Porterville targets gangs in four-day crackdown
Effort: Second in a series of sweeps.
Porterville residents will wake up Saturday morning to fewer gang members on their streets, as police completed the third in a four-night gang detail.
Beginning Wednesday, detectives from the Special Investigations Unit raided various locations across the city, looking for purported gang members from any criminal organization.
They arrested 13 gang members Wednesday, Lt. Chris Dempsie said Friday.
The ultimate goal of the sweeps — to rid the city of gang members, which inundate the populous in crime, Dempsie said.
"The ultimate goal is to eradicate the gang element from Porterville," Dempsie said. "One gang member is too many."
This weekÂ’s efforts are the second in a series of gang sweeps here in more than a month.
During the first, between June 20 and 23, police conducted more than 200 field interviews, probation compliance searches and five parole searches that resulted in the arrest of 60 gang members, mostly from sets of the Norteno street gang.
Dempsie said the department drew flak from people who said they were targeting one gang over another.
The lopsided nature of the arrests came from the fact Norteno gang members outnumber other criminal street gangs by a wide margin.
According to previous estimates, the sets of the gang comprise more than half of the cityÂ’s gang membership.
"We werenÂ’t targeting Nortenos, but they were the ones we ran into," Dempsie said. "WeÂ’re targeting everyone."
Dempsie said the sweeps will continue indefinitely.
"The pressure will be continuous," Dempsie said. "Of course, gang activity is known to rise during the summer, when kids are out of school, but we plan on continuing after school begins and beyond."
