Police investigating a notorious gang in a city on California’s central coast issued a fake news release that the chief credited with saving two men by deceiving gang members who wanted to kill them, but the ruse was criticized by news organizations that reported it as fact.
Santa Maria Police Chief Ralph Martin defended the rare tactic when it came to light, saying he had never done such a thing in his 43-year career, but he wouldn’t rule out doing it again.
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“It was a moral and ethical decision, and I stand by it,” Martin said Friday. “I am keenly aware and sensitive to the community and the media. I also had 21 bodies lying in the city in the last 15 months.”
The phony announcement issued in February was discovered in court documents and reported only this week by the Santa Maria Sun, a weekly newspaper in the city 140 miles northwest of Los Angeles.
The newspaper and local television stations were unaware that the information in the release was false when they reported that two men, Jose Santos Melendez, 22, and Jose Marino Melendez, 23, had been picked up for identity theft and handed over to immigration authorities.
Kendra Martinez, news director at KSBY-TV, said she was “deeply troubled” that police misled the public and news organizations.
In fact, detectives eavesdropping on the deadly MS-13 gang had raced to the home of the two cousins in nearby Guadalupe and took them into protective custody after learning hit men were on their way there.
The sting comes to light as news organizations try to set the record straight as truth and fiction blur amid a proliferation of “fake news” spread by social media.
Sending bogus information to the media to advance law enforcement goals is rare but not unheard of. Police in Ottawa, Canada, were criticized for issuing a news release with false information about evidence connected to a 2014 murder case so they could see how the suspects reacted.
Martin, the Santa Maria police chief, said he did not make the decision lightly as the murder rate has soared in the city of about 110,000 that typically has three to four homicides a year.
Using wiretaps and surveillance, police learned that the Melendez men, members of a rival gang who lost another cousin to violence seven months earlier, were about to be killed, Martin said.
Police concluded they would expose their long-running Operation Matador if they made arrests, so they took the cousins into protective custody before the MS-13 hit men arrived. Figuring the would-be killers might harm family members if they thought the men were in hiding, police fabricated the news release about their arrests.
After MS-13 gang members returned the next day looking for the two, police overheard a phone conversation with them discussing the news report that the men had been arrested for identity theft.
Martin said it bought investigators three weeks to gather evidence that led to the arrest of 17 gang members on charges of 10 murders and plots to kill eight others, including the two cousins, who remain under protection.
Martin said he’s taken some flak from news media, but he has also received about two dozen supportive calls.
