Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Since 1998, the California Department of Justice has maintained a state wide electronic database of residents who law enforcement agencies believe are affiliated with criminal gangs. Ethnographic and qualitative research has highlighted many potential social costs of this program, but there is scant empirical evidence quantifying the impacts of this type of surveillance. Individuals listed in “CalGangs,” which at its peak included over 150,00 individuals, are subject to more intense scrutiny by police officers, and inclusion in CalGangs is used as evidence of gang membership by prosecutors in both criminal and immigration court cases. We first document the rise and fall of CalGangs, based on extensive analysis of internal and public state documents, and present evidence that heightened public scrutiny in 2016 lead to a purge of CalGangs, resulting in 47,000 individuals being removed from the database over a period of 2 years, a 33% reduction in the scope of this surveillance tool. We use county and racial variation in the size of CalGangs generated by this purge to estimate the impact of person-based surveillance on communities. We focus on three outcomes regularly cited as costs, and benefits, or CalGangs: county level crime and arrest rates as measured in the Uniform Crime Reports, case processing time in federal immigration court as compiled in the Syracuse TRAC data, race and county specific employment rates in the American Communities Survey, race and county specific preventative health care utilization as recorded by the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, and race and county specific school attendance and retention rates tracked by the California Department of Education. Our findings highlight the importance of con