This report was funded by the National Institute of Justice but has not been published by the U.S. Department of Justice. To view the full report, go to: http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/grants/208345.pdf

Civil gang injunction procedures-a process whereby selected gang members are prohibited from engaging in specified activities such as loitering at schools, carrying pagers and riding bicycles, or face arrest-have been heralded as an effective and innovative tool to combat street gang activity and to reduce the strangleholds that gangs can have on their communities. The Civil Gang Injunction (CGI) is an anti-gang strategy growing increasingly popular among law enforcement and public officials in Southern California. Despite this expansion, very little is known about the effectiveness of this strategy on reducing gang activity or improving traumatized neighborhoods. The National Institute of Justice awarded a grant to researchers at the University of Southern California to address this gap in research.
This report presents the findings of an evaluation of the impact of one CGI, implemented in the Verdugo Flats neighborhood of San Bernardino, California, in the fall of 2002. The primary outcomes studied focus on changes in the quality of life in this neighborhood, rather than on the injunction's effects on the targeted gang or on official crime. The study's findings have clear implications for law enforcement agencies that anticipate using this strategy, for civil court judges that are asked to limit the activities of gang members to achieve more community order and for future research on program effectiveness.
Relevant theories in social psychology (i.e., small groups and social identity theory) and criminology (i.e., deterrence and social disorganization theory) predict a range of potential outcomes of CGIs. The community social disorganization perspective suggests that injunctions should improve patterns in community processes, such as neighborhood relationships, disorder and informal social control. Our evaluation addresses this type of community-level outcome, rather than the individual gang member outcomes suggested by deterrence and group identity theory. These latter effects may well be precursors to effects on community residents, but these are not captured by the research design of our study. The few evaluations of injunctions conducted to date consider the impact on criminal behavior; our study is the first to focus on neighborhood processes.
Accordingly, the conceptual basis for the evaluation presumes a direct-and untested-impact ofthe injunctions on gang activity. The more immediate, or proximal, effects on neighborhood residents should be observed in reduced gang visibility, graffiti, instances of gang intimidation and fear of gang victimization as well as increased police visibility. These benefits should result in reduced fear of crime more generally, crime victimization, and improved community order.
Ultimately, residents in neighborhoods targeted by injunctions may experience increased neighborhood social cohesion and informal social control, more collective and neighborhood social efficacy, more willingness to call police in threatening situations and improved perceptions of police authority.

San Bernardino
To identify the optimal site for the study, we interviewed an officer from more than two dozen Southern California police agencies. These agencies reported both having significant gang populations and using multi-agency collaborations to combat them on the 1998 National Youth Gang Survey of police. San Bernardino presented several advantages for the research.
First, the San Bernardino Police Department (SBPD) had already conducted three injunctions (against the Seventh Street gang in November 1997, Sur Crazy Ones in fall 1999, and one against prostitutes along a main boulevard) prior to our first contact with them (in spring 2000). Second, the gangs that they were considering for further injunctions seemed excellent targets for studying the impact on communities. Third, the department welcomed our inquiry and proved throughout to be very helpful in all regards.
San Bernardino is roughly sixty miles east of Los Angeles in the rapidly growing Inland Empire.
In 2000, over 185,000 people lived in the city. While the city is part of one of the fastest expanding economic areas in Southern California, it is also home to a large number of poor minorities. Almost half of the population is Latino, roughly eighteen percent are African Americans, and just under thirty percent are white. More than one in five of the residents in this multicultural city was born outside the United States, with almost another twenty percent born outside of California. Over one-third of the population speaks only Spanish at home.
The city has been home to gangs for decades, and gangs have been expanding throughout the last one-third of a century. In spring 2000, SBPD was considering an injunction against the Delman Heights gang, with other gangs such as Five Times and Verdugo Flats in line thereafter.
Ultimately, the department placed the Delman Heights injunction on hiatus (it was later filed in September 2003) and began focusing their attention on a possible injunction against the Verdugo Flats gang, leading us to select that area for our survey procedures.

Verdugo Flats Injunction
On August 5, 2002, the San Bernardino Police Department initiated implementation of a civil gang injunction against the Verdugo Flats gang as the result of the submission of a civil suit brought that day in the appropriate court. Earlier in the summer, five shootings and one assault occurred that suggested that the gang was actively defending its territory against a possible intrusion by an African American gang. The combination of heightened violence and the interracial nature of the gang fight led authorities to move to file the injunction.
Nineteen members of the gang were included in the injunction. Thirteen of the nineteen were in jail at the time of the injunction. Following a series of hearings, the court approved-instituting a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) on September 24, 2002-that these individuals were prohibited from twenty-two activities. Prohibited activities included behaviors associated with selling drugs, trespass, a nighttime curfew, public order offenses (fighting, drinking, urinating, littering, vandalism and graffiti) and public association with any other defendant.
SBPD believes that the Verdugo Flats claims as its territory a large swath of southwestern San Bernardino. It is a large, heavily Latino area that has been home to the gang since the 1970s.
Officers report that the gang had roughly 150 members as of August 2001, a twenty percent increase from two years before. They note repeatedly that Verdugo Flats is "turf oriented," claiming their area (the area in which the injunction was instituted) through extensive graffiti and intimidation of residents. The gang is split into three subgroups, VF Pear Street, VF Congress Street, and VF Marijuanos, the later a term apparently used by the oldest of the gang members.
The original court date for consideration of the TRO was September 13, 2002, but two defendants requested and received a delay until September 24. The two defendants had asked for and received permission to associate with each other and other gang members during working hours, since a group that actively hired gang members employed them.
SBPD officials implemented the injunction using a standard set of procedures that they had developed in previous injunctions: enjoined individuals would be named at patrol meetings, photographs of the individuals would be placed on the wall of the room where patrol officers get their briefings and Metropolitan Enforcement Team (MET) officers would provide the primary enforcement for the injunction. As in earlier injunctions, the SBPD initiated a "sweep" of the injunction area right after they obtained the injunction. They searched homes of parolees and probationers and checked on outstanding warrants. They catalogued paraphernalia, photographs and clothing. They took the entire day to go through the target area.
Further, MET officers trained patrol officers in using the appropriate forms to arrest gang members on the injunction, and made sure that the in-house computer would notify patrol officers if an injunction member was stopped and identified. One police informant noted that he came in several times on his day off to work with patrol officers who had apprehended an enjoined individual.
From the inception of the Verdugo Flats CGI in September 2002 until January 2004, five individuals were arrested related to the injunction. Arrested individuals were liable for enhanced bail of up to $25,000. The SBPD had previously used this technique, which means that arrested individuals could serve considerably more jail time.
Five months after the implementation of the injunction, we interviewed an officer partly responsible for the injunction's implementation about its success. He felt that the impact of the implementation had been dramatic. "The gang members were scared to come outside, scared to hang out together." And, "it is still working." He noted that graffiti and other signs of gang activity have declined dramatically. He pointed out that a wall near the park had graffiti 24/7,365 days a year prior to the injunction, but not lately. Further, he heard from several community residents that they were glad that it had been done, they see the police more than before, and "keep up the good work."

Research Design and Methods
The consensus among the many police officers and attorneys involved in civil gang injunctions who were interviewed was that gang injunctions have an immediate impact on gang behavior.
Gang members were less visible, stopped their intimidation, even disappeared altogether,
relatively quickly after an injunction was filed. Consequently, we opted to time our second survey wave to test the impact of this immediate change in gang members' behaviors on neighborhood residents' attitudes and perceptions. We predicted that specific experiences of gang intimidation, fear of gang members, and visibility of the gang and graffiti would all decrease within the first six months after the injunction and that the visibility of the police would
increase. We also tested the impact on more intermediate outcomes: fear of crime, crime
victimization and perceived level of social disorder. Long-term, gang injunctions were predicted to have a positive impact on aspects of community organization through neighborhood social networks and neighborhood collective action. We included survey measures of neighborhood social cohesion, informal social control, collective efficacy, neighborhood efficacy, willingness to call the police and trust in the police, though we expected that these changes would evolve over a longer period of time.
To test our hypotheses about the immediate impact of the injunction on neighborhood residents, we chose a before-after nonequivalent comparison group design with multiple comparison groups. We planned to survey the residents of the Verdugo Flats injunction area as well as three different comparison areas approximately six months before the injunction and again approximately six months after the injunction.
The comparison areas chosen were: 1) a highly disordered area with no territorial gang presence; 2) a gang area that has an active gang injunction filed three years before; and 3) a nearby area that was low in disorder. The three comparison neighborhoods were also chosen as possible sites for displaced Verdugo Flats gang activity after the injunction.
The first comparison would serve as a control for local factors other than the gang injunction that might cause shifts in the dependent variables across disordered neighborhoods in this section of the city over that time. The second comparison would provide an estimate of the level of fear and intimidation residents experience several years after a gang injunction.
While it was too soon to expect much impact on community disorganization variables in the new injunction area, by Wave 2 the prior injunction area had had an active injunction for several years. If injunctions stimulate longer-term changes in community participation and organization, we predicted that this comparison area would be higher on these variables, especially in Wave 2, than the disorderly control and the Verdugo Flats injunction area. The third comparison area was originally conceptualized as a lower disorder area that would remain stable and would control for very broad trends in the city that affected residents' perceptions of safety.
Two changes in our original research design became necessary. First, the injunction was not filed until about eighteen months after the first survey. Second, the boundaries of the injunction area were drawn farther south than anticipated. Much of the less disorderly comparison area that we had surveyed in Wave 1 was now included within the injunction boundaries. For this reason, we split this area into two parts: creating a secondary injunction area that had relatively low disorder at the time of Wave 1 and the remaining low disorder comparison area. The remaining low disorder comparison area became a good control for the secondary injunction area, since the two were very similar at the time of the first survey.
Surveys were completed with 797 San Bernardino residents in five neighborhoods eighteen months prior and 1229 residents six months subsequent to the issuance of the injunction.
Roughly two-thirds were Latino with the remainder equally distributed among other ethnic categories. All participants were adults; two-thirds were female. A hybrid survey procedure was used to promote response rates in these difficult-to-survey neighborhoods. After five contacts to sampled addresses in support of the self-administered survey, trained field staff approached remaining addresses for a doorstep interview using the same protocol. Adjusted response rates were sixty-four percent for Wave 1 and seventy-three percent for Wave 2.
The primary hypotheses predicted that residents in the primary injunction area experienced a decrease (or less of an increase) from the first wave (before) to the second wave (after the injunction) on five immediate outcome variables relative to the high disorder comparison area.
Differences in the change over time in these two areas were compared by examining their interaction in an ANOVA using wave and area as factors. Significant interactions in the predicted direction were interpreted as support for the primary hypotheses. These analyses were repeated comparing change in the secondary injunction area to change in its control, the low disorder comparison area. The same tests were repeated for the each of the intermediate and long-term outcomes, first between the two high disorder areas and then between the two low disorder areas.
For the next analyses, we assumed that residents in the two territorial gang neighborhoods that had injunctions were characterized by similar neighborhood experiences prior to implementation of the injunction. Both areas, as described by police informants, had been high crime, active gang territories. The levels of outcomes reported in the second wave of the survey were compared between the area that had now been under an injunction for five years and the primary, new injunction area that experienced an injunction just six months prior to Wave 2. It was expected that the long-term effects were unlikely to have developed in the recent injunction area, but would show some evidence of higher levels in the older injunction area. These effects were tested using t-tests and chi-square analyses.
Supplemental analyses explored methodological artifacts arising from mode differences from the hybrid survey model and from variations in non response rates during data collection, lending more confidence to the primary findings.

Study Results
Notwithstanding the limitations of the study methods, our analyses provide evidence of the predicted short-term effects of a CGI on the primary neighborhood targeted. Consistent with police informants' reports of the implementation of the intervention, our surveys of community residents reveal positive evidence of implementation in the increased visibility of police patrols and in less gang presence in the neighborhood, as compared with changes in the primary control area. We estimate this translates into a net shift of about fifteen percent fewer respondents seeing gang members hanging out regularly and about nine percent more respondents seeing police
patrolling in the primary injunction area relative to respondents in the disordered comparison area. Furthermore, fewer residents report acts of gang intimidation and residents report less fear of confrontation with gang members. We estimate a net shift of thirteen percent fewer respondents experiencing intimidation and twelve percent fewer respondents experiencing more than a little fear in the primary injunction area relative to its control. No differences in change in the presence of gang graffiti were detected.
Police reported no territorial gang presence in the primary comparison area, but residents there noted substantial gang activity in the baseline survey. As crime increased in the city over the two-year period between the surveys, gang fear and intimidation increased in the disordered control area, but not in the neighborhood with the new injunction. The level of police patrol visibility remained stable in the new injunction areas, but decreased in all comparison areas. The increased relative commitment of police resources appeared to yield benefits to the primary injunction area: immediate benefits accrued to residents' experience of gang intimidation and fear of gangs.
These benefits to the primary injunction area, however, did not extend to the intermediate or long-term outcome indicators. Only in fear of crime did the primary injunction area show a relative decrease. No significant relative changes were observed on the other intermediate outcomes, perceived social disorder or crime victimization. On the long-term outcome indicators, we found little evidence that immediate effects on residents translated into larger improvements in neighborhood quality (i.e., neighborhood social cohesion, informal social control, collective efficacy and police/community relationships), although reductions in fear of crime and gang visibility, fear and intimidation may be precursors to such change in the long run.1
We found tantalizing hints of such changes in the comparison of the primary, new injunction area with a contiguous area in which an injunction had been implemented five years prior to the second survey. At the time of that survey, the two areas had similar levels of gang visibility, fear and intimidation, but the longstanding injunction area showed favorable levels of social cohesion, neighborhood and collective efficacy, and willingness to call the police if a gang member threatened residents. If we assume similarity between the two areas in these neighborhood characteristics at baseline prior to either injunction, these results are consistent with the view that community improvements will accrue once fear and intimidation are mitigated by the implementation of a civil gang injunction.
Taken together, these two sets of comparisons suggest that injunctions can have a positive impact on communities. This study design does not support strong causal inferences, but our findings lead to some speculation regarding processes of community change. This study did not assess the impact on the individual gang members named in this injunction-we have to presume that the reduced gang presence and intimidation perceived by the targeted community residents was the result of either deterrence and/or group identity processes spawned by the intervention.
The unanticipated delay in obtaining the Verdugo Flats injunction precluded a strong test of long-term community effects, but the comparison between the two injunction communities is consistent with an interpretation of community change: willingness to engage with police in crime control efforts, a perspective that neighbors can and will intervene to resolve incipient crime problems and greater social bonds among neighbors.
The unexpected expansion of the territory covered by the Verdugo Flats injunction provided the opportunity to investigate the impact on a less disordered neighborhood, with considerably less gang activity. Our comparison of this secondary injunction area with a similarly low-disorder, contiguous community produced results that gang injunctions caution those who would promulgate the efficacy of in diverse settings. Despite increased visibility of police patrols, the secondary injunction area evidenced negative impacts, relative to its control: more, not less, gang visibility, social disorder and property victimization, and less faith that a neighborhood can solve its own problems. There are at least four viable explanations for these findings.
First, negative results may reflect demographic shifts in the population of the secondary injunction area after the Wave 1 survey. Statistical controls for these demographic changes did not change our conclusions2 but such transitions may foster neighborhood dynamics that increase gang activity, independent of intervention efforts. Second, as the police anticipated, this secondary injunction area may have been the locale for the displacement of gang activity from the primary injunction area, and the implementation of the intervention may have been weaker in this area. Third is the view that police over-reached by including this neighborhood with less gang activity and less social disorder in the injunction. Finally, these negative results may be a reflection of weaknesses in the study design or method that affected the secondary area comparisons in particular.
These weaknesses, coupled with the distinct shift in the demographic profile of the secondary injunction area (i.e. more renters, less longevity in the neighborhood),
make us particularly cautious about drawing broad generalizations about the negative outcomes detected in the secondary injunction area. On one hand, the results observed in the secondary injunction area may portend damaging effects of injunctions on certain types of communities or a displacement effect. On the other hand is the possibility that these results stem from methodological artifacts in the research process.

Implications for Research and Practice
Very little empirical research has been produced to investigate the impact of injunctions, despite their increasing popularity. This study is the first that examines potential effects on community residents. Future studies that replicate the essential method of this research are needed in a variety of contexts: different injunction forms and implementation procedures, different gang structures, different law enforcement and court venues and different community environments.
Given the expanding interest in this type of intervention, it is striking that so little sound information is available regarding the effects on gang members or communities. A primary limitation of this study derives from its unique quality: any generalization of findings from one study of one injunction on one gang is clearly premature. The effects detected in this study reflect modest improvements in only the primary injunction area, and these may not be replicated in future studies.
The study design could be improved substantially by the inclusion of other data collection components, such as ethnography, structured interviews with gang members, and spatial analysis of crime data. Furthermore, an expanded longitudinal survey design is necessary to trace the long-term impacts of injunctions on community residents. The tenets of community social disorganization theory suggest that interventions like injunctions can produce positive community change and these must be measured over an extended period of time.
Other study limitations derive from this research design. Our positive conclusions rest on differences detected between the primary injunction area and one similarly disordered comparison area. Visual inspection of the trends suggests that the observed differences were more the result of negative changes in the comparison area than positive changes in the injunction area. The neighborhood that was selected as a comparison area possibly suffered from situational or idiosyncratic assaults on community health. An optimal research design would include several comparison areas that mimicked the intervention area at the baseline survey point.
The civil gang injunction against the Verdugo Flats gang in San Bernardino appears to have decreased the visibility of gangs, episodes of gang intimidation, fear of gang confrontations and fear of crime in the targeted community. These effects are modest, but encouraging for practitioners wishing to experiment with this gang intervention strategy. Coupled with the findings from another study that found reductions in violent crime levels in injunction areas, this study suggests that strategic suppression of gang member activities may translate into modest improvements in community safety and well-being. We recommend further experimentation with this strategy, if such efforts are coupled with a program evaluation that continues to build on the assessment of the intervention's effects.
The study findings offer some guidelines for further refinement of the CGI strategy, and also recommendations for restraint or caution in some aspects. The negative results that emerged in the secondary injunction area argue for caution to be exercised in the determination of the geographic area to be covered by an injunction. Law enforcement and judicial practitioners should review spatial depictions of gang activity and crime to insure that the area within which individual conduct is to be constrained is limited to spaces most often frequented by gang members. There is no evidence that expanding the geographic reach of the injunction reduces the displacement of gang activity.
The Verdugo Flats gang-and most of the gangs included in prior studies of injunctions -is a traditional, territorial gang. This type of gang is assumed by practitioners to be most appropriate for injunctions, due to the geographic limitations imposed. Until more is known about the mechanisms whereby injunctions reduce gang activity, it is advisable to limit the strategy to the gang forms that have produced positive results thus far.
This study found tentative support for salutary injunction effects on community residents and neighborhoods. Theory and research on communities suggest that these effects could be substantially increased if injunction development and implementation engaged community residents in a process of neighborhood empowerment and improvement. Social networks and both formal and informal community organizations provide social capital through which neighborhoods can continue on a positive trajectory.
Finally, the positive effects of injunctions might be expanded if this strategy was coupled with he provision of skill-development and treatment resources for targeted gang members. The serving of injunction papers may open a window of opportunity for change. Offering a carrot of positive opportunity for vocational, educational or personal growth with the stick of promised incarceration for violation of the injunction prohibitions may provide more immediate and long lasting change in negative gang behavior than that obtained from an injunction implemented alone.

References:
1 These results were immune to several supplemental tests of methodological artifact. Although changes in gang fear were stronger among residents who were interviewed in person, the same trend was evident among those who self-administered the survey. Previous research would lead us to predict that people would downplay a sensitive issue like gang fear in a face-to-face interview setting. Overall, these additional methodological tests lend more confidence to these findings.
2 The only difference was observed in the homeownership category on the intermediate outcome of perceived level of social disorder. The increase in social disorder in the low disorder area relative to the low disorder comparison area was observed only among renters.