One night last July in Green Bay, Wis., members of two rival gangs, Florencia-13 and Brown Pride Local 13, crossed paths in an alley. They argued, and a fight broke out. When it was over, a member of the Florencia-13 gang lay wounded, and a 48-year-old man who had been riding his bike across the street was shot in the leg.
Witnesses wouldn’t talk much to Detective Dave Eklund, who was assigned the case. But Eklund had a powerful investigative tool on his side: GangNet, a database that tracks information on 350,000 alleged gang members. The system includes the individuals’ photos, street names, addresses and known associates, along with gang hand signals and images of their tattoos.
One member of the Florencia-13 gang did tell Eklund that the alleged shooter was a member of Brown Pride Local 13. Eklund used GangNet to retrieve photos of 27 of the gang’s supposed members in Green Bay, created a lineup and printed it out. He showed the photos to the victims, as well as to presumed members of Florencia-13. The exercise enabled Eklund to rule out as suspects nearly a dozen individuals who were around the alley during the fight.
Eklund also got a tip that the alleged shooter went by the street name Coco and that he was from Oxnard, Calif. So Eklund contacted the Oxnard police department, which also uses GangNet. The Oxnard officers keyed in the name Coco, and got back a photo. Several weeks later, Fernando Carranza Juarez, 22, a.k.a. Coco, was arrested and extradited to Wisconsin, where he goes on trial Feb. 8.
Gang violence accounts for a small percentage of crime. According to the FBI, only 6 percent to 7 percent of murders annually in the United States are attributed to gang activity. But gang membership is expanding to small towns, grabbing headlines and public attention.
As a result, an increasing number of law enforcement agencies are installing GangNet. First deployed by the state of California nine years ago, the system is now used by 7,500 officers in 11 states (including cities such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Minneapolis), as well as by the federal government, according to GangNet vendor SRA International. Each agency maintains its own data, which it can share with users in other jurisdictions (Las Vegas and the state of California have connected their systems).
As Eklund discovered in Green Bay, gang members travel across state lines. And so, says Eric Zidenberg, who heads the GangNet program at SRA, integration provides “the real advantage” of the system. “Without GangNet, [this case] would never have been solved,” Eklund says.
