At a Friday night football game, Detectives Ron Cordova and Omar Flores wandered the stands of Woodland High School. Their backs were to the rivals on the field and their eyes on the rivals in the crowd.
Unlike the thousand or so spectators, the detectives, part of the Woodland Police Department's six-man gang unit, weren't interested in Woodland High orange or Pioneer High black. They were searching for red and blue – gang colors that have torn their city apart in recent years.
Woodland, like Galt to the south and many other small rural cities across Northern California, are feeling the pinch of violence from a gang rivalry that didn't exist in their towns 15 years ago.
The Sureño gang, once relegated to cities south of Bakersfield, has steadily moved north over the past decade, law enforcement officials said.
Sureño gangs have popped up in towns like Woodland, long considered dominated by the rival Norteños gang. The appearance of Sureño gangs in Northern California has brought a surge in violence as small towns experience rises in assaults and homicides.
Gang violence has struck Woodland hard this year.
In late September, a 13-year-old boy was beaten with a baseball bat and stabbed repeatedly as he walked along Lemen Avenue, a Sureño-dominated part of town, Woodland gang detectives said. Police speculate the attack was retaliation for a drive-by shooting that took place a few weeks earlier in which a 16-year-old boy – an innocent bystander, police said – was shot in the abdomen but survived. The shooting also triggered a gang fight at Cache Creek High School just outside the city, detectives said.
Six years ago, the murder of two men and shooting of two girls at a Halloween party in Woodland was blamed on Sureño and Norteño tensions.
Galt has seen some of the same issues, said Detective Bruce Ramos, lead gang detective at the Galt Police Department. "The shootings and stabbing didn't start until about 2000," Ramos said.
Ramos said the Sureño gangs began arriving in Galt around the mid-1990s.
"As soon as they got enough numbers, they got emboldened," he said. "It came to a head and started to explode."
"A lot of the violence we see is violence against the natural rival," said Woodland Detective Cordova. "We've seen a bunch of felony assaults, witness intimidation and drive-by shootings."
The gangs also have brought more street-level drug sales, Cordova said.
Bakersfield once divided the rival gangs, said Todd Irinaga, a supervisory agent with the FBI who oversees anti-gang efforts in the Central Valley. But that line has moved "farther up north to Stanislaus or San Joaquin County, if not even farther north," he said.
Irinaga said a variety of factors explain the Sureños march north, including basic economics.
"(There's) more affordable housing in the Central Valley, there's employment up here and a migratory type of work with people bringing up their families and settling," he said.
For the Woodland detectives, catching kids early is the key to steering them away from the gangs, which recruit kids as young as 9 and 10, Cordova said.
He said he's heard of Sureño gangs wreaking havoc in towns up to the Oregon border.
"The line is no longer a line," he said.
Call The Bee's Stan Oklobdzija, (916) 321-1041.
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