MONTEREY COUNTY SEES GANG THREAT GROWING IN DIFFERENT WAYS

Six years after the FBI published its first National Gang Threat
Assessment, the intimidating influence of gang members continues to
grow in communities across the country -- Monterey County included.

After a two-year hiatus, the National Gang Intelligence Center,
through the FBI, released its 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment,
analyzing trends and the pressure created by gangs in urban, suburban
and rural communities nationwide. This is the third such report, with
predecessors in 2005 and 2009.

"Gangs continue to expand, evolve and become more violent," said Kevin
Perkins, assistant director of the FBI Criminal Investigative
Division, upon the report's release in October.

"The FBI, along with its federal, state, local and tribal law
enforcement partners, strives to disrupt and prevent their criminal
activities and seek justice for innocent victims of their crimes,"
Perkins said.

The most notable trend for 2011, according to the report, is the
overall rise in gang membership and new, creative ways crimes are
being committed.

New gang enterprises

The report estimates there are about 1.4 million active street gang,
outlaw motorcycle gang and prison gang members in the nation -- up by
40 percent from about 1 million gang members reported in 2009. The
rise is attributed to a combination of having more agencies reporting,
increasingly aggressive recruiting by gangs, newly created gangs, new
drug trafficking opportunities, partnership with rival gangs and
drug-trafficking enterprises.

The Monterey County Sheriff's Office estimated there were about 1,160
"registered" gang members locally in 2003. Gang members are usually
registered through field interviews conducted by law enforcement officers.

Unregistered gang members are estimated at three to four times the
number of registered gang members.

Since 2005, the number of gang members in the county has steadily
increased. When the first report came out in 2005, there were
reportedly a few thousand gang members in Monterey County. That same
year, the Monterey County Joint Gang Task Force was created to combat
rising gang violence. The task force was credited for helping reduce
gang violence and bring down homicides to seven compared to 20 the
previous year.

In the 2009 report, officials estimated the county had between 2,500
and 3,499 gang members.

As outlined in the 2011 report, Monterey County said it had about
5,145 gang members in 2010. While the county didn't make the list of
Top 10 gang-infested counties across the nation or even the state, the
increase remains worrisome.

Among the 15 Central California counties, Monterey County has the
ninth-highest number of reported gang members, according to the
report. At 24,482 individuals, Fresno has the most gang members of any
Central California county.

Sureno gangs keep pace

While the greatest increase was seen in the northeast and southeast
regions of the nation, the highest number of gang members lives in the
West and Great Lakes regions, the report says.

Sureno criminal street gangs were identified in the report as among
the most rapidly expanding in many jurisdictions. Sureno gang members
are regarded as mostly Mexican immigrants with ties to their native
homeland. Their rivals are Norteno gangs composed primarily of
U.S.-born residents of Mexican descent.

Salinas, long a stronghold for Norteno gangs, is seeing more Surenos
coming into the area who are organizing in ways they haven't before,
creating more violence in Monterey County.

Where in the past, Nortenos made up about 95 percent of Monterey
County gangs, the Surenos are starting to even out the population,
said county Joint Gang Task Force Officer Jesse Pinon, also a
sheriff's deputy.

"It's now more 60-40," Pinon said.

The rise could be connected to the increase in migration to the area,
he said.

The report's analysis is stark as it opines that violence isn't
letting up -- in fact, gang members are growing more violent as they
seek out other, less usual and lower-risk opportunities for criminal
revenue, including prostitution and white-collar crimes.

Credit card fraud and identity theft are popular when it comes to
white-collar crime, Pinon said, as returns are usually lucrative.

"Drug sales, ultimately, is their money-maker," he said. "They make a
lot of money from this, where check fraud and identity theft is risky,
but it can net good amounts of money."

Nonetheless, drugs and robberies remain among the top crimes for the
county, Pinon said. Moreover, identity theft may go hand in hand with
robberies, he said.

Learning from the past

Like most gangs across the nation, Pinon said, those here in Monterey
County are evolving and becoming more threatening in their own ways.
Gang members are learning how to avoid future detection from past law
enforcement crackdowns, such as Operation Valley Star and Operation
Black Widow, he said.

Operation Valley Star in 2007 saw the capture of 22 suspected gang
members along the Pacific coast from the San Francisco Bay Area
through Monterey County. Operation Black Widow, a seven-year FBI
investigation, resulted in eight members of the Nuestra Familia prison
gang pleading guilty to federal racketeering and conspiracy charges in
September 2004.

"(Gangs) are basically adapting to however they were caught in the
first place," Pinon said.

Some of the findings in the report are so far irrelevant to the
county, such as the expansion of Asian and hybrid gangs.

According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, hybrid gangs are considered mixed race and ethnic gangs
that are loosely structured in rules and codes of conduct for their
members. The gang members could also participate in a number of other
gangs at the same time or team up with rival gangs in carrying out
crimes.

Pinon said the area remains largely dominated by Norteno and Sureno
gangs. But there is some presence locally of hybrid gangs, he said. In
its report, the FBI names the "Juggalos," fans of the rap group Insane
Clown Posse, as a hybrid group posing "a threat to communities due to
the potential for violence, drug use/sales, and their general
destructive and violent nature."

While the area doesn't have Juggalos, Pinon said, law enforcement
officers have seen the hybrid group Peckerwoods, a pro-white gang.

One trend that has law enforcement concerned is the apparent
collaboration of local gangs with Mexican nationals. The Salinas area
has been tagged as a drug-trafficking artery connecting Southern and
Northern California.

"They (the Mexican nationals) supply all the gangs in the area," Pinon
said.

Another potential influence on gang activity in Monterey County still
remains uncertain -- the impact of "prison realignment" under Assembly
Bill 109, in which some state prison inmates are being held in county
jails to relieve prison overcrowding. The plan went into effect Oct. 1
across the state and is slated to send tens of thousands of
lower-level criminals from state prisons to county jails -- in the case
of Monterey County, an already crowded jail.

Pinon said time will tell what impact realignment will have on gang
members released under the plan and whether they will subsequently
re-establish themselves into local gangs.

A counter movement

While gangs are expanding their reach and meting out violence, he
said, there has been a movement in the past few years by law
enforcement and other groups to counter their influence.

In 2009, the same year the city of Salinas saw a record-breaking 29
homicides -- all of which were blamed on gangs -- the Community Alliance
for Safety and Peace was launched. CASP is a coalition of
organizations and leaders from Salinas and Monterey County formed with
the aim of disrupting the culture of violence that continues to affect
public welfare.

In April 2010, the multi-agency Operation Knockout culminated with the
arrest of dozens of gang members and some of the most powerful gang
leaders in the Salinas area.

Since then, officials have reported strides made -- a circumstance that
could be linked to the decrease in homicides. In 2010, the Salinas
Police Department said, the city had 20 homicides. As of Dec. 8, there
had been 12 homicides reported this year in Salinas -- nine of them
definitely linked to gangs.