South Santa Rosa community wary of gang unit revival as they seek alternatives to fight gang violence

A group of about 20 boxing students scattered across the basketball court Thursday at Southwest Community Park in Santa Rosa to practice their footwork and swing at punching targets during an afternoon practice.

The sound of shuffling feet as the young boys and girls bounced from toe to toe on the concrete and the light taps of their mitts were only interrupted by coach Rosendo Sanchez’s booming voice as he called out to his athletes.

The outside classes were being held just blocks from where two 15-year-old boys were shot and killed in separate acts of gang violence over an eight-day span starting two weeks ago.

The slayings weigh heavily on Sanchez, who is working to find a permanent home for his Corby Avenue gym, one of few such hubs for youth in a predominantly low-income and Latino neighborhood of southwest Santa Rosa.

Growing up in the neighborhood, he knows that many are at a pivotal age where, as he put it, they could take a hard turn one way or the other — get involved with gangs or channel their energy into a safe, productive alternative.

He takes a tough love approach with his athletes, chiding them for cussing on the court, holding them accountable if they step out of line in and out of school and always asking them to put in their maximum effort.

It’s the type of program that Jose “Mico” Quiroz, a south Santa Rosa native and former gang member whose son boxes with Sanchez, said would’ve been key for him at an early age.

“As a young man growing up, the male role models that I had, the strong role models that I had, were gang members. They were in and out of prison, they were tattooed up, they were feared and respected in the neighborhood,” Quiroz said. “Our young males, they think that being tough and being strong is being in gangs, is flashing a gun, and we need to show them that’s not the case.”

The two recent shootings have alarmed city and police officials and spurred Police Chief John Cregan to announce the revival of Santa Rosa’s gang task force, shuttered amid fiscal and staffing woes in 2019.

The proposal has been met with a mixed response by south Santa Rosa leaders, residents and activist groups waiting to see how it unfolds given the historic impact of police enforcement in communities of color, including this corner of Santa Rosa.

For Cregan, a former gang sergeant who has championed community policing efforts since taking over the department last July, the spate of deadly gang violence and his closely watched response is taking shape as his stiffest test so far in office.

Council member Eddie Alvarez whose District 1 includes Roseland and surrounding parts of south Santa Rosa, has expressed skepticism about the plan. He also criticized Cregan for launching the unit without more feedback from those likely to be most impacted by the increased law enforcement presence in the community.

“We’re asking mothers to make it OK for police to target their children, specifically brown children. I find that very disturbing,” Alvarez said in an interview with The Press Democrat.

He and others worry the revival of the team could lead to the criminalization of a new generation of youth in south Santa Rosa.

There is room, some community members say, for greater police intervention to help curb violent crimes.

Still, a prevailing sentiment among residents and leaders in the area holds that the recent violence isn’t necessarily a public safety problem that needs to be met with a hardhanded approach but a symptom of generational disinvestment that must be righted.

Cregan, in interviews with The Press Democrat and at a community meeting days after the second shooting, said the gang unit will provide the department the ability to investigate and prosecute gang crimes more effectively. Part of the team’s duties will also involve working with community groups to help curb people from joining gangs and help them safely leave, he said.

“The most important thing to understand is the realities of combating gang crimes — you have to have an enforcement element,” he said. “But you can have a gang enforcement team while still treating people with respect and dignity.”

Cregan: ‘A moment of opportunity for us’

There have been five homicides in Santa Rosa since Jan. 1 and police say four were gang-related.

Cregan called the first of the two latest shootings, a June 16 drive-by on Corby Avenue, “a wake-up call” for the city, one that compelled him to act, and fast.

But the 24-year veteran of law enforcement, who joined the Santa Rosa force in 2005, had signaled his intention to create a dedicated gang task force long before the recent spate of shootings, as he sought to address a reported uptick in violent crimes, one of his early priorities as chief, along with curbing vehicle sideshows.

The two shootings occurred about 1.5 miles apart, in an area that has been plagued by gang and gun violence at times throughout the past three decades.

Shortly after 5:30 p.m. on June 16, bullets unleashed in a drive-by shooting at an apartment complex on Corby Avenue, north of Hearn Avenue, left 15-year-old Alberto Peraza of Santa Rosa dead.

Just more than a week later, on June 24, Felix Vargas Solorio, 15, was shot multiple times during a confrontation between two groups on Blacksmith Way. He died the following day at a local hospital.

Investigators believe both cases are connected to gang activity. The victims’ names were provided through public records by the Sonoma County Coroner’s Office.

Seven arrests have been made in connection with the two killings and five of those arrested are juveniles, including a boy and girl as young as 14.

Cregan went public the morning after the first slaying with his latest plans to revive the city’s gang unit.

He doubled down on that call after the second shooting death and in a Tuesday public meeting at Roseland University Prep, attended by about 120 people, including community, government and school leaders.

He said the team he hopes to form by year’s end — made up of one sergeant and four detectives — is more necessary now because of what his department sees as easy access to illegal firearms and increased gang activity among young people.

But he acknowledged that addressing the issue will take more than police enforcement.

“This is a tragedy that is bringing us here … but a moment of opportunity for us,” Cregan said to the assembled crowd. “We’re not going to be able to solve this just as a police department.”

Gang units at law enforcement agencies in Sonoma County and across the state grew in response to the emergence of criminal street gangs in the 1980s and again when activity and budgets spiked in the mid 1990s and mid 2000s. But since then, many gang units have been reduced or disbanded.

While the proliferation of social media and changes in gang activity since then has again pushed gang violence out in the open, it hasn’t reached the levels seen locally in the mid-1990s and again around 2003 when crime rates surged.

In a community steeped in that history, Cregan’s proposal drew often frustrated responses Tuesday from residents and civic leaders who debated how to appropriately respond to the latest violence in the area.

Elias Hinit, a member of a city committee tasked with overseeing how a citywide quarter-cent public safety tax is spent, said the city must support families and youth and nonprofits working with that population.

“You can’t fight fire with fire,” he said of meeting violence with increased policing. “We have to try to prevent crimes from occurring in the first place.”

Legacy of policing in communities of color

The planned revival of the gang team has raised questions and concerns that increased police efforts will be largely focused on predominantly Latino communities and that it could serve as a vehicle for officers to abuse their authority.

Michaele Morales, a longtime Santa Rosa City Schools employee who retired in 2020, said parents in south Santa Rosa neighborhoods often complained that officers would roll through the area and arbitrarily question teens.

“They just slapped a big label on you because of where you lived and what you were wearing,” she said.

She doesn’t support bringing back the gang unit.

She said in the 1990s when she worked at what was then Cook Middle School on Sebastopol Road and later in her time at Elsie Allen High School on Bellevue Avenue, the school district required students to sign what she described as contracts acknowledging their ties to a local gang.

Clothing colors, sports logos and numbers displayed on backpacks and notebooks were often used to associate a student with a gang.

Morales said it was often open to the interpretation of school administrators and rarely did staff further investigate the assertions.

That opened the door to what she and other parents felt was racial profiling by school authorities and police, predominantly of Latino students. Increased student suspensions and expulsions followed, Morales said, sometimes leading to more serious future repercussions.

Once the school would register a student as a gang member, often without notifying parents, staff would pass on the information to the police department, which could then use it to file gang enhancement charges against students who were arrested for other crimes, she said.

“There was no benefit or help for the kids who got caught up in this,” she said.

The controversial practice was ended by the mid-2000s.

But law enforcement also kept track of suspected and known gang members and affiliates as part of the statewide CalGang database — and once on the list it was nearly impossible to be removed.

The state Department of Justice in recent years has overhauled rules for how law enforcement identifies gang members, how long records can be kept and now provides an avenue for people to request that their names be deleted from gang records.

But for some, police tactics to clamp down on gang violence have had a lasting effect.

Alvarez, who grew up in Roseland, and has squared off with the police department over its involvement of him in an ongoing 2021 Roseland homicide investigation, said some of his family members and friends who were formerly involved with gangs have found their ability to access employment and other benefits limited because of their past run-ins with law enforcement and being labeled gang members in police databases.

He worried that reviving the team could have repercussions for those wrongly associated with gangs and hamper young people who want to leave that life behind as they try to enroll in school or seek job opportunities.

“We’re talking about the possibility of ruining someone’s life,” he said.

'This didn’t happen overnight’

About a mile east from Southwest Community Park, after passing through an older residential neighborhood, you come to a patch of overgrown and browning grass outside the Corby Avenue apartments little more than a block off the western edge of Highway 101.

On Thursday evening, a group of toddlers kicked a soccer ball up and down that small makeshift field as their squeals echoed in the courtyard.

This is where Peraza was standing with a group of friends in the parking lot when he was killed in the drive-by shooting June 16.

For the youngest kids growing up in the shadow of that violence, life appears to go on.

But the growing memorial here to Peraza — with prayer candles, a stuffed Spiderman doll and loving messages from friends and family of the boy they affectionately called Beto — speaks to the unshakable loss they have suffered in his killing.

A 19-year-old neighbor standing on the porch said it was the first time since the shooting that she’d seen kids come out to play. Parents have been nervous more shots could ring out in the otherwise quiet apartment complex in retaliation for Peraza’s death.

While the neighbor said violence along Corby Avenue isn’t new, she was shocked it had played out so near her home.

“It was a normal day and then that happened,” she said, recalling the moment she heard the gunfire, which she mistakenly first took for fireworks.

For Alvarez, a son of Roseland, a predominantly Latino neighborhood finally folded into city limits in 2017, the recent violence isn’t happening in a vacuum. A historic shortfall in services, infrastructure and programs for families and youth have left the community behind, he said.

“This didn’t happen overnight,” he said. “This is the product of underfunding for generations in our area.”

About 2.5 miles north on West Ninth Street, in a neighborhood that has suffered at times with rampant gang activity, Oscar Villalobos Campos said the streetlights were often out and the roads were littered with potholes when he was growing up. There were few parks or safe places for him to go to after school.

The lack of investment in the neighborhood was visible, he said.

“When you feel like your community doesn’t value you, you start to believe it,” Villalobos Campos, 22, a community activist who attended Tuesday’s meeting, said in an interview.

Poverty, cultural barriers and a lack of opportunity have allowed gang activity to flourish in the area, community members said.

The city has set aside millions of dollars to repair roads in the neighborhood and build a library and a fire station on Hearn Avenue. Scores of new housing projects are also on the rise or in the works across the area, meaning a population of about 7,400 residents already said by many to be overlooked and underserved will need more attention and resources from the city.

Alvarez said more work is badly needed.

Addressing root causes of violence

Community members at the Tuesday meeting and in interviews with The Press Democrat in the aftermath of the shootings said they want to see more money spent on early intervention programs and assistance for families in south Santa Rosa.

Quiroz said he wants to see a mentorship program for local youth and additional funding for sports, arts, automotive trade classes and other recreation programs that provide a positive outlet to kids.

He also wants to see more support for those already involved in gangs who want to get out.

“When I made the decision to walk away from all that, it was like somebody died,” he said. “I had no idea who I was and it took me like two years to get my feet under me and start seeing myself as more than just that.”

The lack of a support system and programs to help people transitioning out of gangs can dissuade them from leaving or make it easy for them to fall back into their old ways, he said.

Villalobos Campos said he wants the city to invest in workforce development and educational opportunities for young people and families.

He said some of the street violence is a response to social and economic insecurity. When gang violence reached a peak in the mid-1990s in Santa Rosa, it followed a period of economic unrest, similar to what we’re seeing today, he said.

Economic impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic, rising housing prices and inflation at gas pump to the grocery store have burdened families and that stress often is passed on to youth, he said.

Some of those efforts to curb gang violence are underway at the city.

The city’s Violence Prevention Partnership, established in 2003 amid rising violent crime, uses revenue from a citywide quarter-cent public safety tax to implement recreation and prevention programs and provide grants to local nonprofits that work with youth.

Staff from the partnership are conducting outreach in neighborhoods affected by the shootings and have connected with youth suspected or known to be affiliated with gangs to see if they can help steer them on a different path.

Under a five-year plan that would guide the city’s violence prevention efforts, the team has proposed creating a street outreach team that would work with schools, in neighborhoods and provide outreach at hospitals to victims of violence.

Other plans call for bringing back a teen council to increase youth engagement in the decision-making process and beefing up restorative justice and workforce development programs.

The plan will be presented to the City Council for approval at a later date.

Hinit, the member on the city’s Measure O public safety tax committee, has pushed Cregan and the city to funnel more of the dollars to violence prevention programs. He argued most of the money pays for staff salaries and leaves programs starving for more resources.

The tax generates about $10 million annually and helps fund more than two dozen police and fire positions as well as the violence prevention programs, which receive just 20% of the annual revenue.

There was community support to boost that share when the measure was up for renewal last year but the City Council ultimately left the percentages intact.

Quiroz, the south Santa Rosa father who left gang life behind, said he is OK with additional resources being provided to the department to investigate crimes, but he wants officers to receive bias and de-escalation training and for there to be strict standards for what metrics officers use to determine whether someone is affiliated with a gang.

“I don’t want to see a bunch of goons running around, pulling kids over because of what they’re wearing,” he said.

The team should be staffed by officers who are bicultural and bilingual and representative of the community that they serve, too, he said.

Hinit, like Quiroz, said he’d like to see the team be an integral part of the community if it’s revived, with officers focused on prevention and intervention efforts, and providing support to schools and parents.

Rigel Bowen, who serves on the nonprofit North Bay Organizing Project’s police accountability task force, called for an independent citizens committee to oversee the gang unit. He also signaled the group’s organizers were likely to mobilize against its roll out altogether.

Community unlikely to stay quiet

It’s been less than two weeks since the first of the suspected gang shootings and Chief Cregan’s initial moves in response. The community’s reaction is still unfolding, say Alvarez and other residents.

And its members are unlikely to remain quiet. Many now see a central civilian role in monitoring police work and holding the department and City Hall accountable.

“We’re not the Roseland of old,” said Alvarez, the first directly elected council member for Roseland and south Santa Rosa.

Just short of six years now into its official incorporation into the city, the community has become more civically engaged and organized, he said.

“I know the community is going to let government know where they stand on this,” he said.

Cregan, during Tuesday’s community meeting, said he is committed to ensuring the team treats communities equitably and will address perceptions that officers are targeting a certain population.

“I set the tone as chief of police, and I build the organization that I want our officers to represent. I'm making it a priority that this is how we're going to treat community members,” he said in an interview.

It’s not clear whether strong pushback could change the course of the gang-unit deployment or land the chief’s proposal on the council dais. (Cregan reports to City Manager Maraskeshia Smith, the city’s top administrator, though the council sets city priorities and ultimately signs off on the budget.)

And even if it does come to the council, there’s likely not enough political will to sink or significantly alter the plan. The council during recent budget discussions allocated funding for two additional officers for the department’s downtown team while a four-member majority rejected a proposal to meet that investment with additional resources for recreation programs.

Concerns over crime and public safety aren’t limited to south Santa Rosa either. Council member Jeff Okrepkie singled them out as the top concerns in his northwest District 6 since he took office six months ago.

Residents are interested in increasing police staffing, especially in areas that have had historic gang issues such as in Apple Valley and along the West Steele Lane corridor, he said.

Though the latest two incidents were in south Santa Rosa, the impact is felt citywide and if police don’t take a stronger approach it could worsen, he said.

A dedicated gang task force can help identify trends or changes in gang activity, track graffiti and gather intelligence that can help solve crimes, he said.

But he acknowledged it should be coupled with prevention efforts in schools.

“We’re kind of at an inflection point … and if we’re not addressing it on a consistent basis through law enforcement and violence prevention we’re allowing it to cultivate into something more dangerous,” he said.

Alvarez though sharply critical of the police department at times during his first two years in office, has supported Cregan’s efforts to stomp out sideshow activity, particularly along Sebastopol Road, and a proposal to open a police substation on the neighborhood’s main drag.

Cregan has shown a willingness to work with him and the community, Alvarez said, and he hopes the chief is willing to listen to the feedback and adjust his plans.

“I hope the chief knows the path he’s walking down and adjusts,” he said. “I know he has good intentions and that’s why I’ve supported him, but I do believe this is going to be a learning experience for Cregan and I’m willing to travel that journey with him.”

You can reach Staff Writer Paulina Pineda at 707-521-5268 or paulina.pineda@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @paulinapineda22.