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THE BRIDGE: Gangs and Street Power, Part3
The Facts & Faces of Gangs
*A huge part of gang lore in America is the misperception that African Americans either started gangs, or that they are the majority of gang members in the nation.
However, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, at the close of the last century, an estimated forty-seven per cent of gang members were Hispanic, thirty-one per cent were African American, thirteen per cent were white, and seven per cent were Asian.
One third of all gangs reveal a significant percentage of more than one ethnic group.
These are not the gangs of yesterday.
When examining the difficulties presented by gangs and gang activity, it is important to realize that gangs were neither created by Blacks, nor are Blacks the resounding majority of gang members around the nation. And, a huge percentage of the Hispanic gangs are illegal aliens.
A 1997 LA Times series included a confidential report by the California Department of Justice, revealing that sixty per cent of the Hispanic gang population was illegal immigrants.
Is this a statement to somehow indict Hispanics or illegal immigrants? No, but it is a statement to stop the wholesale indictment of young Black men, who are more frequently targeted and misidentified as gang members than any other ethnic group in the nation.
Black youth wear the face of gang members across the nation--on television, in politics, in the minds of cops, and sadly, in the minds of African Americans who have no idea what the real facts and faces are.
In many cities, three or more Black youth standing on a corner may be misidentified by the police as a gang even if they are law abiding citizens. And, one of the biggest unspoken problems as highlighted in the film "Training Day," is that dirty cops fuel the drug trade on the streets in a number of ways.
In many cases, gang members have reported that gang violence was given fodder by crooked cops who instigate gang rivalries.
In my book "The Los Angeles Riots: Three Decades of Revolution," community activist Bo Taylor, who helped organize a gang truce, said that the LA Riots of 1992 were in part, a planned war between gangs and the police.
"It was all organized," said Taylor. "It wasn’t just a bunch of people freaking out--at least for Blacks. The police say to hell with the community and feel like that’s not their concern. They want to talk about police morale and community policing, but people are not stupid."
There have always been problems between the police and the urban communities.
When it comes to the prosecution of drug crimes, many Black youth have been convicted of drug crimes and jailed when they were simply on the scene, in a house or car or standing near drug activity.
And, the legal system has taken to prosecuting Black offenders with harsher sentences. This is also the case with the media, which reports drug crimes mostly when they occur in the Black community, as if crack cocaine is the only drug on the streets.
The facts of how urban youth are swept into a life of illegal activity are far more complicated than just teens behaving badly.
We need to take a look at how urban gangs have evolved, moving from a circle of neighborhood associates who may delve into crime, to a group of mostly criminals whose primary activities are related to the sale of drugs and drug-related crimes.
Prior to the 1980's, the activity of gangs was largely relegated to marijuana and knives with an occasional handgun.
How did our streets change so drastically?
The answer is actually quite simple: Drugs and guns.
In the 1980's, crack cocaine and automatic weapons flooded the streets of urban America and changed the street game.
Some speculate that drugs were being dumped in the inner cities to finance the government's unauthorized activities in the Middle East, but however the drugs and weapons arrived, it is certain that urban youth weren't chartering planes to bring the contraband across the borders.
The plentiful supply and subsequent demand for crack cocaine made gang activity more lucrative than ever before, which also made the protection of turf even more crucial. And, with bigger, better weapons, the violence in the streets escalated to staggering proportions.
During the same time period, after school programs, community sports programs and college assistance for urban youth began to dry up and in some cases, began to come under fire.
Urban youth with few choices began to take chances on the drug trade, which promised quick cash even as it threatened to shorten lives.
Illegal immigrants are in many cases, recruited to come to this country to participate in street crimes.
By the close of the 1980's drug and gang activity had reached critical mass as well as mythical levels. Stupid ass rappers began glorifying street culture, giving gangs and gang activity a Black face and a seriously misunderstood legend.
The face of gangs across the nation is not only Black, but multicultural.
Am I trying to exonerate gangs for the violence they unleash in the streets?
Not hardly. But what I am trying to illustrate is that the problem in our streets is larger than Dave the dope fiend, or Tyrone the dope dealer.
Our problem can not be cured from the bottom up, but must be dealt with from the top down.
Really, how long can this nation wage it's so-called "War on Drugs," before we realize that it is simply a war on urban youth? That war has failed to rid our streets of violence, drugs and drug-related criminal activity.
In addition, it is important to realize that gang activity surrounds drug commerce on the streets. And that commerce could be stemmed by the government with the employment of higher focus on drugs coming in, as opposed to focusing on the arrest of small time drug dealers.
Gangs have been given the face of Black men and they have been given the face of youth. Both faces are erroneous. Whatever the face, gang violence is on the rise--the larger the city, the larger the problem. Gangs of urban youth are harming each other as well as innocent victims caught up in their careless crossfire.
The violence stems from the illegal activities related to the trafficking of drugs and/or illegal firearms.
According to the University of Chicago's National Youth Gang Suppression and Intervention Program and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (United States Department of Justice), the rate of violent offenses for gang members as opposed to non-gang offenders was three to one. And, gang youth are the perpetrators in eleven per cent of all crimes.
While seventeen is the average age of the gang offender, gang members are staying in gangs longer, with adults well into the twenties and thirties involved in nearly half of the gang-related incidents.
Experts are now making a direct connection between youth gang members and organized adult crime. And, an alarming increase in youthful offenders in violent crimes has sparked a trend of more juveniles being prosecuted as adults.
According to the U.S. DOJ, in 1996, half of all the reported gang members were juveniles, but by 1999, that number fell to thirty-seven per cent.
When it comes to the drug of choice for commerce, the facts and faces are divergent.
Caucasian gangs are more likely to be involved in the trafficking of methamphetamines or powder cocaine and Hispanic gangs are involved in a variety of drugs, while Black gangs are more likely to be involved in the sales of crack cocaine. Gangs of any color are likely to traffic illegal firearms.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, as of 2001, one hundred per cent of metropolitan areas with a population of 250,000 or more reported gang activity. Three thousand jurisdictions in the nation had gang activity.
In two of the largest cities, Los Angeles and Chicago, fifty-nine percent and fifty-three per cent respectively, of all homicides were gang related. Those two cities alone had a total of nearly seven hundred gang-related homicides.
My point in providing the information in this series? Simply to illustrate that we have more to gain from pressuring our government to protect the borders from the international drug and gun trade than from laying blame at the feet of young citizens.
And we have more to gain from understanding that if we do not provide today's youth with more options, we are tacitly providing them with less resistance to the gang life--a violent existence that is, for some urban youth, no longer simply a matter of choice.
We must channel our efforts towards prevention, not condemnation of youth who have been abandoned by evaporating government programs, non-existent community programs and, yes, by the very people who point fingers from a distance.
And, we must do the hard thing--indict the national and local governments for allowing drugs and firearms to flow into our urban areas.
Finally, we have to stop pretending that gang members, particularly youthful gang members are simply horrible people. Many of them could have been turned in a different direction with early intervention.
Many of us could have been them.
There, but for the grace of God, go I.
"I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Darryl James is an award-winning author who is now a filmmaker. His first mini-movie, “Crack,” was released in March of this year. James’ latest book, “Bridging The Black Gender Gap,” is the basis of his lectures and seminars. Previous installments of this column can now be viewed at www.bridgecolumn.com. James can be reached at djames@theblackgendergap.com.
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