Author: Linda Sanderson

I've been a criminal defense investigator in the Bay Area for 34 years, most of that time working with the Contra Costa County Public Defender’s Office. I was a staff investigator there between 1986 and 2012. In 2012, I became chief investigator and oversaw the work of twelve staff investigators until retiring in 2018. My work on Richmond gang cases has contributed to the dismissal of gang-related charges on many cases. At the Public Defender's Office, I provided in-house training to attorneys and investigators on neighborhood groups susceptible to gang-related charges. I've helped attorneys challenge the ever-increasing and oversimplified police designation of what constitutes a gang. I was a staff reporter for newspapers in Lawrence, Kansas and Nyack, New York before settling in the Bay Area, where I worked as the crime reporter at the Contra Costa Times and at the West County Times in Richmond. My journalism degree is from the University of Minnesota, where I was editor-in-chief of the university newspaper. I continue to investigate criminal allegations in gang cases charged against Richmond defendants.

True to the Hood

June 7, 2020

“The system is broken. Every rejection, every shooting, every arrest. Your parents are taken away and the people you love are killed. Then they tell you your neighborhood is a gang.”

—- Willie Lee Jasper, Jr.

For the gang cop, it all boils down to association. In the compressed, low-income neighborhoods of Richmond, California, association is unavoidable. This fact has led to many gang charges in Contra Costa County courtrooms, even when the underlying crime is stealing a television, robbing a grocery store or possessing too much marijuana. When a man associated with certain low-income, black or brown neighborhoods is arrested for carrying a gun, gang cops see the gun as a weapon that exists “for the benefit of the gang.”

“What gang am I a member of?” might ask the man whose home has been burglarized four times and who can’t walk down the street without hearing shots being fired. This gun is clearly for protection.

Richmond police and Contra Costa County sheriff’s deputies, posing as experts on gangs, began testifying in the 1990s that the young black men they saw on neglected streets in Richmond and North Richmond were “gang members loitering with other gang members in gang territory.” The double designation (others, gang territoriy) was made regardless of whether the black person was standing with a brother in a neighborhood driveway or with cousins on his granny’s front porch. If one of these youngsters also was also spotted on a friend’s YouTube rap recording, that made the three points a cop needed to confirm gang member status. There are nineteen identifyers on the “gang member” list.

At first, young men on the street scoffed at what they saw as the police getting it wrong. They were basically all related one way or another and had hung together since childhood. How were they suddenly a gang? They argued that gangs were hierarchically structured criminal enterprises with well-developed lines of authority and identifiable clothing and tattoos. Like Nortenos or Surenos. Like the Crips or the Bloods. That was not what they were, they countered. 

But soon it became apparent that California’s STEP Act of 1988 and its successive amendments could be used against the nontraditional gangs that Richmond’s small neighborhood cliques personified. These groups may have grown organically to protect disadvantaged and marginalized neighborhoods, but they were also involved in criminal drug operations and shootings. The very markers these young men had adopted to distinguish themselves — the hats they wore, their street names and rap music — were now being used against them. Project Trojans was not just a baseball team, the police said. Fourth Street was no longer just a family, they insisted.

Not only were black defendants now subjected to longer prison sentences based on the same behavior committed by a white defendant, but so began the criminalization of certain Richmond neighborhoods. Once your neighborhood was on the list, you hardly stood a chance of being young, black and male and not qualifying as one of the city’s small units called “gangs.”

For Willie Jasper and young men like him, the gang law messed with basic needs: protection and community. Protection relied on the integrity of the hood; community required a loyalty to the group that eclipsed all other sense of order. They believed that self-sufficiency was the only way their undisciplined and neglected community could carry on safely.

–from True to the Hood: Surviving the Streets of Richmond, California

Defense Investigations

June 6, 2020

The struggling neighborhoods of Richmond include streets where young men loyal to their hoods have to choose between that loyalty and the law. These are children born into neighborhood feuds and personal battles that don’t go away, sometimes waiting years to be avenged. These are lives further challenged by the isolation of poverty, lack of education, addiction, mental illness, absent parents and environmental harm. Those who sink most deeply into a life corrupted by revenge can cause havoc for the community and chaos for themselves. The police call these young black men gangsters and the district attorney attaches long, often lifelong years to their prison sentences if they are convicted of violent crimes.

Once arrested, these men must rely on investigation that focuses attention on their circumstances as well as on the question of their culpability. Working alongside lawyers assigned to represent them, the defense investigator must find and present the life that is hiding behind whatever crime is alleged. This work is often frustrated by overzealous prosecutors who lose track of the defendant as “human being.” But it is also buoyed by the opportunity to peel back so much societal branding and find a person who not only isn’t guilty as charged but is also not the devil he has been dressed up to portray.

This is a job I have had the privilege of doing for thirty-four years. Often enough, the men I have worked for have been found guilty in court. But sometimes the lawyer and I find irregularities in the charges or blatant mistakes in the witness statements. Other times the evidence presented by the police and prosecution is addled with reneged testimony or not enough surety about what really happened. Often enough, the person arrested did not do what he is charged with doing.

The most dispiriting results come when the defendant, after hearing his guilty verdict, quietly thanks us for helping and goes about his way. The life you watch depart is always a life that could have been saved.

This process of investigating the criminal cases of young black men reacting poorly to the lives they’ve been given to endure is always mind-blowing and sad. While most focus on the plight of the victim, it is the guilty defendant who suffers the deeper wound and most disturbing harm. To trace the lives of these young men is to journey into our society’s darkest behavior toward people of color. The ramifications of our neglect, racism and outright unkindness is played out every day in our criminal courts.

There are community organizations, individual angels, clergy and some government workers who are trying to reach these folks who end up in our jails and our prisons. More about that later. For now, this is just a shout-out to the defense investigators who believe deeply in what they’re doing.

What I do

June 5, 2020

If you ever want to shut down the noise at a dinner party, just say you’re a criminal defense investigator. Wait until the guy droning on about shortcomings in the equity market finally looks up and asks, “And what do you do?” It seems to work best if you haven’t said much all night.

In truth, people seem to think I make a more realistic looking grandmother. Ha!!!

Right now I’m sitting at home waiting for a break in the coronavirus pandemic so I can show up unannounced at strangers’ homes with a mask on my face. “Just here to talk about that shooting in Richmond last month…” I may have to lose the mask.

I’ve done this work for a long time and it has never gotten old. Going up against the police and prosecution is always an exhilerating challenge, especially when you can poke holes in their narrow-minded version of the defendant and his case. I work for the black men in Richmond whose lives have been shattered by loss and neglect only to grow up accused of being violent. My job is to reconstruct their lives and challenge their culpability so juries will know who they are as they decide their fate.

For 26 years, I was an investigator in Richmond, California with the Contra Costa County Public Defender’s Office. Then I became chief investigator in 2012 and supervised eleven investigators until retiring in 2018. Now I’m doing the same work as a private investigator, minus the workplace drama of eleven staff investigators.


I began my career in the Bay Area as a crime reporter with the Contra Costa Times and the West County Times. My journalism degree is from the University of Minnesota. I won the job as editor-in-chief of the Minnesota Daily when everyone thought this guy named Terry was supposed to get it. I reported for newspapers in Lawrence, Kansas and Nyack, New York before settling in Northern California.

I continue to investigate criminal allegations in gang cases charged against Richmond residents.

This blog is my punishment for writing a book. The book is called True to the Hood: Surviving the Streets of Richmond, California. It is the story of one of the men I worked for and how his fierce commitment to his street family kept him alive and almost killed him. Everyone says a writer needs a social platform if she’s going to sell a book. Well, damn, here I am.

Linda Sanderson