Quote Originally Posted by MikeF
Back to Salinas...

Maybe none of this is related. Maybe Salinas just has a gang-problem.

Or maybe it is all inter-connected. I don't know....
Having worked as a member of the Monterey County Joint Gang TF a couple of years ago, I'll throw out a couple of observations - even though (as I said) I'm a couple of years out-of-date....

First, a huge contributor to the problem was the housing costs in the area. Average folks - cops, firemen, teachers, etc. couldn't afford homes, the cities couldn't afford to pay them enough to live decently there, and thus all of those occupations throughout the county were chronically understaffed - many critically so (50% or less).

The Hispanic community, bear with me as I generalize a bit here, continued to pour into the area due to demand both in the service and the agricultural sectors - and made do by cramming several families into single-family homes. Even with multiple contributors to the mortgage/rent, the adults tended to work at least two jobs to get by. This left the kids unsupervised the vast majority of the time. Think teens and nearly-teens, couple this with a very thin educator and law-enforcement presence, and.......

.....gang issues in all the public schools exacerbated by overcrowded classrooms and the plethora of other issues that result when public school finances are always in trouble (I bit the financial bullet and sent my daughter to RLS at the time, when I realized the nature of the problem). At night, there were some city jurisdictions with only one cop on duty, and the gang members who are all well aware of exactly how thin they're stretched across the county and have their own rat-lines they followed to avoid LE.

Then there's the uncomfortable fact that the Gang TF was simply ineffective, due to reasons beyond its control. One huge problem was the hard fact that none of the individual city jurisdictions could communicate with each other - no 'net connectivity at all, and extremely limited comms otherwise. Sharing information on gangs operating across jurisdictions was conducted the old-fashioned way - by physically going over to the other guy's office and comparing notes. Given the size of the county and the tempo of ops, this was a long way from being even minimally effective. And even a proposed solution wasn't in the works when I left.

Secondly, GTF ops were constrained by the reporting requirements to maintain funding. This required a steady flow of reported statistics - so the GTF had to focus on ops that drove numbers. Of course, this ended up driving low-level actions - parole searches, field interviews, traffic stops, etc. Although this did results in arrests that disrupted the young'uns at the street level, it had zero effect upon the leadership or the broader operations of the gangs. Everyone who was picked up was immediately replaceable. And with this type of low-level focus, there was little time to plan and run effective investigations and cultivate well-placed CIs. Although all recognized that was the way to go to really hurt the gangs, it took time and did not result in the type of numbers that needed to be reported.

So, despite arrests that could make the papers (bad guys - kids - in handcuffs, drugs and weapons confiscated, etc.) none of it really meant anything, because the resources and capabilities did not exist to really run the gangs down. And due to the other socio-economic issues I mentioned, the future gang problem in the area was perceived to be darker - as the police force ages and begins to retire, there are far too few replacements for anyone's comfort......

To talk to your another point you made:
.....creates a vacuum, especially in terms of rule of law, dispute resolution, and mediation at the neighborhood level....
I also worked as a volunteer mediator and mediation trainer with the Monterey County Victim-Offender Reconciliation Program, a program that worked with juvenile offenders. It had great results on recidivism compared with juvie court, and did lead some kids off the gang path, but, ultimately, it was a small program and could only impact a limited number of kids. It was just a finger in the dike. It too suffered from funding support and staffing challenges.