Gang problems vary by city

Sonoma County Sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Dennis Smiley spends most mornings tracking gang activity in Sonoma County.

Smiley enters information about local gang members into the statewide CalGang database, a tool designed to catch suspects in unsolved cases by compiling details including nicknames, tattoos, prior contacts with law enforcement, photographs and a trove of other information entered by agencies throughout the state.

The database includes a list of 57 gangs that have affected the Sheriff’s Office, ranging from long-standing local gang members arrested here to the Los Angeles gang member who served time in the Sonoma County Jail. About 30 of those are local, police experts say.

“A day doesn’t go by where we don’t contact 30 gang members,” Smiley said of all local agencies.

The program isn’t designed to capture statistics, such as how many gang members are in the county, but it does provide a snapshot of gang activity. For example, the database shows that 1,795 people identified as a gang member by Sonoma County law enforcement were either arrested in Santa Rosa or lived here over the past five years.

For Petaluma, that number was 413. Windsor had 293, Cotati, 154, and Sonoma, 124.

Law enforcement officers say gang activity is present across Sonoma County. Strategies to address gang-related crimes vary. In Santa Rosa, detectives primarily focus on specific investigations, “following the crumbs” of information and building cases, Sgt. John Cregan said. The Multiple Agency Gang Enforcement Team, or MAGNET, run by the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office hits the streets in teams with proactive patrols, getting to know individuals and watching for activity, Sgt. Brandon Austin said.

At one point, most cities contributed officers to MAGNET, approaching gangs as a countywide force. But that has changed.

Rohnert Park’s Public Safety Department left MAGNET in 2005 to focus its energy within the city’s boundaries. Today, Sgt. Jeff Justice runs the investigations unit that focuses on violent crimes and gang activity. Any report of graffiti showing up on business walls, along trails and fences comes across his desk, often a harbinger of what’s to come.

“We don’t have a whole lot of gang activity occurring .?.?. having said that, now I’m trying to find some wood to knock on,” Justice said. “Stuff can pop up at any time.”

In Sebastopol, the 1993 slaying of 13-year-old Benny Privitt on Lone Pine Road is a case of mistaken retribution for an earlier killing that marked a surge of gang violence in the county. Following Privitt’s death, the city served 28 residents with documents explaining they were being identified as gang members and warning them to avoid certain colors, locations and people, Police Chief Jeff Weaver said.

“By 1994, it was over,” Weaver said. “Since that time, and in the last 20 years, only once - the summer of 2009 or 2010 - there was a slight resurgence; different gang and different people.”

The four gang members police tracked from that recent summer have since been killed, incarcerated or devolved into drug abuse, according to Weaver. Today, Weaver said he’s aware of two known gang participants in the city.

The Petaluma Police Department no longer has a street crimes team focused on gang activity. Instead, Officer Brian Miller said patrol officers document evidence of a person’s involvement in gang activity - a certain shoelace color, a tattoo, slogans shouted during a fight - which can then be presented during a criminal court proceeding to establish a person’s relationship to a gang. The department has about 10 officers who regularly testify as experts in court.

Miller said Petaluma’s gang-related crimes are “drastically different than they are in Santa Rosa.”

Founded in Petaluma and Rohnert Park, the La Primera gang was born in the early 1990s when a pair of sureño brothers moved here from the Los Angeles area. Today, their ranks include about 100 people, according to police.

They are being shoved out of the city by a hot real estate market that has driven up rents and home prices in the city.

“I would love to think it’s the quality of work we’re doing here, enforcement, patrolling,” Miller said. “I think a lot of it is the cost of living down here: It’s not affordable. Most of the people in this lifestyle aren’t in a position with a lot of extra income.”

“Petaluma is known as a sureño city,” Miller said. “We don’t have gang neighborhoods. There’s a house over here that a bunch of gang kids spend time. We get graffiti and cases like that, they claim certain areas. But we don’t have Kenton Court, Apple Valley.”

Kenton Court. Apple Valley Lane. Sunset Avenue. Neville Way. Those are merely addresses for some in Santa Rosa, but they are written in indelible ink on the skin of some gang members who likely don’t even live there but identify with the groups that claim those streets.

Gangs are present in most every corner of the county. Santa Rosa gang detectives have tracked suspects to homes in Fountaingrove and investigated execution-style shootings in Bennett Valley, Cregan said.

In April, a 19-year-old man was stabbed in the neck, back and arm in broad daylight at Healdsburg’s Vineyard Plaza Shopping Center. The investigation stalled because the victim is not being cooperative with police, a common hurdle in gang investigations, said Austin, with the Sheriff’s Office.

“We know who did it. We know what happened,” he said.

There is a distinct link between poverty and the overworked and broken families, cultural barriers and lack of opportunity that sends kids looking in the wrong places for safety and belonging, said Gustavo Mendoza, a youth intervention specialist with the nonprofit California Youth Outreach.

Most families in the poorest pockets of Sonoma County’s communities aren’t involved with gangs. But both police and advocates like Mendoza said that the vast majority of gang members come from poverty.

Picture a map of Sonoma County. Overlay household economic data from the U.S. Census. The map zooms in to areas where gang detectives spend the most time - places like South Park and Roseland in Santa Rosa, Fetters Hot Springs and Agua Caliente in the Sonoma Valley.

These are communities where the median income is well below federal poverty lines.

“Poverty breeds violence,” Mendoza said.

Rafael Rivero, community outreach specialist with the city of Santa Rosa, last week spent time with a resident of a Roseland apartment complex who had begun to organize neighbors to address the cockroaches, mold, plumbing problems and gang issues rampant in the building.

“They have to deal with language barriers, they have to deal with having two or three minimum-wage jobs, they have to deal with slum landlords,” Rivero said.

Either from exhaustion, cultural misunderstanding or denial, some parents, he said, are not asking their kids the right questions: “‘Where were you last night? Why are you wearing that red hat?’ It’s complex,” Rivero said.