Monterey County Gang Task Force to dissolve
In a little over two weeks, the Monterey County Gang Task Force will be no more. That’s word from the Gang Task Force Steering Committee, who met Monday afternoon.
It was a unanimous decision to dissolve the ten-year-old task force. Much of their work was behind the scenes, making contacts and collecting intel. However, some of it made headlines, most recently in May.
“All the big operations that people are familiar with by name, like Quiet Riot, Operations Snake Eyes and so on,” Salinas Police Chief Kelly McMillin explains, “those all came out of the task force and these were all big wiretap operations.”
According to the committee, there’s just not enough funding or manpower to cover it. The Salinas Police Department and Monterey County Sheriff’s Office were helping to pay the salary of a task force commander. Because of the police department’s restructuring plan, the need for patrols is greater.
At its height, the task force was the largest of its kind outside of Los Angeles. Officers with the Salinas Police made up the lion’s share of the task force with eight officers and two sergeants. Despite the name going away, Chief McMillin says he wants to be clear – fighting gangs remains a priority for his department.
“We lost the task force and the way that task force is operated,” Chief McMillin explains,
“but those duties now shift to our patrol folks, our detectives. They’ll be the ones responsible for doing the same work.”
While that’s changing, other protocol will remain the same.
“The collaborations we’ve had are long-standing collaborations with federal, state, local partners, highway patrol, the sheriff’s department, the probation department, the district attorney,” Chief McMillin said. “Those collaborations, those relationships remain intact and remain very powerful. It’s just a reassignment of the personnel.”
Monterey County Sheriff Steve Bernal said he would like to revive it once funding is figured out, however, there’s no word when that could be. But it’s clear the district attorney as well as the CHP captain and others involved feel the same.
