In late-1942, California Governor Culbert Olson, who was facing a tough re-election battle against future incumbent Earl Warren, sent a memo to Los Angeles County's law enforcement agencies, ordering them to launch a vicious campaign against the city's youth gangs. Under these orders, the office of the Los Angeles County District Attorney decided to use the August 2, 1942 death of José Gallardo Díaz, a Mexican American youth, as a test case to launch the new war against juvenile delinquency by turning the investigation into a major media event. In the weeks following Díaz' death, the LAPD launched mass raids in Mexican and African American neighborhoods, arresting more than 600 young men and women to be held in custody and interrogated. The Los Angeles press hailed the arresting officers as heroes. As a result of their often brutal interrogations of the adolescents, the police announced they had found the murderers: twenty-two alleged members of the 38th Street gang and two female accomplices. The public discourse in California surrounding the arrest of the youths was viciously racist, and high-profile debates emerged whether Mexicans and Mexican Americans were "culturally, politically, intellectually, and biologically capable of living within a white, civilized, democratic society."