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Law enforcement

Hazleton targeting gang issue

Mayor Barletta says his Street Crime Unit is vital and is making good progress.

By Steve Mocarsky smocarsky@timesleader.com
Staff Writer

HAZLETON – Greater Hazleton has close to 400 confirmed gang members living there, and police know who they are, where they live and the gangs with which they’re affiliated.

Detective Christopher Orozco, coordinator of the Hazleton Police Department’s Street Crime Unit, said he is sure there are even more gang members living in the area whose identities haven’t been confirmed. And the problem isn’t limited to southern Luzerne County, he said.

Mayor Lou Barletta said he’s known for quite some time that Hazleton has had a gang problem.

His police officers recognized it first. And when Police Chief Robert Ferdinand told the mayor about it, Barletta had him establish the Street Crime Unit.

But even when the unit was formed in April 2007, Barletta didn’t realize just how many gang members were in the area.

“It did surprise me. It was a much larger problem that even I thought,” Barletta said.

“The reason we started the Street Crime Unit is because police had information that there were gangs in the city and it was becoming an increasingly larger problem. It’s difficult to infiltrate and take down a gang without somebody dedicated to it, working on it all the time,” the mayor said.

Orozco said the unit consists of five full-time specially trained officers from the department’s patrol and detective divisions. Other officers with training assist the unit as needed.

He said the number-one gang activity is selling drugs.

“They probably started coming to this area four or five years ago, and it’s basically because we have a drug market here. When you have people willing to buy, you have people willing to sell,” Orozco said.

It’s a lot cheaper to buy illegal drugs such as heroin and cocaine on the street in New York and New Jersey, so drug dealers began moving to Luzerne County, where illegal drugs sell for three to five times the price while maintaining contact with suppliers in the bigger cities, he said.

“Then you have people who are local who see these people making money, and they think, ‘Hey, I can do that, too,’ ” Orozco said.

The drugs of choice in the area are cocaine, heroin and marijuana. Orozco said there is a local market for prescription drugs, but the main source of illegal sales remains cocaine, heroin and marijuana.

Barletta said he doesn’t think area residents have a reason to be fearful just based on the number of gang members here.

“Most violence comes between (rival) gangs, not to individual people,” Barletta said.

Orozco said gangs want to protect their territory for drug sales.

While Orozco rattled off the names of gangs operating here – Bloods, Crips, Trinitarios, Dominicans Don’t Play, The Latin Kings and MS-13, he declined to name the most prevalent so as not to “fuel the gang.”

“You don’t want a gang that has 60 members to start recruiting to catch up with another gang that has 100,” he said.

Orozco said the Street Crime Unit and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Safe Streets Task Force, with which he is also an officer with arrest power, use the list of known gang members to help them narrow down suspects in gang-related crimes.

There are other uses for the list, but that information is sensitive to law enforcement investigatory technique, Orozco said.

Gang members are confirmed on the list through various methods, such as tattoo identification when they’re arrested, self-admission, information from prison officials and other law enforcement agencies or statements from confidential informants, he said.

And just because most of the addresses of confirmed gang members are in Greater Hazleton, that doesn’t mean the rest of Luzerne County is immune from gang problems, Orozco said.

“We just try to document the ones in our area, but Wilkes-Barre and Scranton have gang issues just like we do. No area is spared,” he said, adding that southern Luzerne County and northern Luzerne County are “about the same” as far as gang-member numbers and gang-related problems.

“The only difference between us and other municipalities in the area is that we acknowledge the problem. It’s uncomfortable politically to say we have gangs in our municipality because it’s something people are afraid of,” Orozco said.

Orozco said he believes law enforcement elsewhere in the county recognize the presence of gangs, but it doesn’t publicize that information – just as Hazleton’s Street Crime Unit and the FBI’s Safe Streets Task Force doesn’t often publicize gang member arrests.

Part of the reason is that police sometimes use gang members who are arrested as informants.

Orozco said five of the eight people charged on Oct. 9 with selling drugs in Hazleton were Bloods members; the other three were drug suppliers. That arrest was made public because one of the suspects was wanted in connection with a highly publicized shooting outside La Cantina Bar in July in which two people were injured.

Barletta is confident that the Street Crime Unit is doing a good job and making the city safer.

“We may not be able to eliminate gang activity, but we certainly made it more difficult for them to operate here,” Barletta said.