Police arrested 75 alleged gang leaders Tuesday in a one-day sweep in the Central Valley for offenses including attempted murder and drug trafficking. The raids, which involved helicopters and canine units, occurred at 50 locations. Hit the jump to read the story.
Police arrested 75 alleged gang leaders Tuesday in a one-day sweep in the Central Valley for offenses including attempted murder and drug trafficking, state Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris said Wednesday.
The raids, which involved helicopters and canine units, occurred at 50 locations in the cities of Madera, Los Banos, Livingston, Merced, Atwater and Dos Palos as part of the Operation Red Zone crackdown, Harris said.
It was aimed at “ruthless” and “lethal” gang leaders associated with Nuestra Familia, which was started at Folsom State Prison in 1968 and continues to be run out of the state prison system, Harris said. Nuestra Familia controls most of the Nortenos street gangs in Central California and has ties to Mexican drug cartels, according to law enforcement officials.
Growing gang violence in the Central Valley has threatened small farm communities and spawned efforts to keep young people from being recruited.
“Their conduct was terrorizing this community,” Harris said at a news conference with other law enforcement officials in Los Banos, “and by extension, their conduct was bleeding through the whole state of California.”
Agents from 16 local, state and federal agencies seized more than a dozen firearms, including five assault rifles; methamphetamine; marijuana plants; crack cocaine; and more than $64,000 in cash in the sweeps, authorities said.
Law enforcement officials conceded that the arrests may provoke rival gangs to expand and noted that such sweeps in the past have driven the violence from one community to another.
The operation began in August 2010 when state law enforcement officials discovered that members of Nuestra Familia, largely driven out of Salinas in earlier sweeps, had set up shop in Madera, Merced and other Central Valley cities.
Four in 10 homicides in California are gang-related, Harris said. Those cases also account for 80% of the state’s effort to relocate witnesses whose lives are in danger because of their cooperation with law enforcement, she said.
The sweeps this week brought the total number of arrests in the operation to 101 and stemmed from surveillance by the attorney general’s Fresno Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement, which tracked the daily movements of suspected gang leaders, Harris said. Among those arrested were two senior Nuestra Familia regiment commanders, she said.
