OGDEN -- With the one-year anniversary of the enactment of the Ogden Trece Injunction, officials are releasing statistics that show a drop in gang activity.
The injunction, essentially banning Ogden's oldest street gang from public endeavor, was signed Sept. 27, 2010, by 2nd District Judge Ernie Jones.
One year under the injunction has seen a 38.5 percent decrease in gang graffiti around the city and a 10 percent drop in overall gang activity, Lt. Scott Conley, head of the Ogden-Metro Gang Unit, said Thursday.
"That's not just Treces, that's gangs overall," said Weber County Attorney Dee Smith, co-author with the gang unit of the injunction. "But we are absolutely attributing it to the Trece injunction.
"It's what we expected to see, quite frankly, with the injunction," he said. "These are what I consider to be significant decreases."
Conley said the overall gang activity figure includes everything from serious crimes to any type of incident in Ogden classified and documented as gang-related.
Graffiti tends to be a constant reminder to a neighborhood of "presence of a criminal mindset" that affects the quality of life even when gang members are elsewhere, he said.
A tool in use in only a few other states, the gang injunction is a first for Utah. It bans Treces from associating with each other in public, being around guns, drugs and alcohol or staying out past an 11 p.m. curfew.
The 331-page injunction includes more than 100 pages of photographs of gang tattoos, graffiti, hand signs and clothing, and documents Trece crimes including assaults, drug distribution, a huge stolen car ring and several gang-related murders over the past four years.
The injunction has so far survived numerous challenges in court from lawyers representing Trece members and the Utah Chapter of the ACLU, including a trip to the Utah Supreme Court last fall.
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