Saturday, August 17, 2013

San Bernardino County DA Michael A. Ramos keeps focus on gangs

By Joe Nelson, Staff Writer, The SUN News -

Despite the shaky economy and budget woes, San Bernardino County's district attorney says he has no plans to cut back on resources to his hard-core gang prosecution unit.

DA Michael A. Ramos established the gang unit in 2005, when gang warfare raged through the county. The unit started out with three prosecutors, but quickly expanded to 15 at satellite offices around the county.

Then, in 2007, the economy tanked, and since then Ramos has had to make the same tough decisions other top county officials have had to make: where to cut costs while at the same time trying to maintain the proper level of service to taxpayers.

"It was tough. I lost 34 positions in 3-1/2 years," Ramos said in a telephone interview Friday.

But he refused to make such sacrifices in the gang unit.

"I had to make this a priority," Ramos said. "The minute you back off, it gets worse."

On Thursday, the District Attorney's Office released its second-quarter gang stats for 2013.

From April 1 through June 30, 194 gang cases were filed, with 134 defendants committed to state prison for a collective sentence of 996 years, the statistics show.

For the same period, 72 gang enhancements were found true and 13 of those defendants were found guilty by juries .

A gang enhancement adds years to a defendant's prison sentence if it is found true that the defendant was a gang member at the time of the offense or committed the crime to benefit a street gang.

In its annual report released on June 30, the county's civil Grand Jury recommended that county law enforcement officials should revisit a strategic plan drafted in 2005, at the height of the gang crisis, which recommended, among other things, a centralized database for tracking gang crimes using GIS technology and establishing research-based programs for at-risk youths.

The Grand Jury made the recommendation in order to assess how far law enforcement has come in implementing the recommendations and how effective the plan has been.

A migration of gang members and their families from Los Angeles to San Bernardino County in search of cheaper housing in 2005 helped fuel the increased gang activity. The city of San Bernardino logged 58 homicides that year.

The Grand Jury praised the District Attorney's Office for its use of enhanced sentencing for gang members.

County prosecutors secured 25 percent more state prison sentences against gang members for the first six months of 2012 than in all of 2011. Between January and June 2012, 158 gang members were sentenced to a cumulative 738 years in prison, according to data provided by the District Attorney's Office.

Ramos welcomes such a review.

Aside from aggressive prosecutions, he said his prosecutors have doggedly been working with the county Probation Department on intervention and prevention programs, including the Let's End Truancy (LET) and Gang Resistance Intervention Partnership (GRIP) programs, which are geared toward educating at-risk youths and their parents on the dangers of gangs and the importance of education to escape the cycle of violence and poverty so many of them face.

When prison realignment -- the shifting of parolee oversight from the state to county probation departments -- took effect in October 2011, the Probation Department, at a time when county employees were being given their pink slips, increased its number of officers to address the influx of parolees and probationers.

Gang members are more closely monitored as a rule of thumb, said Probation Department spokesman Chris Condon.

He also welcomes the Grand Jury's recommendation on revisiting the strategic plan from 2005 and presenting an update and how far the county has come in dealing with its gang problem.

San Bernardino County ranked third in the nation in 2011 in its gang population, with Cook County, Ill., having the second largest gang population nationwide and Los Angeles County having the largest, according to FBI statistics.

But there is hope.

"I do believe we're making considerable inroads," Condon said.

Since Ramos launched the gang unit in 2005, his office has filed 8,216 cases, resulting in 4,400 prison commitments.

"We continue our war against these gang members in San Bernardino County," Ramos said. "I have some of the best prosecutors in the nation working these cases."

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