Peter Arellano, a resident of Echo Park, is now able to sit outside on his porch with his father. He’s also able to wear Dodger Blue if he’d like to, or have an alcoholic beverage anywhere in public view.
These and other activities were potentially prohibited in Arellano’s day-to-day life and were temporarily lifted earlier this year by a federal judge as the city and advocates battle out in court over L.A.’s controversial gang injunctions.
Arellano was attached onto the Echo Park gang injunction in 2015 — without any charges or any hearing — because his father had been involved with a clique within an Echo Park gang. It turned his life into a state of “probation-like conditions,” as one ACLU attorney put it, despite Arellano’s claim that he is not a member of a gang.
So the ACLU and the Urban Peace Institute sued, on behalf of Arellano and another plaintiff.
On Sept. 7, a U.S. District Court judge granted the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction against their gang injunctions. For now, as the suit continues, they are free to be. And as a result of the case, officials at the LAPD and the city attorney’s office began auditing the rolls of its gang injunctions to see if other people might be on there unfairly.