We’re publishing a series of op-ed articles from students in The Writing Program at USC. Every student in the class taught by Stephanie Bower and Dr. John Murray was required to make a short documentary about education by profiling a local school and/or program. Following the film project, the students wrote op-ed articles in response to their experiences and tackled some of the issues they discovered while making the shorts. We will be posting a new op-ed daily for the next two weeks.

by Courtney Kay

Beautiful coastlines, 70 degree sunshiny days, suburbia, and beachfront property…this is your perception of San Diego, California, right? Beach babes, surfers, and a bunch of Caucasians living in paradise. Do gangs, shootings, and destructive tensions with law enforcement come to mind? How about unconstitutional gang injunctions that could strip away many citizens’ civil rights and liberties?

These are the existing aspects of San Diego culture many tragically fail to recognize, while members of our community continue to be killed. Just last week a shootout between Encinitas and Carlsbad gangs resulted in the death of two young teenagers. With nearly half the homicides with known motives in San Diego County at the hands of gangs according to The San Diego Union Tribune, it is essential that these issues be strongly addressed.

Only in the present administration has the state government realized the urgency of this issue and taken action. In conjunction with recent gang prevention efforts, Governor Schwarzenegger announced three weeks ago his plan to award $9.2 million to cities and community-based organizations in areas with heavy gang concentrations. Of this money, $400,000 has been specifically granted to Oceanside–and believe me, it needs it.

My hometown, Oceanside, is also home base to the largest Samoan gang in the United States. With multitudes of other racially segregated gangs, the city has had its share of gang-related problems, and I’ve been there to witness at least a few. I never really thought it a huge problem, until right before my eyes a fellow high school student was stabbed during gym class. I watched as his pristinely white t-shirt become drenched with blood as he ran off the scene in fear.

How are $400,000 of our hard-earned tax-payer dollars going to stop all of this? One controversial idea proposed by the San Diego County District Attorney is the re-implementation of the gang injunction system used most recently in Vista, a neighboring city, in June 2005.
The idea was thrown back on the table in light of ongoing deliberations in the murder trial of Oceanside police officer Dan Bessant, who was killed in December 2006 while patrolling a gang-infested neighborhood. After teenagers Meki Gaono and Penifoti Taeotui of the Samoan gang Deep Valley Bloods were charged, the District Attorney’s Office offered to prepare an injunction in north Oceanside where the shooting occurred.

Oceanside is all too familiar with the gang injunction program, having been implemented four times since 1997. The program basically forbids specified gang members within a certain geographical area from particular activities such as associating, drinking or possessing alcohol, owning or shooting guns, wearing gang colors, and trespassing. The program has met with success in the past, so many propose a fifth term. Why not?

The answer is simple. Because the racial landscape of this particular case is so different from those in the past, the gang injunction solution cannot be generically applied. Given the ethnic demographics of this area of Oceanside, gang injunction number five would be the inappropriate course of action.

The city’s four previous injunctions dealt only with Hispanic gangs who tended to live in defined areas. The Samoan gang members, however, are scattered throughout the city. Because the city cannot easily pinpoint and accurately identify these exact neighborhoods where gangs are organized, it would be unfair to impose gang injunctions at the cost of many innocent residents’ constitutional rights.

In addition, gang injunctions have received a great deal of criticism and backlash from the community, creating even more tension. Critics say injunctions promote the mistreatment of innocent bystanders by law enforcement and create a distrust and disdain of authority in neighborhoods. This attitude of being unjustly attacked can help fuel violent retaliations.

This is exemplified in the Bessant trial. One “undercurrent motive” for the defendants was that police had recently increased their presence in the gang-ridden neighborhood, and the city had unfairly started civil abatement procedures against three residences identified as hosting criminal activity. Alienating members of the community and pitting law enforcement against residents can have consequences of their own.

Given the necessary and unavoidable civil rights violations, the court promises it will not order this injunction unless a police agency presents evidence of its “absolute necessity.” Instead of putting undue time and attention into this legislation, the real necessity should be in ensuring the city make a more productive use of its $400,000.

The majority of the money should not be spent continuing expensive gang injunction efforts inappropriate to the situation. The money should be carefully budgeted to building a comprehensive, multi-faceted gang prevention effort—only giving money to injunctions in the direst situations. With the state’s help, Oceanside now has the power and resources to drive down violence in a smarter and more focused way. It has the money to focus on preventative efforts proven to decrease gang membership such as education, after school, and vocational programs. The main focus should be emulating an all-encompassing, proven strategy like the G.R.E.A.T. (Gang Resistance and Education Training) program, so that gang violence can permanently become a thing of the past in Oceanside.

In looking back at the emotionally charged funeral of beloved father, husband, and son Dan Bessant, I can’t help but feel that injunctions are merely a temporary fix. Let us focus on the long haul Oceanside and spend this money where it will do the most good. We must deal with the gangs that provoked this attack in order to prevent the loss of another innocent life, but we must do this in a way that does not perpetuate the violent cycle. In respect to my fellow church member Dan Bessant and his life, let us use his lesson for good— refraining from further discriminatory gang injunctions and instead taking positive action on a path for change.