Right now, there are over 150,000 names in a database of gang members. Anybody can be entered in this database for almost any reason, from being in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time, to simply wearing a New York Yankees hat in the wrong part of town. Citizens of cities with high gang activity levels like Compton and Carson can be profiled for almost no reason at all.
The CalGang database was originally designed to merely check if an individual is listed as a gang member, not to see if they actually are one. However, the database is actively being used by police officers to target individuals who are on the list.
The inherent danger in targeting citizens on the list, however, is that some of the people on the list have been on the list from infancy. In fact, most of these infants are on the list for “self-professing” their gang membership, There’s no need to discuss the absolute absurdity of a child that cannot speak at all professing to be a gang member. Even if their first words were in fact confessing their allegiance to the Park Village Compton Crips, even exceptional children don’t even begin to speak until at least half a year after their first birthday. The fact that children, all the way from infants, to preteens are being considered gang members without evidence, and then being targeted for it later in life.
In addition, even if juveniles are entered into the CalGang database, their parents are to be notified immediately, so that they can challenge their child’s inclusion in the database. Under the current use of the system however, this rarely happens. Tens of thousands are admitted into the database for trivial reasons, and nobody is notified. A law was attempted to put into place last year to offer the same opportunity for adults to challenge their inclusion, but the law was never passed. Looking at how the juvenile law is handled however, would it even matter if the equivalent was put into place for adults? Seeing as parents of juveniles aren’t even notified, who says that adults, who are probably even considered to be more high risk, would be notified instead?
The consequences of this discriminatory and absurd database can be monumental. San Diego native, Aaron Harvey, a former member of the Lincoln Park Bloods during his teen years. Never having been charged with a criminal offense, his record was clean, yet he was in the database. While setting up a real estate business in Las Vegas, he was arrested and brought back to San Diego to be tried on twelve counts of criminal street gang conspiracy to commit a felony. Members of Harvey’s former gang had committed shootings, and since he was in the database, he was tried as well. Although eventually found innocent, over the course of the trial, he had spent eight months in jail, losing his job, apartment, and reputation among friends and family.
“It’s like a virus that you have, that you don’t know you have, and you’re spreading it to other people,” Harvey said of gang classification. “(Someone) infected me with this disease; now I have it, and there’s no telling how many other people I have infected.”
As the United States. hopes to lessen the institutional racism many minorities face, they must do away with these systems that allow police and other figures of authority to subjugate minorities so that there are more opportunities to imprison these men.
In fact, many of those who are in prison have more rights when it comes to these types of databases, as they are informed if they are considered to be part of a gang and if they are, they can challenge that through a corrections department.
Overall, not only is CalGang discriminatory, it is largely useless as it misidentifies many, leading it to be a list of people who may have some vague connections to gangs, or merely happened to live in a “hood” where gangs tend to be common. Harvey is only one example of a life devastated by the effects of this database, and that case in particular shows the lessening of human rights due to a list which has a dubious credibility at best.