‘Baddest of the bad’: New task force targets violent criminals in Wichita area

The gangs and career criminals who rob and shoot their way across the Wichita area don’t know it yet, but four investigators are targeting them.

Two FBI agents, a Wichita police detective and a Sedgwick County sheriff’s detective have been quietly working behind doors and on the streets gathering intelligence since March. The four share the same cubicle within FBI offices at the Epic Center for a reason.

They are members of a new inter-agency task force assigned to combat violent crime at a time when violence is rising in Wichita.

▪ Wichita police had 1,100 reports of aggravated assault through June of this year, up from 855 during the same period last year.

▪ Police have recorded 61 nonfatal shootings during the same period this year, more than double the 24 at the same point last year.

▪ Last year, violent crimes in Wichita increased by double digits over the year before.

Recently, heads of agencies represented on the task force – FBI Special Agent in Charge Eric Jackson, Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsay and Sedgwick County Sheriff Jeff Easter – told The Eagle that they want the public to know the task force exists. They are going after the crime in a concerted way.

The task force focuses on serial robbers, violent gang members and career criminals.

As a police detective on the task force put it, these are the cases involving “the baddest of the bad in Wichita.”

Anticipating, watching

If you pass the task force investigators on the street, you might not realize they are cops.

They often don’t wear ties or uniforms. They have tattoos, goatees or beards and wear shoes made for walking or running. They spend hours in unmarked cars – watching.

They’re anticipating someone’s moves, so they can intervene and prevent violence.

They peer through binoculars when they can’t get close enough, or they deploy video equipment, depending on the circumstances.

When they meet a suspect, they know how to leverage him.

Facing stiff sentences, a suspect will sometimes turn on his partners in crime, giving the task force vital information to help prosecute a series of crimes. When you treat a suspect with respect, the investigators say, it’s surprising how much information he might give.

They spend a lot of time talking to other cops, in squad rooms and on the street, communicating about who they are looking for and offering assistance.

They are meeting with patrol officers at shift changes and with members of the Wichita police gang unit and the department’s Special Community Action Team, known as SCAT. They meet together so everyone can be “briefed up” on the bad guys they are looking for.

The idea is that if an officer on the street stops someone targeted by the task force, the members can be contacted immediately. It gives a task force investigator a chance to get information about a suspect before a window of opportunity closes.

The four investigators asked that their names not be used because it could hinder their investigations.

Preventing shootings

Gangs are behind many of the violent crimes, the agency heads say.

The cases the task force focuses on are not random crimes.

Two examples:

▪ An east Wichita bank robbery this past spring in which one robber vaulted over a counter while another held a gun on people in the lobby, keeping the customers from using their cellphones to call police. After a minute, the two robbers ran from the bank, disappearing over a wall into an adjacent apartment complex. Investigators think the two have committed other crimes in Wichita.

▪ A string of retaliatory, gang-related shootings in a neighborhood north of 13th Street, between I-135 and Hillside.

If the gangs know they are being watched, it could interrupt the shootings, one of the FBI agents on the task force said.

“We want to be in their decision cycle,” he said.

They want a gang member bent on vengeance to ask himself: “If I do this, am I more susceptible to law enforcement catching me?”

Because so many of the gang-related shootings are retaliatory, if investigators prevent one, they also prevent four to five subsequent shootings.

The FBI agent stressed that the task force is just part of the effort. Patrol officers on the streets and detectives interviewing people as part of routine investigative work are crucial to putting cases together.

The task force exists to focus on key cases for the long term, when officers are swamped with emergency calls and detectives are loaded with cases. The task force is for the marathon part of the effort, to keep sharing information and connecting pieces of crimes that cross jurisdictions until the case can be fully prosecuted.

It’s been years since such an inter-agency task force operated in Wichita, said Rebecca Martin, an FBI supervisory senior resident agent in Wichita. In the mid-1990s, another task force, also composed of FBI, Wichita police and sheriff’s investigators, had success tackling violent robberies and gang crimes and sent hundreds to prison.

Easter cited the vicious robbery and shooting of Julie Dombo last August when she went into a Derby store to get her cellphone fixed. Her injuries were so severe, her hands and feet were amputated. That’s the kind of crime the task force hopes to prevent, Easter said.

The FBI needs partners like the Police Department and the Sheriff’s Office because they have “intimate knowledge” of what occurs on the streets, Martin said.

The targets are what the officials describe as “main players” and mentors for younger criminals or “old guys of the gangs.”

The key in going after the main players is to be surgical and not to upset entire neighborhoods with broad-brush enforcement, said Ramsay and FBI spokeswoman Bridget Patton.

Gangs used to live in and frequent what Easter calls “poverty pockets.” But gangs now exist all over Wichita, he said. The gangs make money from robberies and drug and human trafficking.

The ongoing challenge with gangs is getting intelligence on them because some people are scared to report them, Easter said.

How it works

This past week, task force investigators explained how they work.

Every day they listen to local police channels for calls that could be connected to suspects they are tracking.

Because they are office mates, they can quickly share databases held by their respective agencies. If they were in separate offices scattered around Wichita, it might delay the information sharing by a half day, which can cause a crucial delay.

The four investigators bring a variety of investigative experience. They have worked in big cities, on the border and in Wichita. They’ve dealt with drugs, gangs and homicides.

They are a bridge between the three agencies. If the Police Department needs helps tracking down a shooting suspect, the FBI can help with its unique federal resources.

“A lot of these guys are traveling, thinking nobody is looking for them,” one of the FBI agents said.

“We will use any tool we have to get them off the streets.”

The task force can use federal law, which often brings more time behind bars than state law. It’s a way to put career criminals in federal prisons where they are farther away from their associates, making it harder for them to try to run a criminal enterprise from behind bars.

The task force formed in March, quietly. So many gang members don’t know of its existence, the investigators say.

“They will be seeing us out there,” the FBI agent said.

The other FBI agent on the task force described it as taking a 360-degree look at suspects, meaning not only trying to connect them to recent crimes but crimes in the past that remain unsolved. When they study their suspects, one task force member said, they ask themselves, “What do you think they did in the past and got away with?”

Even in a city the size of Wichita, with almost 400,000 people, it can be a small world for the task force members. They never know when they might run into one of their targets.

At one Wichita restaurant, one of the FBI agents was served a burrito from a former target. The agent had just happened to go there for lunch. The man supplying the burrito had no idea who his customer was.

“No clue,” the agent said. “He didn’t even give me a second look.”

This story was originally published August 5, 2016 at 4:53 PM with the headline "‘Baddest of the bad’: New task force targets violent criminals in Wichita area."