Despite concerns from police, a Minnesota Senate panel has voted to ban law enforcement databases of apparent or existing gang members.

The decision Tuesday night by the Judiciary Committee is the latest effort to recast gang oversight in Minnesota in the wake of the disbanded Metro Gang Strike Force, which saw a dozen of its members accused of various types of misconduct.

After introducing a restructuring bill last month, state Sen. Mee Moua, DFL-St. Paul, altered it during its first committee hearing, pushing through an amendment that bars law enforcement agencies from maintaining “a computerized criminal gang investigative data system” of people who are or may be involved in gang activity.

Moua said that would prohibit “GangNet”-type databases, a reference to one maintained since 1998 by the Ramsey County sheriff’s office. GangNet is a system not specifically authorized by state law in which information is compiled on people who may be associated with gangs.

It also would repeal a statute that allows a more specific state-maintained database called the Minnesota Gang Pointer File.

On a divided voice vote, the committee sent the bill to the State and Local Government Operations and Oversight Committee, which meets Friday.

Moua, chair of the Judiciary Committee, said having law enforcement use the state’s existing Comprehensive Incident-Based Reporting System (CIBRS), which is based on incident reports, is a smarter approach and does not involve profiling people as gang members. In the past, critics have raised questions about GangNet, contending people can be mislabeled as gang members.

Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher, however, sent the committee that meets Friday a letter strongly criticizing Moua’s approach.

“If this proposal becomes law it will dismantle 20 years of progress in investigating and prosecuting gang members in Minnesota,” Fletcher wrote. “Officer safety will be jeopardized because officers will not have access to information regarding gang history. Investigations will be slowed because officers will not be able to identify the combatants and their motives without complete information regarding their gang association. And finally, the prosecution of gang motivated offenses will be curtailed.”

After criticisms were aired about the subjectivity of the names entered in GangNet, one-third of them were deleted. It still contains roughly 10,500 names, however. The state’s Pointer File system, meanwhile, has about 3,000 names, all with some type of felony or gross misdemeanor conviction.

At Tuesday’s hearing, some interpreted Moua’s amendment as limiting law enforcement’s ability to have access to critical information about gang activity, especially in suburbs.

David Brown, an assistant Hennepin County attorney, said law enforcement recognizes the importance of protecting privacy. But he said it also wants to make critical connections to cases that occur across jurisdictional lines.

“It is incredibly important that we have access to that kind of data,” Brown told the panel.

Fletcher, meanwhile, said Minnesota has 3,000 confirmed gang members and another 10,000 close associates of gang members.

“Dismantling the computer systems that track these criminal gang members would send us back to the pre-computer “stone ages” of law enforcement,” he wrote.

One irony, he said, is that if the databases were disallowed, incident data now considered confidential likely would be considered public under Minnesota’s data practices law.

“Police agencies will be compelled to publicly release data on thousands of individuals, contrary to the goals of the advocates of the new amended language, who wish to protect the privacy of the persons in the gang systems,” he said.

Moua, however, stood by her proposal.

“I invited Sheriff Fletcher to come to the committee and talk about GangNet and he declined,” she said. “I have to disagree. I think GangNet and the Gang Pointer File, they foreshadowed a system like CIBRS. We now have CIBRS in place. I don’t think GangNet or Pointer has utility.”

Dennis Lien can be reached at 651-228-5588.