Imagine sitting in Davis Square with a group of friends waiting for the Joey to take you back to campus. Students and Somerville residents are walking around, enjoying the beautiful fall evening, when some people come and sit next to you, seemingly waiting for the Joey too. Suddenly, without warning, a policeman pulls up and shouts from his car that you all have to leave immediately.
You ask him what you were doing wrong, and he simply replies that you need to leave or everyone in your group could be arrested. You are shocked. Since when did waiting for the Joey become a crime? In fact, ever since Somerville passed the Anti-Gang ordinance, something as innocent as waiting for the Joey could be an arrestable offense.
The Somerville Anti-Gang Ordinance was most recently enacted this past August and is based on an old Chicago city ordinance passed in 1992, suspended in 1995 and found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1999. Its purpose is to disrupt gang activity in Somerville and it was passed in response to several recent rapes in Foss Park. While its intentions are good, this act allows too much discretion in enforcement and invites the law to be administered in a discriminatory fashion. Thus, the law is overtly unconstitutional and only serves to perpetuate prejudicial law enforcement.
In essence, the law allows police to ask any group to disperse if one member is recognized as belonging to a known street gang. The police must make this determination on the spot by seeing if the individual in question satisfies 13 separate criteria listed in the ordinance.
The first problem with the act is that the Somerville Anti-Gang ordinance is deliberately vague. Terms such as "intimidation" are left undefined, leading to confusion in the interpretation of the law. Furthermore, police cannot correctly assess whether or not the individual in question meets all 13 of the act's requirements in the short period of time they have to make the call, and thus must make assumptions based on social identity. This will lead to numerous wrongful accusations and will increase tension between the police and community instead of lower it.
Since the one recognized gang in Somerville is Salvadorian, in order to try to uphold this complicated and vague law, police will disproportionately target people of color, even if they have no affiliation with the gang. Besides violating the vagueness clause of the 14th Amendment, the Anti-Gang Ordinance also violates many other Constitutional rights. For example, the law can be used to prevent the free movement and expression of those in protest. Also, one of the 13 requirements is that the suspect has committed a crime in the past. This raises many questions about Double Jeopardy, as the Constitution states that it is illegal to be arrested and prosecuted for the same offense twice.
From a law enforcement standpoint, the Anti-Gang Ordinance is also completely unnecessary. In fact, there is already a law in the Somerville Code that explicitly targets the criminal behavior of street gangs and allows police to take action against it. This existing law states that "street gangs cannot use property to ... solicit or commission a crime." In this law, the terms "street gang" and "criminal activity" are explicitly defined based on previous code. As a result, the law focuses on criminal behavior instead of social identity.
In a previous viewpoint, Anne Stevenson commented on an incident where "one of the neighborhood gangs was hanging out" in its car on a basketball court, "blaring hard core rap music." In her story, the police came and asked the men to leave and they did. She mistakenly attributes this to the new Anti-Gang Ordinance when, in fact, this "gang" was violating numerous existing Somerville laws such as disturbing the peace and misusing public property. The police had every legal right to ask them to leave without the new unconstitutional law.
Our argument is not that measures should not be taken to reduce crime in Somerville. We just feel that the Anti-Gang Ordinance is not the answer and in fact invites prejudice into the law while simultaneously placing added stress on the police force. It takes time and money, and in the process, prevents officers from enforcing the laws already on the books and from taking proactive measures such as educational anti-crime programs to reduce crime.
Stevenson is concerned about her rights as a Somerville resident and accuses Tufts Project REPEAL of "tearing up [her] neighborhood." In reality, members of Project REPEAL are extremely active within the Somerville community in programs such as Big Brothers, CORES, and programs through the University College.
In fact, at least one member has family in Somerville, further connecting the group to the community. Project REPEAL members are concerned about their community and are working with numerous community groups, such as Community Action Agency of Somerville, who are also concerned about this new ordinance.
Tufts Project REPEAL is concerned with the rights of all Somerville residents, both Tufts Students and non-Tufts students alike. Of course, we are not "pro-gang," but we realize that only a small percentage of crime in Somerville is the result of "gang" activity. There are many proactive measures that can be taken to better protect the safety of Somerville residents that will do a better job than the ordinance in question.
While Tufts Project REPEAL is concerned about the safety of Somerville residents, we also understand what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said: "An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Dan Grant and Mickey Leibner are both sophomores majoring in Political Science. They are also members of Tufts Project REPEAL.
