Gang sweep today, more crime tomorrow: Fresno’s inability to deal with root causes

I recently read a quote stating, “The next evolution of humanity will not lie in what we discover, but rather in what we are willing to leave behind.” I wish I knew where the quote originated, but I interpreted it as a lament, challenging the prioritizing of progress over people, and the human cost associated with such an arrangement.

For years Fresno has been on the cusp of evolution as residents have championed movements to make the city more just, more equitable, and more inclusive. However, living into this newer, more humane space has been frequently met with resistance. One lingering and longstanding form of resistance within our city is its commitment to the mantra of “law and order,” which often uses law enforcement as a solution to social ills. So, let’s talk about law and order in our city, and its impediment to progress through analyzing “Operation No Fly Zone.”

On April 15, it was announced that a multiagency task force concluded an investigation that resulted in the arrest of more than 40 individuals. Law enforcement agencies reported on the severity of allegations, which included murder, conspiracy to commit murder, human trafficking and more. This specific operation targeted “107 Hoover” gang members and was remarkably similar to an indictment of numerous “Dog Pound Gang” members in 2016.

In both cases several months of investigation were conducted, several individuals were apprehended, and the magnitude of the moment and its meaning for our city was misreported and lost. The framing in both operations was one of success, and that the streets of Fresno were made safer.

Operation No Fly Zone did succeed in its goal of apprehending certain persons of interest, but it did not make Fresno a safer place. What the operation did do, however, was to publicize the cost of negligence, incompetence, and apathy built into our city’s infrastructure, which severely harms communities and renders them vulnerable. Our city cannot become safer if the conditions that created the need for Operation No Fly Zone continue to exist.

Mass policing and mass incarceration do not create safer communities. Healthy communities have the capacity to keep themselves safe. Therefore, a vital part of creating safer neighborhoods requires us to abandon tactics that hyper-individualize certain “bad actors,” which absolves our government of its obligation to invest in the well-being of those on the margins.

Instead, we must move to fully examine the root causes of criminal activity and violence and commit to dismantling the social determents that drive these behaviors. If we want to have an honest conversation about crime in our city, then discourse concerning crime cannot be separated from decades of under-educating our city’s youth, which can be observed through a massive proficiency gap and an unreadiness for transitional age-youth to progress in our economy.

We must also factor in the fractured state of our housing and homeless situation, which has created pockets of insecurity for many families in our city who live in generational poverty.

Finally, we must be transparent about racist zoning practices that have left many of our city’s communities overly polluted, limited in technical infrastructure and severely under-resourced. These factors work in concert to create disproportionately adverse health conditions and an over-reliance on the underground economy for survival.

Therefore, a proper analysis of crime and violence in our city understands them as symptoms of the trauma-inducing circumstances that our city and county structures have proven incapable of remedying.

It is the conditions and quality of life of our city’s most vulnerable that makes us critical of the antiquated “law and order” model. The Central Valley, which is Yokuts land, is an area that was once vibrant and plush, with rivers flowing as far as San Francisco, that was criminally acquired and criminally rearranged. During the appropriation and division of the land, particular laws and codes of conduct were imagined and implemented to establish a new social order that has resulted in the area becoming a world leader in food production, while simultaneously being inhabited by some of the world’s most hungry.

This has created multiple spaces within our city and county where the environments themselves are criminogenic, meaning that they are the root causes of crime.

To create safer communities, we must invest in the health and wellness of all neighborhoods. That mandates us to repent of historical wrongdoings, and to trust those that are the most impacted to point the way forward.

This story was originally published May 6, 2022 at 5:00 AM.