Pomona gang sweep nets 24 arrests, 17 for felonies

Twenty-four people were arrested — 17 for felonies — during a 10-hour gang sweep Saturday night and early Sunday, police said.

“Last night we were a little more active than ones in the past,” Pomona police Capt. Michael Ellis said Sunday. “The number of arrests were up as well as seizures of drugs and firearms. They were all up.”

Officers seized three handguns, 23 grams of methamphetamine and 23 grams of marijuana during the operation that started at 4 p.m. and lasted until 2 a.m. Sunday, according a Pomona Police Department report.

This was the sixth high-visibility gang operation in Pomona during the past year, according to police.

The department’s report lauded “these types of high visibility gang enforcement operations” for contributing to a 20 percent reduction in violent crime from 2012 to 2013.

But last year homicides jumped from 17 in 2012 to 29 in 2013, a 71 percent increase, according to police statistics.

Three people have been killed in this city of about 150,000 thus far in 2014. No arrests have been made in connection with the three slayings, one of which police said was gang-related.

The U.S. Marshal’s Service, the California Department of Corrections, the Los Angeles County Probation Department, the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office and the San Gabriel Valley East AB109 Task Force assisted Pomona police in the latest sweep. None of the other agencies were available for comment Sunday afternoon.

A portion of the sweep included compliance checks for probationers and parolees, police said.

“The focus was gang members,” Ellis said. “The people we searched have gang ties or were identified as gang members.”

Names, charges and gang affiliations of the people arrested were not available Sunday, nor were locations of the sweep.

The department’s statement called it “a citywide gang enforcement operation.”

Additional details of the sweep should be presented later this week, according to the Police and Probation departments.

Police Lt. Ron McDonald said confiscating drugs and guns removes gangs’ primary sources of power.

“The best result is the weapons we take off the street,” he said of the operation.

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