The Arlington County Police Department is disbanding its Gang Unit amid a shift in tools available to officers investigating gang-related crime.
Personnel within the Gang Unit, which investigates gangs and provides street-level gang enforcement, will be reassigned elsewhere in the Criminal Investigations Division, ACPD spokesperson Alli Shorb told ARLnow.
“Criminal incidents involving gang components will continue to be investigated to the fullest extent by our Criminal Investigations Division and gang-related charges will be sought when appropriate,” she said.
Last week, county-level policy on gang enforcement changed when the Arlington County Board voted to end all voluntary cooperation between local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The county’s “trust policy” previously allowed police to contact ICE only in contexts involving identified gang members and certain serious crimes.
In recent years, the vast majority of cases that ACPD referred to ICE related to gang investigations. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) invoked concerns about gangs when criticizing the County Board on social media shortly after the vote.
Shorb told ARLnow that the decision to dissolve the Gang Unit came prior to the County Board’s recent vote, which followed years of activism from protesters critical of ICE’s impacts on Arlington’s immigrant communities.
“The Arlington County Police Department continually reviews personnel assignments and makes relevant structural decisions based upon factors including available staffing, crime trends, technology advancements and departmental priorities,” she said.
Shorb declined to comment further on the reason for the change.
Regardless of whether the removal of the Gang Unit and the shift in county policy are related, Randall Mason, president of the Arlington Coalition of Police, told ARLnow that recent changes have caused concerns in the county’s police union.
The old version of the trust policy, he said, provided police with a valuable way to address public safety threats including gang activity.
“Section 7 of the trust policy was meant to keep the community safe,” Mason said. “It seemed to be a common sense approach to this issue, only contacting ICE in a very limited number of circumstances.”
Rather than remove the section altogether, he said, “any concerns about overly broad language in Section 7 should have been addressed individually.”
The police union’s biggest worry, Mason said, is that the shift could potentially deter prospective officers from wanting to work at ACPD — a department that continues to grapple with a longstanding staffing shortage.
“Will this decision somehow deter prospective officers from choosing ACPD over another agency? I have no idea,” he said. “But our vacancies and the amount of overtime our officers are working just to keep the department running remains our #1 concern.”
Mason tied these ongoing issues with understaffing to the decision to disband the Gang Unit. He said that about 40% of positions in the Criminal Investigations Division are vacant.
“We are stretched very thin and cases that used to get investigated are not able to be followed up on anymore,” he said. “The gang unit positions being unfilled is another example of how stretched we are as a department to provide quality investigations to Arlington County residents.”
