Post by Brad on Feb 6, 2009 12:11:15 GMT -8
City of Yakima 200 S. 3rd Street
Police Department Yakima, Washington 98901
Roy WIillson, Interim Chief of Police Telephone (509)575-6200 Fax (509)575-6007
Memorandum
Date:9/29/03
TO: Chief S. Granato
FROM: Sgt. T. Foley 3621
SUBJECT: gang report
The Yakima gang experience is similar if not identical to that of other small communities throughout the Pacific Northwest and the rest of the country. Prior to 1991, no one was aware of the existence of youth gangs in the Yakima Valley, if in fact they existed prior to then. If they did exist, it was completely underground. Of course, at that time, Yakima was plagued by an out of control drug problem. No other law enforcement issue gained much attention.
The first gangs to make an appearance in Yakima were “black” gangs, the Bloods and Crips. Those gangs suddenly appeared, almost the day after Hollywood released the movies “Boyz N the Hood” and “Colors” in 1990 / 91. Over night the language and attire changed for a significant number youth, particularly the African American kids.
Aside from their attire and constant hand gesturing, the Bloods and Crips drew little attention to themselves. There were gang fights and rumors of drive-by shootings. The fights usually coincided with the end of the school day as large numbers of kids came together at the bus transfer sites and parks. Posturing often led to fist fights or fights with clubs and bats. The rumors of drive-bys were usually nothing more than rumors. It was not uncommon to find a dozen or more African American youth camped out on someone’s front porch in the middle of the night. Questioned about their intentions, they frequently claimed to be defending the location from a drive-by shooting. The idiotic tactic belied their inexperience with actual drive-by shootings.
Within a few months, Hispanic gangs made a sudden and overwhelming appearance in Yakima and the rest of the Yakima Valley. Like the Crips and Bloods, Hispanic gangs, were basically of two distinct foundations; Norteno or Sureno.
They also identified with either the color red or blue just as the Crips and Bloods. This link to colors initially caused some confusion among law enforcement and the general public. It was believed the Nortenos were somehow linked to the Bloods and the Crips to the Surenos.
There never was any such link. In Yakima, there was never a time when a Hispanic gang had an alliance with any true Black gang. They almost instantly feuded, which caused the Black gangs to disappear as quickly as they had appeared. The sheer number of Hispanic gang membership was only one factor in the demise of the Bloods and Crips in Yakima. Within the first year, Hispanic gang membership outnumbered Black gangs ten to one and that ratio was growing rapidly. Secondly, the Hispanic gangs identified with larger gang sets in metropolitan areas, particularly in California and enjoyed their back up and protection. Many of the Hispanic youth in Yakima had not previously engaged in gang activity, but many of them were familiar with the life. Many of them either came from places where gangs had existed for generations, or had family that still lived in those areas. The Black gangs never had that foundation.
Finally, and most importantly, when it came to drive-by shootings and other acts of violence, the Black gangs found the Nortenos and Surenos preferred action to rumors. When push came to shove, the African American kids found it was not safe to play gang, which is what they were doing while the Hispanic kids were much more serious about it. The Crips and Bloods existed in Yakima for about a year, give or take a few months.
There was one other gang with “Black” roots that made a significant appearance. The West Side Hustlaz (Hustlers) appeared in the mid-nineties and lasted for three or four years. They were born of the Rainier Street Hustlaz, a Crips gang out of the south Seattle area, when one of its white members moved to Yakima to comply with his probation in King County. In Yakima, they were comprised of mostly Hispanic and white kids, with two or three African Americans as well. They were able to exist for so long due mostly to an alliance with the Playboy Surenos. Both gangs coexisted in an area that is now police district four. The WSH was one of the first gangs to actually engage in criminal activity to benefit the organization. Mostly they committed car prowls and burglaries, but were rumored to engage in low-level drug dealing.
Besides the Crips and Bloods, Nortenos and Surenos, other, independent gangs came and went. Race pride type gangs existed for varying durations. Chicanos Por Vida (CPV) and Colonial Brown Pride (CBP) were Hispanic gangs but had no association with either Nortenos or Surenos. For a very short time there were also a few Native American pride gangs. However, they evaporated like the Crips and Bloods, and for the same reasons. They had no family history in gangs; no affiliation with larger groups and it became unsafe to be in their gang.
CBP was very short lived, while Chicanos Por Vida lasted for several, violence filled years. They were notorious for cold-blooded, in your face shootings and stabbings. They existed so long outside the Norteno/Surenos philosophy for a few reasons. Many of the CPV members had a family history that involved gangs and some even enjoyed parental support. They viewed themselves as part of the larger, national CPV membership.
There were other odd gangs as well. Two such gangs consisted almost exclusively of middle class, rural (cowboy) white kids. They referred to themselves as “Crews” and feuded with each other over the right to use a specific C.B. radio channel and the right to use certain parking lots from which to hang out and broadcast over their CBs. Threats and intimidation over the airwaves soon led to assaults and damage to each other’s vehicles.
Then there were tagger groups, like the Fun Boyz and Uni-Bombers. They would vehemently deny being gang members, viewing themselves as merely artists. They often claimed to be non-violent, but their murals very often depicted weapons and violent scenes. Just as the CBers, they fit the recognized definition of a gang.
By 1992, with the growing gang violence, the police department first designated a gang investigator in the detective division. Steve Davis worked gang crimes alone until I joined the unit in 1993. Prior to that I had been assigned to the Street Crimes Unit. In the Street Crimes Unit we worked almost exclusively on the drug problem until 1992 when we were tasked with identifying, photographing and basically hounding gang members. So, by the time I joined the detective division, I had basic knowledge of gang activity and membership.
Steve Davis and I were founding members of the Northwest Gang Investigators Association, a group of law enforcement and criminal justice agencies throughout Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. Through the association, Davis and I learned the gang evolution in Yakima was pretty much universal throughout the northwest, with the exception of the larger, metropolitan areas. In those larger areas, the African American population still out numbered the Hispanic population and Crips and Bloods were still strong and active.
One common theme among the membership was that many agencies found their officers blaming their administrations for allowing gangs to grow unchecked in their cities. Most claimed their administrators acted as if the problem would go away by itself. Many, like Yakima even denied the problem, claiming gang members were merely “wannabes”. They were acting the role of gang members because it was the fad. The fad would run its course and then fade away. Many, like Yakima were even forbidden to say the word “gang” over the police radio. It was comical the euphemisms we had to use to when broadcasting over the radio. When dispatched to investigate gang activity, officers were often sent to investigate a “group of organized youth” or “youth in sports attire.”
I found the members of the NWGIA were less likely to cast blame on their administrators. Most of them were honest enough to admit they also initially thought the gang activity was a fad that would pass. In fact, I found the police department refused to minimize the situation for as long as the general public had.
In 1993 or 1994 the Yakima Herald Republic ran a public opinion poll, asking citizens for the most significant problems in the Yakima Valley. They reduced the results to a top ten, three of which were gangs, crime, and youth violence. I always suspected that if asked to be specific about the latter two, they also would have been gang related as well. Because of the public concern over gang activity, Steve Davis and I were often required to give public presentations. Without fail, during the question and answer portion, someone would insist that gang members were just “wannabes”. By that time, we had faced the facts and our response was always the same, “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and does drive-by shootings like a duck, then it’s a duck”.
At its peak, (1994-95) gang membership, known to the police department, could be estimated at about 500-600 members in 20-25 gangs. Those numbers ebbed and flowed as gangs came and went and members moved back and forth among the known gangs. Some gangs like the Playboy Surenos and Vario Campo Vida and Chicanos Por Vida seemed to be steadily solid.
They out lasted all the others. Even today, one can find active PBS and VCV members.
Occasionally, other gangs outnumbered PBS, VCV and CPV, but that usually occurred as that gang was new and recruiting heavily. Which also meant it was trying to make a name for itself, usually by extreme acts of violence against other gangs. For some reason, most gangs lasted only a short time.
In the first few years, most of the young gang members had no clue when it came to gang history, terminology or symbolism. More than a few times there existed gangs that referred to themselves as Thirteenth Street or Fourteenth Street, not realizing that those numbers had nothing at all to do with streets. There even existed for quite some time one troubling gang who called themselves the XIV, pronounced phonetically “ex-I vee”. That is a bit redundant for a norteno gang set.
There were, and are some difficult hurdles to addressing the gang problem. One was juvenile court and juvenile detention. Juvenile court was notoriously slow to process cases; a problem that got even worse as juvenile crime was on the rise. Often I would refer a case to juvenile court for prosecution. The case would go unheard until the defendant was eighteen years old and juvenile court no longer had jurisdiction. More than once, they held a case for a year and a half before they lost jurisdiction.
Secondly, juvenile detention had (and still has) minimal staffing. By law, they were able to accept only a few inmates. Their criteria for booking were too tight to accept most arrestees. They were only able to accept juveniles arrested for class A violent offenses or felony arrestees that had other cases still pending.
Most gang members were unable to make the connection between criminal behavior and incarceration. One young man didn’t go to detention until his tenth stolen car. I was once interviewing a gang member about a shooting he had just committed. He confessed to that shooting as well as another which I didn’t know he had committed. After the two confessions, he said he had to leave. He attempted to set up another appointment to discuss the shootings further. That was his expectation, based on his experience. Juveniles always go home after being arrested. He had no idea that he would be going to jail on the same day he confessed to two separate shootings.
Another hurdle we had to address was the manner in which the schools dealt with their gang problems. They had a zero tolerance policy and expelled any violators from the mainstream schools. They had outlawed red or blue clothing, any numbers on clothing or books, any hand gestures, or just about anything else that might be view as gang related. Violators were banished to the alternative schools. Their problem was solved, at least for the school district. For us, the alternative schools became part of the problem. The schools assigned gang members to either of the schools based on their gang affiliation. Reds went to Stanton Alternative School and Blues went to the Opportunity Industrialization Commission School. The school district had little choice but to separate the gangs, but the situation did exacerbate the problem for those of us outside of the school. The gang members, all gathered in one spot had an opportunity to collaborate and plan their activities. Secondly, both Alternative schools reached the bus transfer station at the same time every afternoon. It was a constant battle. The alternative schools became the first known gang turfs. Even today, there are no areas of Yakima that can be consistently recognized as the turf of any particular gang.
Another concern was case law that restricted out ability to build intelligence files. We were prohibited from labeling a juvenile as a gang member, or even taking their picture without their parents’ permission. We took the photos and labeled everyone as gang associates.
We did get some help from our lawmakers. At the local level, we enacted a curfew law, which prohibited juveniles from being out past 2330hrs on weekdays and mid-night on weekends. The law has since been ruled unconstitutional.
We also enacted what had been dubbed the “anti-cruising” law. Prior to that, cruising on Yakima Ave every Friday and Saturday night had existed for over fifty years. Before gangs, cruising was much like “American Graffiti. After the rise of gangs, cruising became a six-hour riot every weekend. There were many high profile shootings and knifings. The law received a lot of publicity through the press. On the first weekend after it was enacted, there was no cruising. One weekend it was cruising as usual. There was absolutely none on the following weekend or since then.
The law never actually outlawed cruising, but no one at the Police Department or City Legal Dept. ever asked the press not to call it that. It had the desired effect.
There was also some help from the state level. One enactment was the automatic declination for juveniles arrested for class-A violent offenses. Prior to that, a prosecutor had to petition the court to try a juvenile as an adult. The prosecutor had to convince the juvenile court to decline jurisdiction. After the enactment, juveniles charged with class-A violent offenses were automatically tried as adults and subject to adult sentencing guidelines.
The state also enacted a weapons enhancement to its sentencing guidelines. A person convicted of a violent crime with a firearm had five years added to their sentence. That time could not be suspended or reduced for good behavior.
The state also enacted the drive-by shooting law and the reckless endangerment law. The two were very similar, as the latter has to do with shooting from a car or shooting and then fleeing in a car. I’m not sure how those two enactments offered any help, as both acts were already illegal.
At the federal level, car jacking became a federal crime. It has been charged in Yakima, but not often.
We also received assistance from juvenile probation, prosecutors and judges. Although the police had a difficult time getting a juvenile into detention, probation officers were able to book for probation violations. They kept us informed as to who was on probation and what their restrictions were. They agreed to write up the detention order whenever we found a kid violating his conditions of release, twenty-four hours a day. Prosecutors agreed to give gang related cases timely response. Judges started issuing material witness warrants for reluctant victims and witnesses. Most gang crimes were gang on gang and there was a code of ethics to which they all adhered. It was extremely difficult to get one gang member to testify against another, even one who had shot him. Strangely, most of them testified freely once they were arrested and hauled to court.
We received assistance from the National Guard. Although they did not participate in enforcement, one guardsman was stationed at the police department. One of her functions was to maintain a computer database, listing all known gangs and gang members. They were sorted by name, tag name, tattoos, criminal offenses and other criteria. They were invaluable for tracking suspects.
I left the gang unit in 1996. By that time, gangs had peaked and were on the decline. Although it might not sound progressive or politically correct, it appeared stricter enforcement was the key. The gangs in Yakima were comprised of a handful of leaders, but mostly followers. Once the leaders were removed from the picture, especially for extended lengths of time, the gang activity dropped dramatically.
Gang numbers and activity has ebbed and flowed ever since, never reaching the levels of the early nineties. We have learned to expect rises in activity coinciding with the beginning and end of the school year.
I am no longer well informed on gang activity or membership. None of the old gangs still exist in Yakima. Occasionally we hear from someone claiming to be PBS or VCV, but there seems to be no connection to the former members of those groups. My impression is that there are far fewer of them, but those today are better organized. They are into the gang life for different reasons. Many of those in the old days were in gangs because it was the popular thing to do. Those today are more serious. They have little fear of apprehension or prosecution, as some of the old problems with juvenile court have returned to pre-gang conditions.
There is still a juvenile probation officer assigned to work with the police department and that working relationship still exists. The working relationship with the judges and juvenile prosecutors’ office has since faded and the National Guard is no longer assigned to work at the PD. In fact, that computer database does not exist. Our intelligence database seems mostly to consist of a few photo albums maintained by the Street Crimes Unit.
There is no gang unit per se. One detective, David Cortez is recognized as the most well informed on current gang activity. In an effort to implement a more community oriented plan, several years ago the detective division was arranged according to neighborhoods rather than type of criminal activity.
Police Department Yakima, Washington 98901
Roy WIillson, Interim Chief of Police Telephone (509)575-6200 Fax (509)575-6007
Memorandum
Date:9/29/03
TO: Chief S. Granato
FROM: Sgt. T. Foley 3621
SUBJECT: gang report
The Yakima gang experience is similar if not identical to that of other small communities throughout the Pacific Northwest and the rest of the country. Prior to 1991, no one was aware of the existence of youth gangs in the Yakima Valley, if in fact they existed prior to then. If they did exist, it was completely underground. Of course, at that time, Yakima was plagued by an out of control drug problem. No other law enforcement issue gained much attention.
The first gangs to make an appearance in Yakima were “black” gangs, the Bloods and Crips. Those gangs suddenly appeared, almost the day after Hollywood released the movies “Boyz N the Hood” and “Colors” in 1990 / 91. Over night the language and attire changed for a significant number youth, particularly the African American kids.
Aside from their attire and constant hand gesturing, the Bloods and Crips drew little attention to themselves. There were gang fights and rumors of drive-by shootings. The fights usually coincided with the end of the school day as large numbers of kids came together at the bus transfer sites and parks. Posturing often led to fist fights or fights with clubs and bats. The rumors of drive-bys were usually nothing more than rumors. It was not uncommon to find a dozen or more African American youth camped out on someone’s front porch in the middle of the night. Questioned about their intentions, they frequently claimed to be defending the location from a drive-by shooting. The idiotic tactic belied their inexperience with actual drive-by shootings.
Within a few months, Hispanic gangs made a sudden and overwhelming appearance in Yakima and the rest of the Yakima Valley. Like the Crips and Bloods, Hispanic gangs, were basically of two distinct foundations; Norteno or Sureno.
They also identified with either the color red or blue just as the Crips and Bloods. This link to colors initially caused some confusion among law enforcement and the general public. It was believed the Nortenos were somehow linked to the Bloods and the Crips to the Surenos.
There never was any such link. In Yakima, there was never a time when a Hispanic gang had an alliance with any true Black gang. They almost instantly feuded, which caused the Black gangs to disappear as quickly as they had appeared. The sheer number of Hispanic gang membership was only one factor in the demise of the Bloods and Crips in Yakima. Within the first year, Hispanic gang membership outnumbered Black gangs ten to one and that ratio was growing rapidly. Secondly, the Hispanic gangs identified with larger gang sets in metropolitan areas, particularly in California and enjoyed their back up and protection. Many of the Hispanic youth in Yakima had not previously engaged in gang activity, but many of them were familiar with the life. Many of them either came from places where gangs had existed for generations, or had family that still lived in those areas. The Black gangs never had that foundation.
Finally, and most importantly, when it came to drive-by shootings and other acts of violence, the Black gangs found the Nortenos and Surenos preferred action to rumors. When push came to shove, the African American kids found it was not safe to play gang, which is what they were doing while the Hispanic kids were much more serious about it. The Crips and Bloods existed in Yakima for about a year, give or take a few months.
There was one other gang with “Black” roots that made a significant appearance. The West Side Hustlaz (Hustlers) appeared in the mid-nineties and lasted for three or four years. They were born of the Rainier Street Hustlaz, a Crips gang out of the south Seattle area, when one of its white members moved to Yakima to comply with his probation in King County. In Yakima, they were comprised of mostly Hispanic and white kids, with two or three African Americans as well. They were able to exist for so long due mostly to an alliance with the Playboy Surenos. Both gangs coexisted in an area that is now police district four. The WSH was one of the first gangs to actually engage in criminal activity to benefit the organization. Mostly they committed car prowls and burglaries, but were rumored to engage in low-level drug dealing.
Besides the Crips and Bloods, Nortenos and Surenos, other, independent gangs came and went. Race pride type gangs existed for varying durations. Chicanos Por Vida (CPV) and Colonial Brown Pride (CBP) were Hispanic gangs but had no association with either Nortenos or Surenos. For a very short time there were also a few Native American pride gangs. However, they evaporated like the Crips and Bloods, and for the same reasons. They had no family history in gangs; no affiliation with larger groups and it became unsafe to be in their gang.
CBP was very short lived, while Chicanos Por Vida lasted for several, violence filled years. They were notorious for cold-blooded, in your face shootings and stabbings. They existed so long outside the Norteno/Surenos philosophy for a few reasons. Many of the CPV members had a family history that involved gangs and some even enjoyed parental support. They viewed themselves as part of the larger, national CPV membership.
There were other odd gangs as well. Two such gangs consisted almost exclusively of middle class, rural (cowboy) white kids. They referred to themselves as “Crews” and feuded with each other over the right to use a specific C.B. radio channel and the right to use certain parking lots from which to hang out and broadcast over their CBs. Threats and intimidation over the airwaves soon led to assaults and damage to each other’s vehicles.
Then there were tagger groups, like the Fun Boyz and Uni-Bombers. They would vehemently deny being gang members, viewing themselves as merely artists. They often claimed to be non-violent, but their murals very often depicted weapons and violent scenes. Just as the CBers, they fit the recognized definition of a gang.
By 1992, with the growing gang violence, the police department first designated a gang investigator in the detective division. Steve Davis worked gang crimes alone until I joined the unit in 1993. Prior to that I had been assigned to the Street Crimes Unit. In the Street Crimes Unit we worked almost exclusively on the drug problem until 1992 when we were tasked with identifying, photographing and basically hounding gang members. So, by the time I joined the detective division, I had basic knowledge of gang activity and membership.
Steve Davis and I were founding members of the Northwest Gang Investigators Association, a group of law enforcement and criminal justice agencies throughout Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. Through the association, Davis and I learned the gang evolution in Yakima was pretty much universal throughout the northwest, with the exception of the larger, metropolitan areas. In those larger areas, the African American population still out numbered the Hispanic population and Crips and Bloods were still strong and active.
One common theme among the membership was that many agencies found their officers blaming their administrations for allowing gangs to grow unchecked in their cities. Most claimed their administrators acted as if the problem would go away by itself. Many, like Yakima even denied the problem, claiming gang members were merely “wannabes”. They were acting the role of gang members because it was the fad. The fad would run its course and then fade away. Many, like Yakima were even forbidden to say the word “gang” over the police radio. It was comical the euphemisms we had to use to when broadcasting over the radio. When dispatched to investigate gang activity, officers were often sent to investigate a “group of organized youth” or “youth in sports attire.”
I found the members of the NWGIA were less likely to cast blame on their administrators. Most of them were honest enough to admit they also initially thought the gang activity was a fad that would pass. In fact, I found the police department refused to minimize the situation for as long as the general public had.
In 1993 or 1994 the Yakima Herald Republic ran a public opinion poll, asking citizens for the most significant problems in the Yakima Valley. They reduced the results to a top ten, three of which were gangs, crime, and youth violence. I always suspected that if asked to be specific about the latter two, they also would have been gang related as well. Because of the public concern over gang activity, Steve Davis and I were often required to give public presentations. Without fail, during the question and answer portion, someone would insist that gang members were just “wannabes”. By that time, we had faced the facts and our response was always the same, “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and does drive-by shootings like a duck, then it’s a duck”.
At its peak, (1994-95) gang membership, known to the police department, could be estimated at about 500-600 members in 20-25 gangs. Those numbers ebbed and flowed as gangs came and went and members moved back and forth among the known gangs. Some gangs like the Playboy Surenos and Vario Campo Vida and Chicanos Por Vida seemed to be steadily solid.
They out lasted all the others. Even today, one can find active PBS and VCV members.
Occasionally, other gangs outnumbered PBS, VCV and CPV, but that usually occurred as that gang was new and recruiting heavily. Which also meant it was trying to make a name for itself, usually by extreme acts of violence against other gangs. For some reason, most gangs lasted only a short time.
In the first few years, most of the young gang members had no clue when it came to gang history, terminology or symbolism. More than a few times there existed gangs that referred to themselves as Thirteenth Street or Fourteenth Street, not realizing that those numbers had nothing at all to do with streets. There even existed for quite some time one troubling gang who called themselves the XIV, pronounced phonetically “ex-I vee”. That is a bit redundant for a norteno gang set.
There were, and are some difficult hurdles to addressing the gang problem. One was juvenile court and juvenile detention. Juvenile court was notoriously slow to process cases; a problem that got even worse as juvenile crime was on the rise. Often I would refer a case to juvenile court for prosecution. The case would go unheard until the defendant was eighteen years old and juvenile court no longer had jurisdiction. More than once, they held a case for a year and a half before they lost jurisdiction.
Secondly, juvenile detention had (and still has) minimal staffing. By law, they were able to accept only a few inmates. Their criteria for booking were too tight to accept most arrestees. They were only able to accept juveniles arrested for class A violent offenses or felony arrestees that had other cases still pending.
Most gang members were unable to make the connection between criminal behavior and incarceration. One young man didn’t go to detention until his tenth stolen car. I was once interviewing a gang member about a shooting he had just committed. He confessed to that shooting as well as another which I didn’t know he had committed. After the two confessions, he said he had to leave. He attempted to set up another appointment to discuss the shootings further. That was his expectation, based on his experience. Juveniles always go home after being arrested. He had no idea that he would be going to jail on the same day he confessed to two separate shootings.
Another hurdle we had to address was the manner in which the schools dealt with their gang problems. They had a zero tolerance policy and expelled any violators from the mainstream schools. They had outlawed red or blue clothing, any numbers on clothing or books, any hand gestures, or just about anything else that might be view as gang related. Violators were banished to the alternative schools. Their problem was solved, at least for the school district. For us, the alternative schools became part of the problem. The schools assigned gang members to either of the schools based on their gang affiliation. Reds went to Stanton Alternative School and Blues went to the Opportunity Industrialization Commission School. The school district had little choice but to separate the gangs, but the situation did exacerbate the problem for those of us outside of the school. The gang members, all gathered in one spot had an opportunity to collaborate and plan their activities. Secondly, both Alternative schools reached the bus transfer station at the same time every afternoon. It was a constant battle. The alternative schools became the first known gang turfs. Even today, there are no areas of Yakima that can be consistently recognized as the turf of any particular gang.
Another concern was case law that restricted out ability to build intelligence files. We were prohibited from labeling a juvenile as a gang member, or even taking their picture without their parents’ permission. We took the photos and labeled everyone as gang associates.
We did get some help from our lawmakers. At the local level, we enacted a curfew law, which prohibited juveniles from being out past 2330hrs on weekdays and mid-night on weekends. The law has since been ruled unconstitutional.
We also enacted what had been dubbed the “anti-cruising” law. Prior to that, cruising on Yakima Ave every Friday and Saturday night had existed for over fifty years. Before gangs, cruising was much like “American Graffiti. After the rise of gangs, cruising became a six-hour riot every weekend. There were many high profile shootings and knifings. The law received a lot of publicity through the press. On the first weekend after it was enacted, there was no cruising. One weekend it was cruising as usual. There was absolutely none on the following weekend or since then.
The law never actually outlawed cruising, but no one at the Police Department or City Legal Dept. ever asked the press not to call it that. It had the desired effect.
There was also some help from the state level. One enactment was the automatic declination for juveniles arrested for class-A violent offenses. Prior to that, a prosecutor had to petition the court to try a juvenile as an adult. The prosecutor had to convince the juvenile court to decline jurisdiction. After the enactment, juveniles charged with class-A violent offenses were automatically tried as adults and subject to adult sentencing guidelines.
The state also enacted a weapons enhancement to its sentencing guidelines. A person convicted of a violent crime with a firearm had five years added to their sentence. That time could not be suspended or reduced for good behavior.
The state also enacted the drive-by shooting law and the reckless endangerment law. The two were very similar, as the latter has to do with shooting from a car or shooting and then fleeing in a car. I’m not sure how those two enactments offered any help, as both acts were already illegal.
At the federal level, car jacking became a federal crime. It has been charged in Yakima, but not often.
We also received assistance from juvenile probation, prosecutors and judges. Although the police had a difficult time getting a juvenile into detention, probation officers were able to book for probation violations. They kept us informed as to who was on probation and what their restrictions were. They agreed to write up the detention order whenever we found a kid violating his conditions of release, twenty-four hours a day. Prosecutors agreed to give gang related cases timely response. Judges started issuing material witness warrants for reluctant victims and witnesses. Most gang crimes were gang on gang and there was a code of ethics to which they all adhered. It was extremely difficult to get one gang member to testify against another, even one who had shot him. Strangely, most of them testified freely once they were arrested and hauled to court.
We received assistance from the National Guard. Although they did not participate in enforcement, one guardsman was stationed at the police department. One of her functions was to maintain a computer database, listing all known gangs and gang members. They were sorted by name, tag name, tattoos, criminal offenses and other criteria. They were invaluable for tracking suspects.
I left the gang unit in 1996. By that time, gangs had peaked and were on the decline. Although it might not sound progressive or politically correct, it appeared stricter enforcement was the key. The gangs in Yakima were comprised of a handful of leaders, but mostly followers. Once the leaders were removed from the picture, especially for extended lengths of time, the gang activity dropped dramatically.
Gang numbers and activity has ebbed and flowed ever since, never reaching the levels of the early nineties. We have learned to expect rises in activity coinciding with the beginning and end of the school year.
I am no longer well informed on gang activity or membership. None of the old gangs still exist in Yakima. Occasionally we hear from someone claiming to be PBS or VCV, but there seems to be no connection to the former members of those groups. My impression is that there are far fewer of them, but those today are better organized. They are into the gang life for different reasons. Many of those in the old days were in gangs because it was the popular thing to do. Those today are more serious. They have little fear of apprehension or prosecution, as some of the old problems with juvenile court have returned to pre-gang conditions.
There is still a juvenile probation officer assigned to work with the police department and that working relationship still exists. The working relationship with the judges and juvenile prosecutors’ office has since faded and the National Guard is no longer assigned to work at the PD. In fact, that computer database does not exist. Our intelligence database seems mostly to consist of a few photo albums maintained by the Street Crimes Unit.
There is no gang unit per se. One detective, David Cortez is recognized as the most well informed on current gang activity. In an effort to implement a more community oriented plan, several years ago the detective division was arranged according to neighborhoods rather than type of criminal activity.