Time to revisit Special Order 40?
- PRO -

by Dennis P. Zine, Los Angeles City Councilman

LA Daily News Article - 04/26/2008

EDITOR'S NOTE: This first appeared as an Editorial OPINION article in the LA Daily News. Please also see the opposing point of view, the "CON" article, as expressed by LAPD Deputy Chief Michel Moore.

Street gangs have one primary purpose: to intimidate communities through criminal activities. These thugs terrorize their own neighborhoods and other communities without the slightest regard for human life or a bare minimum of human decency. A sizable portion of gang membership consists of criminals who are in this country illegally.

Major efforts (and millions of dollars) have been spent on obtaining and enforcing injunctions to keep gang members away from certain areas and to stop gang members from associating with each other. Common sense suggests that another effective way to reduce gang violence is to find and deport gang members who are in this country illegally. But in the city of Los Angeles, common sense has taken a back seat to a misinterpretation and restrictive implementation of a policy known as LAPD Special Order 40.

In 1979, the Los Angeles Police Department implemented Special Order 40. It prohibits officers from "initiating police action where the objective is to discover the alien status of a person." Unfortunately, Special Order 40 has been misinterpreted to mean that LAPD officers cannot ask someone they have arrested about immigration status until after criminal charges have been initiated.

As currently implemented, Special Order 40 deprives the community of a valuable tool in the fight against gangs. Every day, Los Angeles residents are at increased risk of violent assault because we are underutilizing the tool of deportation to rid our community of illegal, foreign-born criminals.

If an officer knows a gang member is an illegal immigrant, he should be allowed to notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement so that it can detain that gang member. Similarly, when the LAPD arrests a gang member found to be here illegally, the LAPD should be allowed to place an immigration hold on that individual. This allows ICE to provide a due-process determination of a person's immigration status.

The modification I propose to Special Order 40 focuses solely on illegal-immigrant gang members. An officer must conduct a legitimate investigation on a person to determine that the individual is in a gang (verified by the CAL/GANG System) and is also here illegally. To be registered in the system, one must meet the criteria listed in the Gang File Guidelines of the LAPD Manual. These files are administered by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Gang officers and other police personnel who have completed the required CAL/GANG training may also input and update information into the CAL/GANG database. Access to the database is restricted to authorized personnel only.

In early March, Jamiel Shaw Jr. was gunned down near his home. An illegal-immigrant gang member with a previous criminal history of violent acts who had just been released from county jail has been charged with this murder. Jamiel was not in a gang. He was a model student and star athlete who had attracted the attention of Stanford University. Jamiel's mother, an Army sergeant, was on her second tour of duty in Iraq when she received news about her son's vicious murder.

This tragedy cannot be ignored. We need to take preventive action so that needless acts of violence cease without detracting from the original intent of Special Order 40.

The LAPD is not hostile to the immigrant community. Fifty-nine percent of LAPD officers are also members of ethnic minority groups.

After decades of obscene gang violence and millions upon millions spent on gang-prevention programs, the city of Los Angeles has begun to fight back. But we have not taken the decisive step of permanently removing these criminals from our streets. The city should involve ICE in its war against gang crime by apprehending and deporting illegal-immigrant gang members.

Currently, the LAPD's Operations Valley Bureau officers work with immigration officials to systematically go through the files of arrestees, deporting those who are in the country illegally. This is good policy, but it is not applied consistently throughout the Police Department. We are one city; there must be one policy. My modification takes a proactive approach, assisting officers to apprehend criminals on the front end, notifying ICE before a crime is committed by a gang member, not after.

The City Council should demand a modification to Special Order 40 so that Los Angeles can use all tools legally available to combat street gangs, including those that have illegal immigrants as members. It is time to handcuff criminals, not police officers.

Dennis P. Zine is a Los Angeles City Council member who has spent almost 40 years with the Los Angeles Police Department. He is currently an LAPD reserve officer.

http://www.dailynews.com/editorial/ci_9063632