riding bicycles and hanging out in a crime-racked area on Summit Avenue near Orange Grove Boulevard.

But crime did not decline in the broad area, primarily because some gang members began fanning out from the blocks covered by the injunction, making it difficult for authorities to focus their efforts on one location.

Former Pasadena Police Chief Bernard Melekian had the injunctions lifted after being hired in 1995, calling them “an intellectual substitute for responsible public policy.”

That,  for Jones, describes the situation in Monrovia.

“This is why young men grow up and leave Monrovia,” Jones said. “I have a 41-year-old son, and when he decided to buy a house he left town because the police were so hard to deal with. When young men got off the freeway, the police were there waiting and would stop them for things like the light above their license plate being out. All of the young men I knew in his age group got out of here when they grew up.”