Police are using "gang checkpoints" as an excuse to violate citizens rights.
San Juan, TX - The San Juan gang checkpoints that fall between the balance of civil liberties and public safety are at the center of a lawsuit filed by the South Texas Civil Rights Project on Wednesday.
The Alamo group claims the City of San Juan has failed to comply with open records requests inquiring about the checkpoints. Police use them to gather data for submission to the TXGANG database maintained by the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The lawsuit also states public records requests regarding the police department’spolicies to review misleading, false or obsolete information in the database have been ignored.
In a statement released Wednesday, STCRP attorney Joseph Martin said, “We believe that such checkpoints are unconstitutional, and that information gathered illegally is being used to compile a database that doesn’t protect against people being mistakenly identified as gang members.”
The Monitor’s own records request made to DPS found that there were 41,863 unique entries in the TXGANG database as of February and 43,421 in all. DPS also said 803 records have been added by participating Hidalgo and Cameron County authorities since 2010.
On Thursday, police Chief Juan Gonzalez said there hasn’t been a need for the checkpoints recently and that the last gang-related murder in the Pharr-San Juan-Alamo area occurred in early 2012.
“I think that the lawsuit is baseless. There’s no proof of any wrongdoing from the department,” he said. “I’m not fazed about it. We’re going to continue with our efforts reducing gang violence in the PSJA area.”
The Monitor first reported on San Juan police gang checkpoints in December, noting Gonzalez said they had been conducted for the past year. During the checkpoints, officers set up roadblocks in certain areas looking for gang members whose information might be voluntarily included in the TXGANG database.
Police said it was a small portion of a larger effort to address a serious gang problem in the area, while the STCRP said it appeared to violate the Fourth Amendment, which keeps people free from unreasonable search and seizure.
“We are concerned that people are being labeled as gang members based on unreliable information and without even being suspected of committing any crime,” the STCRP statement attributed to Martin said. “There doesn’t appear to be any procedure in place to notify an effected person, or their parent or guardian in the case of juveniles, to allow them to contest their inclusion.”
In its lawsuit, STCRP said its initial request was filed Jan. 4. The city produced limited documents by Feb. 12, but failed to respond to all of the group’s requests, the lawsuit states.
The city also didn’t responded within 10 days as required by law, the group has charged.
“People need to be able to know what local government agencies are doing,” Martin said in comments to The Monitor. “We can’t rely just upon what they’re willing to say.”
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