By Ryan Sabalow
Record Searchlight
REDDING, Calif. — A program that put movement-tracking ankle bracelets on paroled, high-risk gang members has been discontinued because of state budget cuts. And local law enforcement officials say the loss of the program, though it monitored just two north state gang members, takes away a valuable tool.
Friday, they say, was a perfect example of why such a program is needed.
On Friday afternoon, members of the Shasta County Anti-Gang Enforcement team headed to a house on Camino Drive across the street from Enterprise High School in Redding.
The team was at the home to check on Vong Vue, a 35-year-old parolee who SAGE agents say is a documented member of an Asian prison gang.
When they knocked on the door, Vue, whose GPS-tracking bracelet was removed around a week earlier, wasn’t home.
“Here we have a gang member with high violence potential, and we have no idea where he is right now,” said SAGE team member Rex Barry, an investigator from the Redding Police Department. “Unfortunately, that’s the way things are right now.”
That didn’t stop the multiagency team from making a bust. Because Vue’s on parole, the agents say they didn’t need a warrant to search his home.
The team arrested his girlfriend, Gee Xiong, 28, of Redding, after agents allegedly found around 1,000 bright-green Ecstasy tablets in a baggie in the couple’s bedroom.
Vue was later arrested at work. He was being held Tuesday without bail at the Shasta County jail.
In an email to north state law enforcement leaders, David Nichols, who oversees the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s northern division parole office, said he had no choice but to get rid of the program that monitored 20 paroled gang members in 14 north state counties.
“Being able to monitor the movements of our community’s most serious gang members via GPS has been an invaluable tool, and to many of you a key component in recent investigations,” he said. “The decision to pull this caseload was not mine to make, but rather a casualty of the reallocation of the department’s resources.”
Nichols, whose office continues to monitor sex offenders via GPS bracelets, said his agents would continue to help local law enforcement officials as best they could amid the “trying” budgetary times.
Redding Police Chief Peter Hansen said that though the program’s loss is going to be felt more further south in California where gangs are more prevalent, it’s yet another blow to local law enforcement resources, which have been stretched thin due to local and state funding cuts.
“I think it’s symbolic of what’s happened statewide in terms of our ability to hold them (criminals and parolees) accountable and monitor them when they get out,” Hansen said.
Plus, Hansen said, prison and street gangs have put Redding area in their sights.
He said his officers have received “direct and specific intelligence” from state prison officials of “a concerted effort” by ethnic prison gangs to target Redding as a potential base of operations. He said Hispanic gangs, in particular, would like to recruit members in Redding, even if those members belong to other ethnic groups.
With Interstate 5 running through the heart of the area, Redding is a ripe target for gang activity, since cartels are hoping to find ways to connect with the Mexican cartels running drugs up and down the West Coast freeway, he said.
Hansen pointed to a number of gang-related shootings last year to illustrate that the gangs are already here.
“Redding’s on the map for them,” Hansen said.
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