The recent arrest in Hollister of Philip Sparks, for the past
eight months the Nuestra Familia commander on the streets,
reaffirms what authorities have preached and signals a need to
dedicate law enforcement resources toward more proactive gang
enforcement.
The recent arrest in Hollister of Philip Sparks, for the past eight months the Nuestra Familia commander on the streets, reaffirms what authorities have preached and signals a need to dedicate law enforcement resources toward more proactive gang enforcement.
Salinas police officers – involved with a local, state and federal effort called Operation Street Sweeper – arrested Sparks without incident a week ago at his home in the 800 block of Fremont Way. Sparks is accused of being regimental commander for the Salinas-area Nuestra Familia gang and is suspected of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and methamphetamine. If convicted, he could face 10 years in prison.
Hollister police authorities had not been informed of, and were uninvolved with, the situation before the arrest. But that probably has less to do with trust than it does the logic of minimizing awareness of a necessarily confidential operation. Why inform any department that does not need to be involved – especially in Hollister’s case where there was just the one, albeit prominent, arrest?
What the arrest does underscore, however, is the reality that Hollister not only has a gang problem of its own, but it also has drawn attention as a home to high-level members such as Sparks, whose prison-based Nuestra Familia gang has affiliations on the outside with the Nortenos. Although it doesn’t necessarily equate to additional street trafficking here, Sparks and undoubtedly others’ presence does add another potential target for retaliation, and it signals the reality that gang leadership’s evolution has pushed its higher brass into more rural areas where they attract less attention, and where law enforcement resources are thinner.
Sparks’ arrest, for instance, came on the heels of a methamphetamine bust in Gilroy, with similar demographics, which amounted to the largest such seizure in U.S. history. Cities throughout the region would benefit greatly from enhanced partnerships in the fight to stem such gang and drug-related activity in our neighborhoods.
For Hollister and San Benito County officials, it accentuates a problem that demands cooperation and disbersal of resources toward anti-gang efforts. Merely reacting is not enough – a Hollister police spokesman noted how city authorities take action “if there’s a cause” – and it won’t stem the street-level activity or the latest trend involving gang leadership taking up residence in Hollister.
What we witnessed with Operation Street Sweeper is that the only way to defeat gangs – from the top down – is to take a proactive, thoughtful approach, and to devote the necessary resources toward those efforts.
