We Need Peacemakers Like Alex Sanchez

At the heart of the Rampart Division police scandal is the nature of the war on gangs being executed by the Los Angeles Police Department. Virtually any means are justified to achieve the anti-gang CRASH unit objective of "total suppression." Officers have admitted to lying under oath to obtain injunctions, as well as shooting and planting drugs on an innocent undocumented immigrant.

Now it appears that the anti-gang war is directed even against former gang members working for peace on the streets.

Last Friday, Rampart CRASH officers arrested Alex Sanchez, 27, as he was getting into his car in the mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles. Sanchez is a respected leader of Homies Unidos, an anti-violence organization formed in L.A. and El Salvador by former gang members who have turned their lives around.

CRASH officers arrested Sanchez on a federal immigration warrant because he is undocumented and seeking special status. It is contrary to LAPD policy to serve as an arm of the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service because immigrant communities will not trust police if they believe that names are being passed along to the INS. In Sanchez's case, CRASH broke that policy, and Sanchez now sits in a detention center in San Pedro.

Sanchez was born in a San Salvador barrio. Like most in Homies Unidos, he was introduced to violence through the U.S.-supported war in El Salvador. Sanchez followed other immigrant war refugees to Los Angeles, where he joined Salvadoran youths in a gang. He broke the law, was arrested and deported, came back illegally to find his young son, got a job and changed his life.

Why should we care? Because the long war against gangs is an expensive, bloody treadmill. There are 160,000 alleged gang members incarcerated in California. Those like Sanchez who change their lives are precious role models for their younger brothers and sisters.

One night several years ago, I watched the anti-gang war from the CRASH perspective with an LAPD undercover anti-drug task force as they watched and made arrests of immigrant gang members selling drugs on a street corner. What struck me was how young these gang members were--well under 20--and how their creative potential had been misdirected. They did their bookkeeping with chalk on the street, made their transactions in seconds, kept lookouts posted and usually could intuit an undercover officer trying to bait them. I felt sad at their wasted lives and at the futility of sending 30 officers to spend the night rounding up teenage street dealers who were otherwise just jobless strangers in a strange land.