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City
Announces Gang Injunction Finally Moving Forward at Anti-Crime
Group Meeting
More than a
year after its formation, committee continues to meet but still has
not moved forward with implementing any of the recommendations it originally
developed to stem crime
By
Gene C. Johnson Jr.
Bulletin Staff Writer
COMPTON – There
appeared to be a consensus among those in attendance as well as the
six panelists gathered during the June 2 monthly meeting of the city’s
Anti-Crime Committee: to rid Compton of gangs, homicides, prostitution,
graffiti and illegal car sales on city streets, more citizen participation
is needed.
“We’re really trying to make Compton a better place to
stay. If there is a problem, we’re trying to do everything we
can to solve it,” said National Association of Equal Justice
in America (NAEJA) CEO Royce Esters during the meeting held at the
Martin Luther King
Jr. Transit Center. “The citizens of Compton have to share in
on that load. We all have to work together.”
Panelists included yiHhHourie Taylor, police chief of the Compton Unified
School District, Deputy City Atty. Merle Greene, Capt. Bill Ryan of
Compton Sheriff’s Station and NAEJA Chairperson Leon Harper.
“We need to be more effective, as far as the citizens are concerned,” said
Harper, a 38-year resident of Compton. “There’s a stigma
throughout Compton: ‘If it doesn’t happen to me, it doesn’t
happen.’ We have to all get together and some the problems. We
don’t want to just sit here and talk about it.”
The June 2 meeting consisted of updates from the school district, the
Block Club Commission, the Park Police, Municipal Law Enforcement and
legal matters regarding the City Attorney’s Office.
According to Taylor, the Tennis Center at the Home Depot Center in
Carson will house the school district’s high school graduation
ceremonies tomorrow, June 12.
“We’re (school officials) happy that everything will be
consolidated and we (school police) won’t be running from school
to school,” he
said.
During the meeting, Green announced that the gang injunction the city
was supposed to have filed months ago has finally been filed against
the Mob Piru gang.
“Right now we’re (the City Attorney’s Office) in
the litigation process where we’re under court order to serve
each and every member of that gang,” said Green, adding that
there are approximately 168 gang members. “So it (the injunction)
is moving forward at that stage of the process.”
Moreover, fed up with the gang plaguing her neighborhood, longtime
Compton resident Martha Pittman offered temporary accommodations at
her home to Ryan so that he could see the mayhem first hand.
And while there has been, by media accounts, an uptick in the number
of homicides (20 so far this year) following the city’s two-year
downturn in violence, other problems rising to the surface include
graffiti defacing a growing number area businesses and street food
vendors, said Lestean Johnson, president of the Compton Chamber of
Commerce.
“As soon as the (business) owner comes and takes the graffiti
off, within the next day the graffiti is back up,” Johnson said. “We
have a situation of who’s winning – the business owner
or the people who are putting up the graffiti?”
Ryan said about two or three months ago he met with an assistant city
manager to present to him a program called “Graffiti Tracker,” a
global positioning system database program in use at the sheriff’s
Pico Rivera station. Photos are entered into the Graffiti Tracker program,
which helps to identify vandalism suspects and trends.
Another chief concern among the 30 to 35 in attendance, they said,
is the growing number of illegal car sales along Long Beach, Rosecrans
and Alondra boulevards as well as Myrrh Street.
“And the owner of the business is (also) the registration person
who is parked in a parking lot selling the vehicles and registering
them
as they’re being sold,” Johnson said. “The city is
not receiving revenue.”
“They (people selling the vehicles) know our law, they know our
municipal codes,” said Frank Gutierrez, a city of Compton Code
Enforcement Officer. “They know if there are one, two vehicles
on the street that we cannot cite them.
“It has to be more than two vehicles,” Gutierrez said. “They’re
playing this cat-and-mouse game with us, but we are citing vehicles for sale.
Until they (city officials) change the municipal code in which we can cite every
vehicle for sale, man, we can’t stop this.”
The Anti-Crime Committee, chaired by NAEJA and formed at the urging of the mayor
in January 2007, was originally supposed to meet monthly to develop and then
implement recommendations aimed at stemming the tide of crime here. However,
more than a year later, the committee has failed to address or put into action
any of the recommendations it originally developed.
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