After an extended summer holiday, John Oliver returned to his desk at Last Week Tonight to dissect US law enforcement’s overreliance on faulty and unregulated gang databases. Such databases – as Oliver put it, “basically lists the police keep of people they say are involved in gangs” – have been used to justify numerous deportations under the Trump administration, including the deportation and detention of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadorian immigrant from Maryland whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) illegally deported due to what they later admitted was an “administrative error”.
The deportation stemmed from a wrongful inclusion on a gang database – in 2019, officers apparently observed Ábrego at a Home Depot and filed a report that he belonged to a gang, based on the fact that he wore a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with “rolls of money covering the eyes, ears and mouth of the presidents” and that they “know such clothing to be indicative of the Hispanic gang culture”.
According to the report, “wearing the Chicago Bulls hat represents [that] they are in good standing with the MS-13.” “Which is already a little bit weird, because it implies that somehow, if you’re not up to date on your monthly MS-13 dues, your Bulls hat privileges get revoked,” Oliver joked.
The officer who filed that report also cited an anonymous tip that Ábrego was a member of MS-13; the officer was also suspended a week later for unrelated misconduct and ultimately fired. “Nevertheless, that gang allegation meant that Ábrego García was denied bond and spent months locked up in Ice detention,” Oliver explained, an outcome that was “ridiculous. A person’s clothing shouldn’t be criteria for locking them up for eight months. As we all know, the worst consequence of fashion choices should be getting roasted by teens on TikTok.”
Ábrego’s saga is one of many stories that bring the government’s use of so-called “gang databases” into question. Around the country, many local and state police departments keep these databases, often without disclosing them, despite investigations finding them to be “notoriously inconsistent and opaque”, “riddled with questionable entries and errors” and “rife with unreliable intelligence”, to quote several reports cited by Oliver.
When it comes to what constitutes a “gang”, there’s “a lot of variability here”, said Oliver. “Not all gang members may even be engaged in crime.” As one researcher put it: “Not all gang members are criminals, and not all criminals are gang members.”
“Unfortunately, none of that nuance is on display in these databases,” said Oliver, and none of these lists have oversight from any other branch of government or other law enforcement. The criteria for inclusion are police observations and “self-admissions”, which basically means, according to Oliver, “We found something on your social media that we decided constitutes you admitting that you’re in a gang.”
That could include posts with the word “gang”, such as a post from a teenager with the caption “happy birthday. gang”, added to a database on the grounds of self-admission. “And if the bar is that low, anything is basically a confession,” said Oliver. “A pic of you holding a diploma with the caption ‘killed it?’ Congratulations grad, but now you’re wanted for murder.
“And while so far I’ve been saying anyone can be added to these lists, those who end up on them are heavily people of color,” he continued. At one point, Washington DC’s database had only one white person on its list. “Do you know how few lists there are with only one white guy on them?” Oliver joked. “It’s basically this database and the cast of Hamilton. That is it.”
Additions can also be motivated by spite; in 2020, a cop in Phoenix registered 17 Black Lives Matter protesters as “ACAB gang members” in retaliation.
Most states also do not require states to notify people if they put them on a gang database. “And when it comes to immigrants, the designation of gang member can be truly life-altering,” said Oliver. “It can be the reason that someone is denied various pathways to remain in the US, and it can make someone a higher priority for deportation and the target of a raid.”
Oliver relayed the story of a Hispanic teen in Long Island named Alex, who was added to a gang database by a school resource officer after he was seen wearing bright blue sneakers, which school security guards told him was associated with the gang MS-13. He had also doodled “504” on his backpack, which is the country code for Honduras, his country of origin. A few months later, Ice agents arrested him, saying they heard he was a gang member, and eventually deported him.
When a police commissioner in Alex’s county was asked why he felt local law enforcement needed to partner with Ice, he answered: “If we have intelligence that they are a gang member, that’s not necessarily a crime … the intel that we have may not indicate a state crime. The intel may be small on them, but nothing that is going to keep them in jail. So if we perceive someone as a public safety threat, we utilize all of our tools, which again includes immigration tools, so we’ll partner with the Department of Homeland Security to target them for detention.”
Oliver fumed in response: “If someone is on your list of big bad criminals, and you can’t find any big bad crime to arrest them for, that suggests the issue might be your fucking list.
“It is pretty clear that gang databases are way too easy to get on, way too hard to get off, and can turn people’s lives upside down,” he added. “So what do we do? Well, I’d argue we get rid of them. And if you think, ‘Well hold on, how will police then stop gang violence?’ I’d say, with police work. They could and should do actual police work focusing on where violence is concentrated, instead of fixating on labels.
“I’m not saying that violence associated with gangs isn’t real or isn’t a problem,” he concluded. “I’m just saying the answer needs to go beyond policing and way beyond these databases.”
