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Crime & Safety

Simmering Gang Conflicts Has Task Force on High Alert

El Verano School is caught between on-going turf wars that date back years, says gang task force head Sgt. Dave Pedersen in interview with Patch

When Sonoma County Sheriff’s officers began responding to nighttime gang-related altercations in the El Verano School neighborhood recently, it raised a red flag for Sgt. Dave Pedersen. Gangs were his specialty, so to speak, and this indicated a disturbing trend: the presence of norteño gang members in sureno turf.

“The fact that Norteños were coming on to El Verano school grounds, and ended up involved in an assault and robbery, that perked us up,” Pedersen said earlier this week in a phone interview with Patch. “Because that’s Norteños encroaching on what is normally Sureno territory. We were like, ‘Hey, things are heating up in the valley’.”

In this case, “we” are the members of the Sheriff’s Multi-Agency Gang Enforcement Team, or MAGNET, which Pedersen now heads. The task force is comprised of two CHP officers, a sheriff officer & two deputies, an adult probation officer and two juvenile probation officers. It was started in the mid-1980s, said Pederson.

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Their initial reaction reflects the growing concern law enforcement has for the gang presence in Sonoma Valley, a concern that dates back six years.

“You will predominately find Surenos at El Verano School and Larson Park,” explained Pedersen, “and you will predominately find Norteños at Maxwell Park. And they know it, and we know it.”

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“That’s why those Surenos who were hell-bent on killing a Norteño one night went to Maxwell Park to do it.”  He’s referring to the fall of 2007, when Luis Miranda was shot and killed at Maxwell Farms Regional Park.

Other gang-related violence has occurred recently at the Rack and Cue billiard hall and the Vineyard Market last October.

The facts, lore and mystique about gangs can be a dizzying study, and a diverse one. “If you told me 23 years ago I’d be going under bridges to read graffiti I would have laughed at you,” said Pedersen.

“But actually, once you are able to read it and see what the heck it’s saying, it actually gives you insight into what’s going on between rivals.”

As much as self-identity, gangs seem to be about rivalry.

The Surenos are the common name for the criminal street gang of the Mexican Mafia. They primarily claim their roots in Mexico and Southern California.

Norteños, by contrast, predominantly trace their roots from the San Joaquin Valley, “and take their orders from the prison gang Nuestra Familia,” said Pedersen. 

“We find black Norteños, white Norteños, Hispanic Norteños – I think we’ve even found one Asian Norteño. That gang mixes races, but for the most part they are Hispanic.”

Even the color identity of the street gangs Pedersen trace to prison life. “Back in the day, in the Sixties, they gave out bandanas in the prison in the CDC system to do work, and that’s how it started. The Sureños grabbed the blue  bandana and Norteños grabbed the red bandanas. That’s how they identified themselves in the prison system, and that’s how it is today.”

The revelation that the victim of violence at El Verano School on March 29 said that being gay was at least part of the reason for the assault – “It wasn’t until later it came out  that it was possibly a hate crime; in fact it was a hate crime,” said Pederson – doesn’t change the fact it was perpetrated by gang members.

“When Luis Miranda was killed in Maxwell Park,” said Pedersen, referring back to 2007, “you saw this huge amount of uproar, in the newspaper articles, and community activism. We started groups to study what could be done in the valley.

“Then that kind of fell apart.  Because there wasn’t another murder, there was nothing else to bring the citizens together. They forget about it,” said Pedersen.

A similar uproar seems to be forming now, albeit not over the gang threat so much as the mischaracterization of El Verano Elementary School as gang turf. After statements similar to these that Sgt. Pedersen made to the Sonoma Index Tribune were published on Monday, several letters were received by that paper and Patch, including one from its principal and another from its staff (attached to this article as a PDF), in defense of El Verano Elementary School. Index-Tribune Editor and Publisher David Bolling wrote a mea culpa editorial yesterday to omitting the words “at night” from the description of gang activity at El Verano School.

But soon, Sonoma may be looking back on these as better days. “A good way to put it is gang activity ebbs and it flows. And right now it’s flowing, and we haven’t even gotten into summer.”

If anything, the defense of El Verano school and the issue of a victim’s sexuality is a distraction from the issue of gang activity in Sonoma, the Springs and beyond. For the nortenos and surenos are not the only gangs in Sonoma County – there are White Supremacists like the Barbarian Brotherhood and Nazi Low-Riders, white biker gangs like the Hells Angels and Hispanic bikers like the Malditos (The Damned), the Black Guerilla Family and the 415 Kumi – and subsets of those gangs.

“There really aren’t that many,” said Pedersen, “unless you count subsets. Because there are norteños in Sonoma that are one sub-set, and there are norteños in South Park [Santa Rosa], by the Fairgrounds, that are another subset. We count them all as separate gangs, because some of them will be feuding within the same gang. So there’s roughly between 30 and 40” gangs in the county.

If it’s a depressing list, even more so is what it portends. “There are some people we lose track of, and I’m hoping they get jobs and get married and have children and kind of get out of it,” said Pedersen.

“But the notorious ones, for lack of a better term, the ones that we follow from start to finish,  that’s usually the way they end up: They end up in prison or deceased.”

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