Oakland pursues third gang injunction

[dalycity650]

04/26/2011

OAKLAND -- The city's hotly debated Fruitvale gang injunction is heading toward a courtroom turning point next week, and a few details emerged this week about a potential new injunction in East Oakland.

The Fruitvale case against 40 men accused of being members of the Norteños street gang will see the close of "phase one" after some final arguments before Judge Robert Friedman on May 6.

Shortly after, Friedman is expected to weigh in, deciding whether the city has proved that the gang is a criminal "unincorporated association" active in the area and whether a handful of the defendants are members of the group.

Javier Quintero, 27, and Abel Manzo, 25, the only defendants who have testified, were called as witnesses by a small group of volunteer lawyers who have taken up the case, representing more than 20 of the accused men.

It's unclear whether their testifying will have helped Quintero and Manzo or put them in peril. Both have criminal histories, and if they convinced Friedman they've given up crime, they could be dismissed from the case and would be free while the court case goes on. Both men have held productive jobs, and neither has recent criminal convictions.

But Quintero was arrested in the courtroom several weeks ago, a few days after being stopped by police in a car with gang insignia and marijuana in it. Manzo may have perjured himself, claiming on the stand that he didn't know the Norteños existed.

Their


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lawyers, including Oakland attorney Michael Siegel, filed arguments with the court last week.

Of Manzo, they wrote, "His feelings, his loyalties, his values, his beliefs about what he knows and what he has done and not done and been through, are not at issue here. "... The sole question is whether the People have shown by clear and convincing evidence that Manzo is actively a part of a criminal street gang in the Fruitvale."

Of Quintero, they wrote that he had been in trouble before but tried to go straight: "Eventually he got a real job -- with "... benefits and a chance for advancement; a true rarity -- but after eighteen months good, and regardless of them, he was fingered by (police) and suddenly snatched out of his groove and put in the GPS (global positioning system) program, under the hard-nose (parole officer) Moreno, and then put into this scandalous case."

Documents filed by the city's attorneys argued the opposite. They wrote that Manzo and Quintero are both chronic offenders with ties to crime in the area.

"Unlike injunctions obtained in the previous two decades against gangs," the document argues, "the People have taken the additional extraordinary step of naming individual gang members, so that they are assured their due process rights are respected."

City Attorney John Russo followed the same format in the North Oakland injunction Friedman approved in June.

Though the Fruitvale case has taken longer than Russo hoped -- when he announced the injunction in October, his office wanted to have it decided by the end of 2010 -- his office is still pursuing a third injunction.

Russo first mentioned the third case in October, but documents released this week show his office has paid about $20,000 to an outside law firm to explore the case in East Oakland, a region known for even more gang violence than the Fruitvale district.

The firm has agreed to a $40,000 cap in that case, Russo spokesman Alex Katz said Tuesday. "That's an extremely low cost to taxpayers for a complex case like this," he added.

As to the details of the new injunction, he said, "We've just had really preliminary discussions with OPD about it. We don't have another injunction queued up right now."



DISCUSS.....

 

[DFresh77]

Yes a 3rd one, but against which gang though? My best bet it will be against Border Brothers....

 

[dalycity650]

Most likely they going against every major gang in Oakland One By One. Theres other ways to tackle gang violence, I just don't see these gang injuctions as the answer.

 

[birdloco]

why are they mainly against Latino Gangs? I'm not saying that black gangs haven't been hit with them but just about every case i've heard of from L.A. to the Bay have been against Latino Gangs.

 

[Likwid]

I would think theyre targeting latino gangs because they usually are rooted on more organized crime.

 

[22sleepy415]

why are they mainly against Latino Gangs? I'm not saying that black gangs haven't been hit with them but just about every case i've heard of from L.A. to the Bay have been against Latino Gangs.

It's mainly to promote gentrification and to remove the status quo. The Mission is the best example, so far. When the Mission was a predominantly brown, lower-income, community, injunctions were unheard of. Now that gentrification is pushing people away and the area has become repopulated with higher-income people, injunctions come into play.

This is why the move is not marketed as an "injunction", but as a "safety zone." To give people the impression that the area is now safe.

Just about every neighborhood with an injunction has pockets of higher-income people. Even 3rd street is starting to change much like the Mission District did, when the dot-com boom first sprung up.

In SF, blacks gangs have been hit more, but that's because we're all centered in the Mission. And also, the Mission is the crème de la crème as far as setting the blueprint and precedents for future gang injunctions. Our injunction area is bigger than all the other ones combined.

http://www.sfcityattorney.org/index.aspx?page=20

 

[Likwid]

So for conversation sake...its a bad thing for kids and working families to live in a gang and drug free environment? You can't arrest a whole population out of a neighborhood either.

 

[22sleepy415]

So for conversation sake...its a bad thing for kids and working families to live in a gang and drug free environment? You can't arrest a whole population out of a neighborhood either.

No, that's a good thing. If our streets were cleaned up when it mattered to us, who knows what some of us then we wouldn't be having this discussion.

But if tackling the drug problem was a main concern, then the area around 16th and mission would have the most hotly-enforced injunction. That area is still a "bad" area and hasn't been as affected by gentrification. Most of the gang violence also happens in that area. But it's about marketing the neighborhood, not about stopping the gang violence or drugs.

The working families are predominantly in the areas where there is no "safet zone." If the injunction in the Mission was meant to improve the lives of working people, then the map would be entirely flipped around to cover the other area. In the other area, that's where hard-working people are being directly affected by crime. If you look at a 1-block perimeter of both 16th/Mission and 24th/Mission, the difference is huge.

 

[birdloco]

good shit sleepy. There's a man that knows his barrio

 

[uN4gvN]

You sound very educated brotha based on the content of your posts, as well as the grammar and punctuation. It's good to see.

 

[Likwid]

@sleepy is crime helping the gentrification move along quicker? Are gang members in these neighborhoods essentially aiding in the digging of their own graves so to speak?

 

[DFresh77]

@sleepy is crime helping the gentrification move along quicker? Are gang members in these neighborhoods essentially aiding in the digging of their own graves so to speak?

In a way they are, instead of making the neighborhood safer for them and their families, they make it worse...

That's how I see it though, but I understand and know why a group sticks together to look out for their neighborhood as well...

But injunctions are not the way to go IMO...

 

[22sleepy415]

@sleepy is crime helping the gentrification move along quicker? Are gang members in these neighborhoods essentially aiding in the digging of their own graves so to speak?

It's complicated. I see what you're getting at. In the topic of injunctions, they're almost symbolic without much real-world impact. I can tell you how it affected some individuals but I couldn't tell you how it actually made anything better.

About gentrification; you have to keep in mind that the Mission has been the Mission for a long time. As far as violence is concerned, it's all still there. Some things are a little different, but not better or worse, just parallel. So the crime doesn't speed up gentrification, or else it would have happened a long time ago.

This is the simplest way I can put it. Rent goes up. Becomes out-of-reach for working families. Higher-income hesitant to move in because of crime. Use injunction as marketing. Higher-income people motivated to move in. All along, crime is still there.

But you have to see the injunction zone and the non-injunction zone. That speaks volumes as far as whether the injunctions are really there to make things safe.

 

[birdloco]

sleepy hit the nail on the head. Cities all over the country continue to use this tool to kick out generations of residents so the new residents (usually out of town hipsters) can move in, help raise the housing value while silmutaniously getting rid of an entire race of residents. Just like sleepy said, "gang injunctions" are the key to painting a negative picture of the community to the rest of the city and surrounding areas to gather support. Basically this things goes back and fourth throughout decades. If you look at how major cities gave way to suburban areas, back in the days most downtowns of major cities were occupied by familes during the 40's/50's until the boom n suburbs drew many familes out of the major cities and into the newly marketed suburbs. Once that happened, many minorities such as black and brown moved towards the cities creating crime rates through the 70's/80's/ and 90's. Now, these hipsters are moving back to major cities and leaving the burbs that many minorities are moving into after leaving the city. to sum it up: Shit is basically a huge cycle. in 20 years we'll be getting kick out of the burbs and back to the city.