From: Rosanna Ramirez <roramirez@ucdavis.edu>
Subject: FW: Yolo County DA Tries Damage Control After His Staff Murder Immigrants
To: "'Bobby Rodriguez'" <bobbyrodriquez1954@yahoo.com>
Date: Monday, January 4, 2010, 6:32 PM
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Sent: Sunday, December 27, 2009 11:47 PM
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Subject: Fwd: Yolo County DA Tries Damage Control After His Staff Murder Immigrants
-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Zeltzer <lvpsf@igc.org>
To: Undisclosed-recipients: <>
Sent: Sun, Dec 27, 2009 9:59 am
Subject: Yolo County DA Tries Damage Control After His Staff Murder Immigrants
Yolo County DA Tries Damage Control After His Staff Murder Immigrants
http://www.sacbee.com/ourregion/story/2422266.html
Jeff Reisig created an anti-gang task force, wrote an anti-gang injunction and says there are 1,600 reasons he made the anti-gang fight his top priority as Yolo County's district attorney.
Targeting gangs has set him up for some community heat, most recently over a report from his office exonerating two police officers – members of what used to be his task force – who shot and killed a suspected gang member in Woodland earlier this year.
But Reisig, the Yolo County DA for the past three years, says he can't imagine approaching his job any other way.
"Talk to the old-timers who were here, and they'll tell you they remember the day when they would see a few people here and there wearing colors," Reisig said. "Now it's just exploded. The way I see the issue, I have a mandate to aggressively go after gangs. In my opinion, they are the single biggest threat to public safety in Yolo County."
Since his election in 2006, and even before, the brawny, spike-haired prosecutor has established himself as the Eliot Ness of Yolo County. Just as the fabled "Untouchable" of 1920s Chicago focused on the bootlegging gangsters of his era, Reisig has directed his piercing gaze at the estimated 1,600 street gang members who he says are terrorizing portions of his jurisdiction between the Sacramento River and the hills below Lake Berryessa.
Right there in what he calls his "little country county," Reisig said he faces a gang problem responsible for "thousands" of violent felonies over the past decade, including the shooting deaths of two law enforcement officers. Reisig also blames gang-banging drug dealers for bringing in the dope for Yolo County's users.
"You've got all these serious violent felonies, you've got dead cops, you've got drugs on the street, and it's all tied to criminal street gangs," he said.
Most recently, Reisig and his office have been in the spotlight for announcing last month that prosecutors would not file charges over the April 30 shooting death of 26-year-old Luis Gutierrez Navarro.
Wearing plain clothes and driving an unmarked car, the officers gunned down Gutierrez after he ran away and, by their account, pulled a knife on them when they stopped him to ask what was up. The state attorney general's office signed off on the DA's conclusion that the shooting was legally justified.
As a deputy prosecutor under former Yolo District Attorney David Henderson, Reisig created the task force with a 2001 grant-funding request. He oversaw its workings for eight years until he handed off its supervision to the Sheriff's Department in January.
Reisig didn't see a conflict in his office conducting what he described as a "parallel" review of the shooting, independently interviewing witnesses at the same time Woodland police detectives and sheriff's internal affairs investigators conducted their own probes.
He said he asked officials in the attorney general's office if they had a problem with his participation, and they gave him the go-ahead.
"It was clearly something we thought about and looked at," Reisig said. "One of the first questions I asked myself was, is this appropriate for the District Attorney's Office to handle? I personally felt there was no conflict. We did not control the unit. The sheriff ran the unit."
The Nov. 24 release of the DA's report has inflamed some community activists, who called it a whitewash. It has also attracted scorn from Cruz Reynoso, a former state Supreme Court justice and current law professor at the University of California, Davis.
An expert in constitutional law, Reynoso, in an interview, called the DA's report "less than impressive." Reynoso is putting together a citizens panel to conduct another review of the shooting. Hearings are expected to get under way early next year.
According to Reynoso, Gutierrez had every right to refuse to talk to the task force officers when they stopped him on the Gum Avenue overpass, above Highway 113.
"I can't help but conclude this is a killing that did not have to take place," he said. "The question is, why did it? That's basically what our commission will be investigating."
Before he put the commission together, Reynoso and Reisig had lunch. Reynoso said Reisig "seems like a sincere person" and Reisig called Reynoso "a nice guy."
Reisig sounded skeptical about the commission, however. He said his report on the shooting has been reviewed by the state attorney general, and both the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice civil rights division are investigating. He joked that the only entity not to weigh in on the shooting is NATO.
"The loss of life is tragic, and I'm sad for everybody involved," Reisig said. "But we had a job to do and we did it, as openly and transparently as possible. We invited everyone in the system to come look at it.
"But I never felt like there was a reason for there to be controversy regarding what we're doing," he added. "We had a mandated duty to review the shooting. We made some findings, and they were reviewed by the attorney general and upheld. I don't see the controversy.
"What I see," Reisig continued, "is politics."
Going to court
Reisig's actions also have come under review in the Bryte and Broderick areas of West Sacramento, where he won a preliminary injunction last year to corral neighborhood street gang members.
Daniel Velez, 59, president of the Washington Little League, questioned the need for the injunction in a sworn affidavit. He said the injunction, which covers everything in town north of the Highway 50 and east of Harbor Boulevard, has made his neighborhood "notorious."
"Yeah, there are some stupids here, but you can't treat your whole community like that," Velez told The Bee. "I have 200 kids in my Little League. Those are 200 good boys right there."
Police and prosecutors, Velez said, "don't recognize those good boys."
The injunction bars people identified by law enforcement as gang members from associating with each other, intimidating anybody or possessing weapons or drugs or alcohol in public.
Reisig defended the injunction, which is slated for a hearing in April to determine whether it should become permanent. He said it might give pause to some good boys before they join a club that could get them in trouble.
The prosecutor took issue with the suggestion that the court order penalizes somebody for who they are rather than what they do. Enforcement only comes into play, Reisig said, if a named target violates a judge's order.
"If someone's a gang member, it's not like they're going to be arrested for being in a gang," he said. "Nobody's being arrested for having a barbecue in their front yard or for hanging out with their next-door neighbor. The key is the judge's order, and if somebody's found to be in violation of the judge's order, they still have the right to go to trial."
'Pushing and pushing'
Yolo County Supervisor Matt Rexroad said the gang problem "absolutely, positively shapes every aspect of law enforcement" in the jurisdiction. But former Public Defender Barry Melton believes that law enforcement, including his friend Reisig, has seriously overhyped it.
Melton said he thinks the estimate of Yolo's 1,600 gang members is way overblown.
"I seriously doubt the number's that big," Melton said. "How do you make the determination? If I live on the block and my neighbor's a gang member and I go have a beer with him, am I affiliated? The thought is that everything they do is in furtherance of what the gang is doing, and of course that is not true."
Riding the gang issue and cracking the whip on his office of 120 employees to move cases quickly, Reisig has generated top-of-the-chart reviews from Yolo County's legal, political and law enforcement establishments.
"I rank him very high," said Davis-area Supervisor Jim Provenza, an attorney and registered Sacramento lobbyist who represents the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. "One of the good things about him, he's flexible. He's willing to listen and grow with the job."
Sheriff Ed Prieto called Reisig "a man of integrity.'
"He has very strong convictions about right and wrong," Prieto said. "I think somebody has to stand up for the good guys, and that's what he does."
Veteran defense lawyer Rod Beede has tangled head-on with Reisig in three murder trials. Afterward, the legal combatants discussed the cases over beers.
"He's brought some youth and energy and creative ideas to the DA's office," Beede said.
Presiding Superior Court Judge David Rosenberg credited Reisig with working with the other players in the justice system to drive down what used to be a horrendous backlog of untried cases that packed local jails.
"Jeff as the district attorney … has been very flexible and willing to try new things," Rosenberg said. "He's been very understanding of the problems and limitations we have and has been willing to problem-solve."
A 40-year-old native of Gilroy who now lives in West Sacramento, Reisig already has his campaign up and running for a 2010 re-election effort.
Coming to the end of his first term, Reisig has pushed his staff to get cases filed, get cases tried, get cases out of the court as quickly as possible. The number of felony trials in Yolo County has risen from 30 or 40 a year to 120 a year since Reisig took over. The jail that once was subject to a population cap now has space to rent to the federal government.
Along the way, Reisig has angered some people inside his office, including one former investigator who accused him of trying to politicize the gang injunction. Another sued him on allegations that the district attorney disclosed confidential materials on a disciplinary matter to another agency.
Reisig responded that when he took office, he shook up "a good-old-boy network" that included "some people who resented the accountability I was demanding of people on the job."
He acknowledged that he's been "pushing and pushing," and he said he won't stop – especially when it comes to gangs.
"We're busy over here," Reisig said. "It puts us in the spotlight. I'm proud of what we've done because I think it better serves Yolo County."
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