Gang Injunctions

Gang Injunctions & Civil Abatement in Los Angeles

A gang injunction in Los Angeles is when the City Attorney’s Office with approval from a judge issues a restraining order against specific gang members of a particular gang. With information gathered from police officers, a judge will grant a restraining order against identified members of a gang, in essence suing them. In the lawsuit, the actual gang members are mentioned, and they are forbidden to engage in a host of activities, some of which are already illegal such as selling drugs, vandalizing property and possessing weapons. Other activities that they are restricted from doing have included associating with other named gang members, curfew or riding bicycles. Each gang injunction must define a geographic area where these activities are restricted known as a “safety zone.”

Los Angeles first started experiencing with gang injunctions in the early 1980s in Pomona, West Covina, and E. LA, but the injunction against the Play Boy Gangster Crips in 1987 is when these civil abatement strategies first gained national attention. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenged the constitutionality of the injunctions and city attorney James Hahn was forced to modify his lawsuit. Since then, several injunctions have been implemented in LA County including in Inglewood against the Crenshaw Mafia Bloods, in Los Angeles against 18th Street and the Harpys, and in Norwalk against the Orange Street Locos to name a few. There have been just over 30 injunctions in LA County. The ACLU has continued to take the position that gang injunctions violate civil rights and in a report published in 1997 the ACLU has claimed that they are not that effective in abating crime.

The popularity of the injunctions have seen places such as San Diego and San Jose, California, San Antonio, Texas, and Chicago, Illinois to adopt similar strategies against their gangs. Although the California Supreme Court ruled that the city of San Jose may implement gang injunctions when it overturned a 1995 appellate court decision in the ACLU case, People v. Acuna, because of the vague language of Chicago’s 1992 anti gang ordinance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that it was unconstitutional and challenged individual freedoms (see Chicago v. Morales).

In the San Diego injunction, the California appeals court stated that gang members can keep their pagers and cited that restricting pagers for any purpose violates ones freedom of speech.