\n<\/p>\n
A<\/span>fter an extended summer holiday, John Oliver returned to his desk at Last Week Tonight to dissect US law enforcement\u2019s overreliance on faulty and unregulated gang databases. Such databases \u2013 as Oliver put it, \u201cbasically lists the police keep of people they say are involved in gangs\u201d \u2013 have been used to justify numerous deportations under the Trump administration, including the deportation and detention of Kilmar \u00c1brego Garc\u00eda, a Salvadorian immigrant from Maryland whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) illegally deported due to what they later admitted was an \u201cadministrative error\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The deportation stemmed from a wrongful inclusion on a gang database \u2013 in 2019, officers apparently observed \u00c1brego at a Home Depot and filed a report that he belonged to a gang, based on the fact that he wore a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with \u201crolls of money covering the eyes, ears and mouth of the presidents\u201d and that they \u201cknow such clothing to be indicative of the Hispanic gang culture\u201d.<\/p>\n According to the report, \u201cwearing the Chicago Bulls hat represents [that] they are in good standing with the MS-13\u201d. \u201cWhich is already a little bit weird, because it implies that somehow, if you\u2019re not up to date on your monthly MS-13 dues, your Bulls hat privileges get revoked,\u201d Oliver joked.<\/p>\n The officer who filed that report also cited an anonymous tip that \u00c1brego was a member of MS-13; the officer was also suspended a week later for unrelated misconduct and ultimately fired. \u201cNevertheless, that gang allegation meant that \u00c1brego Garc\u00eda was denied bond and spent months locked up in Ice detention,\u201d Oliver explained, an outcome that was \u201cridiculous. A person\u2019s clothing shouldn\u2019t be criteria for locking them up for eight months. As we all know, the worst consequence of fashion choices should be getting roasted by teens on TikTok.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00c1brego\u2019s saga is one of many stories that bring the government\u2019s use of so-called \u201cgang databases\u201d into question. Around the country, many local and state police departments keep these databases, often without disclosing them, despite investigations finding them to be \u201cnotoriously inconsistent and opaque\u201d, \u201criddled with questionable entries and errors\u201d and \u201crife with unreliable intelligence\u201d, to quote several reports cited by Oliver.<\/p>\n When it comes to what constitutes a \u201cgang\u201d, there\u2019s \u201ca lot of variability here\u201d, said Oliver. \u201cNot all gang members may even be engaged in crime.\u201d As one researcher put it: \u201cNot all gang members are criminals, and not all criminals are gang members.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cUnfortunately, none of that nuance is on display in these databases,\u201d said Oliver, and none of these lists have oversight from any other branch of government or other law enforcement. The criteria for inclusion are police observations and \u201cself-admissions\u201d, which basically means, according to Oliver, \u201cWe found something on your social media that we decided constitutes you admitting that you\u2019re in a gang.\u201d<\/p>\n That could include posts with the word \u201cgang\u201d, such as a post from a teenager with the caption \u201chappy birthday, gang\u201d, added to a database on the grounds of self-admission. \u201cAnd if the bar is that low, anything is basically a confession,\u201d said Oliver. \u201cA pic of you holding a diploma with the caption \u2018killed it?\u2019 Congratulations, grad, but now you\u2019re wanted for murder.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd while so far I\u2019ve been saying anyone can be added to these lists, those who end up on them are heavily people of color,\u201d he continued. At one point, Washington DC\u2019s database had only one white person on its list. \u201cDo you know how few lists there are with only one white guy on them?\u201d Oliver joked. \u201cIt\u2019s basically this database and the cast of Hamilton. That is it.\u201d<\/p>\n Additions can also be motivated by spite; in 2020, a cop in Phoenix registered 17 Black Lives Matter protesters as \u201cACAB gang members\u201d in retaliation.<\/p>\n Most states also do not require states to notify people if they put them on a gang database. \u201cAnd when it comes to immigrants, the designation of gang member can be truly life-altering,\u201d said Oliver. \u201cIt can be the reason that someone is denied various pathways to remain in the US, and it can make someone a higher priority for deportation and the target of a raid.\u201d<\/p>\n Oliver relayed the story of a Hispanic teen in Long Island named Alex who was added to a gang database by a school resource officer after he was seen wearing bright blue sneakers, which school security guards told him was associated with the gang MS-13. He had also doodled \u201c504\u201d on his backpack, which is the country code for Honduras, his country of origin. A few months later, Ice agents arrested him, saying they heard he was a gang member, and eventually deported him.<\/p>\n When a police commissioner in Alex\u2019s county was asked why he felt local law enforcement needed to partner with Ice, he answered: \u201cIf we have intelligence that they are a gang member, that\u2019s not necessarily a crime \u2026 The intel that we have may not indicate a state crime. The intel may be small on them, but nothing that is going to keep them in jail. So if we perceive someone as a public safety threat, we utilize all of our tools, which again includes immigration tools, so we\u2019ll partner with the Department of Homeland Security to target them for detention.\u201d<\/p>\n Oliver fumed in response: \u201cIf someone is on your list of big bad criminals, and you can\u2019t find any big bad crime to arrest them for, that suggests the issue might be your fucking list.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is pretty clear that gang databases are way too easy to get on, way too hard to get off, and can turn people\u2019s lives upside down,\u201d he added. \u201cSo what do we do? Well, I\u2019d argue we get rid of them. And if you think, \u2018Well, hold on, how will police then stop gang violence?\u2019 I\u2019d say, with police work. They could and should do actual police work focusing on where violence is concentrated, instead of fixating on labels.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not saying that violence associated with gangs isn\u2019t real or isn\u2019t a problem,\u201d he concluded. \u201cI\u2019m just saying the answer needs to go beyond policing and way beyond these databases.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After an extended summer holiday, John Oliver returned to his desk at Last Week Tonight to dissect US law enforcement\u2019s overreliance on faulty and unregulated gang databases. Such databases \u2013 as Oliver put it, \u201cbasically lists the police keep of people they say are involved in gangs\u201d \u2013 have been used to justify numerous deportations<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12767,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[6422,351,262,1899,1551,5545],"class_list":{"0":"post-12766","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-databases","9":"tag-gang","10":"tag-john","11":"tag-oliver","12":"tag-police","13":"tag-rid"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}