US city turns to military strategy for help in stopping gang warfare
Salinas officials stage a ‘surge’ as violence soars
SALINAS, Calif. - Known to readers as the birthplace of John Steinbeck and in supermarket produce circles as the “Salad Bowl of the World,’’ the city of Salinas carries darker renown in the netherworld of California’s prisons.
Instant respect is accorded any inmate tattooed with the words “Salad Bowl’’ or “Salis’’ - gang shorthand for a city now defined by eruptions of violence.
In the space of 11 days this year, seven people were slain in Salinas. Each killing spilled from the gang warfare that this summer pushed the homicide rate in the city of 140,000 to three times that of Los Angeles. There were a record 25 homicides, 23 related to gangs. Residents retreated indoors at night, and Mayor Dennis Donohue affirmed his decision to seek help from an unlikely source: the US military.
Since February, combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been advising Salinas police on counterinsurgency strategy, bringing lessons from the battlefield to the meanest streets in an American city.
“This is our surge,’’ said Donohue, who solicited the assistance from the elite Naval Postgraduate School, 20 miles and a world away in Monterey. “When the public heard about this, they thought we were going to send the Navy SEALs into Salinas.’’
In fact, the cavalry arrived in civvies, carrying laptops rather than M-16s and software instead of mortars. In this case, the most valuable military asset turned out to be an idea: Change the dynamic in the community and victory can follow.
“It’s a little laboratory,’’ said Hy Rothstein, a retired Army colonel and career officer in Special Forces who heads the team of 15 faculty members and students, mostly naval officers taking time between deployments to pick up a master’s degree. Their effort in Salinas counts as extracurricular and is voluntary, given the constitutional bar on the military operating within US borders.
“Obviously, there are restrictions,’’ said Deputy Police Chief Kelly McMillin. “Not only the constitutional part of it, but just the idea we are going to have choppers fast-roping onto Alisal Street.’’
The reality turns out to be less dramatic: The thrust of the plan relies on winning the trust of people. In Salinas, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, the uniformed forces patrolling “are still viewed as an occupying force,’’ said Police Chief Louis Fetherolf.
Gangs and police compete in the aftermath of gang shootings. Witnesses in a position to see everything share nothing with police. Their silence is so absolute that after a killing in August, a department spokesman told the local paper that police were “absolutely begging’’ for witnesses.
When Salinas police hosted a community meeting a couple of years ago to help residents determine whether their children were in gangs, not a single resident showed up.
Rothstein, a veteran of counterinsurgency efforts in Colombia and Central America, notes the “significant overlap with how you deal with insurgencies and how you deal with cities that are under siege from gangs.’’ Going after insurgents, he said, involves “trying to capture the allegiance and control of the population. Gang members are trying to do the same.’’
To help, the advisers brought to Salinas the powerful computer software commanders used in Iraq. US forces there started out nearly as blind as Salinas police consider themselves in facing a population where, by the mayor’s count, 10 to 15 percent of families include a gang member.
Major James M. Few, a veteran of three Iraq tours, said he sensed in the grievances of poor Latinos some of the air of disenfranchisement that Sunnis felt toward the Iraq government dominated by Shi’ites.
The gang problem dates back decades in Salinas, headquarters of the northern California network known as La Familia or Nortenos. The gang operates more coherently in Salinas than its rival, the Mexican Mafia, Sergeant Mark Lazzarini said.
