"Safety Zones" ban gang members from meeting or even speaking to each other inside a defined geographic area.
A controversial law enforcement technique called a gang injunction "safety zone" has been getting the attention of law enforcement in at least eight states. Essentially, it lists people police say are gang members and bans them from meeting or even speaking to each other inside a defined geographic area.
Police in Wyandanch, N.Y., are trying to convince a judge that curtailing rights normally protected under the Constitution can make their community safer.
Law enforcement officials need two key things for a gang injunction safety zone: a place troubled by gangs, and a list of gang members. In a small corner of Wyandanch, a far-flung suburb of New York City, Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy is pushing to create a safety zone.
Levy sees it as an experimental tool police can use to prevent gang violence. He is sympathetic to critics who say the zones violate people's freedom of speech and right to assemble. But he says police should be able to constrain people with criminal pasts.
"Things change when you're convicted and there are conditions placed upon your future, and that's exactly what's happening in this case," Levy says. "The great thing about this process is it gives the opportunity for due process."
Youth counselor Heath Broughton he worries police are targeting a very narrow group of people. Lots of idle youths walk the streets, along with more hookers and more people drinking in public.
The proposed safety zone is about 2 square miles with lots of liquor stores, several gas stations also operating as head shops, and what used to be working-class homes. According to the census, half the homeowners have left and subdivided their homes to renters.
The New York Civil Liberties Union is challenging Levy in court, even though these safety zones have largely been ruled legal. One journal cites 122 known attempts to create them in recent years; only three were denied. Columbia University Law School professor Jeffery Fagan specializes in policing strategies. He says there's no definitive evidence that they reduce crime, but prosecutors love the injunctions because they make it easier to target gangs.
"In a civil injunction, the evidence that prosecutors have to put forward is of a much lower standard," Fagan says.
In civil court, all it takes to label someone a gang member is a "preponderance of evidence," unlike criminal court, where proof beyond a reasonable doubt is required. But once the injunction is in place, violating it is criminal. It's only a misdemeanor, but in some states it can be one of three strikes leading to life in prison.
"Basically what you have is enforcement at a heightened level — at a lower level of suspicion — in predominantly minority neighborhoods," Fagan says.
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/05/140951590/safety-zone-bans-meetings-of-alleged-gang-members