Outnumbered: Jamiel's Law Can Even The Odds

Outnumbered: Jamiel's Law Can Even The Odds
April 18, 2008

By Walter Moore, Candidate For Mayor of Los Angeles, WalterMooreForMayor.com

According the the LAPD's website, our city has 41,000 gang members, and only 9,630 police officers.

Translation: our police are outnumbered by a ratio of more than four-to-one. That's like fielding a football team with just three players on it.

Jamiel's Law can help even the odds by reducing the number of gang members in our city. U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein estimates that 80% of the members of the 18th Street gang in California "are illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America."

Why should we let gang members stay here? Why should we let them outnumber our police, when we can even the odds?

Rather than fighting Jamiel's Law, the Mayor of L.A. could and should, with a stroke of a pen, modify the provisions of the LAPD Manual to deny "sanctuary city" protection to gangs.

The Mayor, Police Chief and City Attorney should then cooperate with federal officials to investigate, arrest and deport gang members who are in our country illegally, without waiting to catch them committing murder or other crimes.

Thomas O'Brien, the new U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, would presumably welcome the cooperation. Since he took over, the L.A. Times reports, "[t]here was a particularly dramatic increase in the number of cases filed against immigrants with felony convictions who were caught in the country after having been deported." His office is filing 65 such cases per month, up from 17.

The City should and could, moreover, even "loan" attorneys to the U.S. Attorney to prosecute gang members in the country illegally. The same article says O'Brien "has begun to bring in lawyers on loan from local prosecutors' offices to help handle the load of immigration cases .. . ."

Jamiel's Law should not be controversial. There is no legitimate reason to keep our police outnumbered. Nor is there any legitimate reason to grant "sanctuary city" status to gang members.

Let's get this law passed. After all, we, the law-abiding citizens of L.A., outnumber the Mayor and City Council.