North Carolina’s HB 1173 Risks Repeating California’s Failures

In December 2025, just days before Christmas, 13-year-old Jaleeyah Tune was murdered in Goldsboro, North Carolina. According to prosecutors, Jaleeyah was ambushed by three teens with alleged gang ties. In the aftermath of this tragedy, new legislation, House Bill 1173, has advanced in North Carolina. This new bill, known as “Jaleeyah’s Law,” would enhance criminal penalties for gang-related activity. Lawmakers are attempting to prevent tragedies of this kind in the future, but such laws can prove slippery slopes. It cannot be overstated how tragic the loss of Jaleeyah Tune is, but emotionally charged lawmaking has already led to overcriminalization, wrongful gang designations, and erosion of due process before.

House Bill 1173 would make the biggest changes to North Carolina’s gang laws since the Gang Suppression Act of 2008. The new bill would create a “three-person team” of two prosecutors and one criminal investigator dedicated to gang-related cases. The threshold for what constitutes a gang member would be lowered for law enforcement purposes. If passed, Jaleeyah’s Law would classify “three or more people who engage in criminal activity” with common identifiers or customs as a gang. Where the 2008 law required criminal activity to be among a group’s primary purposes, HB 1173 would strip that language entirely, leaving room for vague association-based designations rooted in clothing, tattoos, or social media posts.

What someone does, versus who someone is, sits at the core of American criminal courts. Jaleeyah’s Law threatens to blur that line in ways that should concern policymakers. North Carolina does not need to look far to see the aftermath of loosened gang designation in practice. In California, the state’s gang database, CalGang, was built on similarly broad criteria, with unusable working definitions, such as “gang-related” tattoos associated with known gang members or wearing clothing that might be gang-related, added to the database. The results were a disaster. A 2016 state audit of CalGang revealed racially biased entries, violations of civil liberties, and inaccurate entries. The auditor found that agencies could not legitimize 23 percent of CalGang entries reviewed, and “thirteen out of 100 people” in the database had no substantiated reason for being there. CalGang included individuals listed as gang members who were younger than one year old. Jaleeyah’s Law, with its lowered thresholds and association-based criteria, is precisely the kind of architecture that produced CalGang’s failures. North Carolina would be building a similar system from scratch, without the years of hard-won reform that California is still struggling to complete.

Jaleeyah Tune deserved better than what happened to her; her family deserves a serious legislative response. The lawmakers who named this bill did so with genuine intention. Still, this emotion cannot be mistaken for sound policy. Laws passed with such broad criteria have proven to be a problem in the past, leading to individuals, especially minorities, being incarcerated for crimes they did not commit. Laws of this nature oftentimes hurt the very communities they are intended to protect. Legislation that can be weaponized helps no one.