Troy Senik
The Surge Comes to Salinas

A plan to apply counterinsurgency doctrine to gang violence

Communities beset by seemingly unbreakable cycles of violence; law enforcement overmatched to the point of essentially ceding sovereignty to an organized and heavily armed resistance; citizens so intimidated by thugs that they won’t report them to authorities, for fear of retribution. Eight years into the War on Terror, this scenario sounds familiar. But its location isn’t the Sunni Triangle in 2006 or southern Afghanistan today; it’s a farm town on California’s Central Coast.

In Salinas—a predominantly Hispanic, blue-collar community best known for producing John Steinbeck—violence has spiraled out of control. With a population of under 150,000, the city’s homicide rate has rocketed to three times that of Los Angeles, largely the result of fighting between the rival Norteños and Sureños gangs. With murders at an all-time high in 2009 (29 as of late December), residents are understandably frightened. When the police go searching for answers in the aftermath of a gang killing, self-interest prevails. Citizens more confident in the gangs’ ability to retaliate than in the cops’ ability to protect them stay mum.

Salinas’s mayor, Dennis Donohue, and his new police chief, Louis Fetherolf, want to reverse this vicious cycle. They think that they may have found a solution 7,500 miles to the east and 17 miles to the west. Those are the distances to Iraq, where General David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy, generally known as “the surge,â€