Everyone who has challenged in court the LAPD's decision to place them or their child in the state gang database has had their name removed.
Larry Sanders was chatting with friends in South L.A.’s Green Meadows Recreation Center in April when two police officers approached. They said they had received a call about people drinking in the park.
Petitioners like Sanders say their removals show that they never should have been on the list and that the evidence against them was flimsy. The city attorney’s office, which represented the LAPD in the 2019 petitions, wrote in a statement that it lost the first two petitions when the court ruled that the LAPD’s evidence, which consisted primarily of a letter listing the general reasons but not the underlying facts supporting inclusion in the database, was not clear and convincing proof.
The public has no access to CalGang. For decades, police officers have used the database to check on suspected gang ties and affiliations.found some of the agencies entering alleged gang members’ names, including the LAPD, could not substantiate the claims for some entries. Currently, law enforcement can use information like clothing or identification as gang members by “reliable” sources. Only two or three of eight possible criteria need to be documented, depending on the circumstances.
Requesting to be removed from the database is rare. According to the attorney general’s report, only 53 requests for removal were made between Nov. 1, 2017 and Oct. 31, 2018. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department and the LAPD received the most requests. While San Bernardino County granted three of 18 requests, the LAPD denied all 15 it received.
Sanders’ letter said he had met three criteria to justify his inclusion on the database — arrest for offenses consistent with gang activity, association with documented gang members and frequenting gang areas. With nothing more to go on, Sanders could issue only a blanket denial, said Sean Garcia-Leys, an attorney at the Urban Peace Institute who represented Sanders. The singer had been arrested in his 20s for reasons that he said were unrelated to gang crime.
In a statement, Assist. Chief Frank wrote that his removal did not mean that he was wrongfully placed in the database. “We are neither asserting nor conceding that removing him from the database means that he should not have been placed there to begin with,” he said. The current LAPD scandal began last year when a Van Nuys mother complained that her teenage son was erroneously added to CalGang after a field interview with officers. Police supervisors reviewed body camera footage from the officers and found it did not match their accounts, leading to an expanded internal investigation and a recent recommendation by Chief Michel Moore to fire of one of the officers involved.
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