PROSECUTORS LAUNCH A NEW ASSAULT ON CALIFORNIA GANG

California and federal authorities cracked down on the Nuestra Familia
drug gang in the state's rural Central Valley on Wednesday, arresting
75 people and underscoring the persistence of California's gang problem.

The arrests, part of a bigger federal effort called "Operation Red
Zone" that has netted a total of 101 alleged gang members on gun and
drug-dealing charges, took place in such rural towns as Dos Palos and
Livingston.

The alleged gang members headed to those towns to sell drugs after
they were "effectively driven out" of Salinas by crackdowns in recent
years, the California Department of Justice said. Before that,
prosecutors busted high-level members of Nuestra Familia in 2000 and
2001 without taking down the organization.

Pursuing violent gangs is like Whac-A-Mole, the arcade game in which a
player smacks one pop-up rodent and then another pops up elsewhere,
because gangs never truly go away, said Rory Little, a professor at
Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco and a former federal prosecutor.

Pursuing big gangs is also expensive and time-consuming. Kamala
Harris, California's attorney general, said Wednesday that her staff
has spent more than 8,000 hours on the case since last year, and that
didn't include the work of other organizations, such as the U.S.
attorney's office in Sacramento.

The operation "is going to have a huge impact on the state of
California," Ms. Harris said, by taking a large number of gang members
off the streets. Ms. Harris said she was trying to combine big arrests
with programs to stop teenagers from entering gangs.

But recent law-enforcement cuts have thwarted such programs in some
cities, according to local police. While state and federal authorities
cracked down on gangs in one part of the Central Valley, other cities
are struggling to control gangs.

In Oakdale, Calif., a Central Valley city of about 20,000, Det. Brian
Shimmell said he was struggling to curb gang activity since the city's
police force was cut from 28 members to 20 in 2009. The force lost its
officers who used to work with juveniles in gang-prevention programs.

Between 2005 and 2007, he said, the city recorded 239 gang-related
crimes; between January 2008 and January 2011, he said, it recorded
459 gang crimes.