I found out I was in a gang database — a shared criminal intelligence system used by policing agencies to store information on identified gang members — in 1996 after a dozen members of the Los Angeles Police Department crashed through my front door. The officers were from an anti-gang and graffiti task force and the arrest warrant identified me as a leader of not one, but two, graffiti gangs. When I found out that officers had torn through my family’s apartment looking for spray paint and markers as per the search warrant, it reminded me of the actual gang members who had done the same just a few years earlier.

As a local graffiti writer I had spent my adolescence running from gangs that resented how “taggers” like me wrote in the neighborhoods they claimed as their own. Now I was labeled a gang member. I had been labeled a gang member because I must have looked like one. Or it may have been because a judge is more likely to issue a warrant for a kid in a gang than a kid who writes on walls. I will never be sure. I was a vandal, but I was not in a gang, and the legal consequences for each are vastly different.

At my arraignment, my “gang” identity was brought up to frame the many charges for vandalism I was facing. Like the more than 94 percent of state-level felony defendants in America, I plea-bargained and received a fine, probation and community service, but avoided jail time. It was the gang label, not the criminal charges, that scared me most. I realized then, as I understand now, that gang categorization is often more of a legal tactic than a matter of identity.

Recent accusations of Los Angeles Police Department officers falsely identifying people as gang members are nothing new, and the problem is certainly not just a local issue. The Los Angeles Times reported last month that 20 officers from the Metropolitan Division assigned to crime suppression duties were suspected of having willfully falsified information on field interview cards during traffic stops. Information on such cards is relied upon later to determine who should be entered into a gang database. Self-identifying as a gang member, in addition to tattoos and officers’ descriptions of “gang related” clothing, are used to make a gang distinction.