EFFECTIVENESS OF GANG SUPPRESSION CAMPAIGNS QUESTIONED
‘Talking loud and acting proud’
More than a year ago the Greensboro Police Department unveiled a strategy to combat gangs that could be likened to chopping the head off a snake. The approach is “top down”: “We will identify the leadership within these criminal gangs and will systematically remove them, beginning with the top leadership, using proven investigative and prosecutorial means,” one of the goals of the department’s gang enforcement unit states. “We will employ every legal avenue available to identify, locate and aggressively prosecute the leadership within criminal gangs. We believe that this disruption of the criminal gang structure will have a significant impact on the gang’s ability to remain organized and adversely affect their ability to recruit new members.”
In the case of the Almighty Latin King & Queen Nation, one street organization labeled a gang by law enforcement, the gang unit’s aggressive strategy of surveillance and arrests carried out has resulted in the organization’s leader receiving a flurry of charges, most of them dropped by the Guilford County District Attorney or resulting in acquittal. Jorge Cornell, the self-identified leader of the North Carolina Latin Kings, has been charged 17 times since Dec. 1, 2007; he was found guilty of two — disorderly conduct and resisting arrest — acquitted of one — assaulting a police officer — and relieved of 12 by the DA, while two others remain pending.
While police have produced no evidence of coordinated criminal activity in the past year, Cornell has publicly pursued a peace agreement, pledged to expel members who engage in violence and sell drugs, and won the support of pastors and a wide array of activists as he confidently faces charges of abducting a 15-year-old girl and contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile early next month. Cornell said Monday that his group turned down a plea deal from the Guilford County District Attorney to drop the felony abduction charge in exchange for pleading guilty to contributing the delinquency of a juvenile because he and fellow Latin King members consider themselves innocent.
At least one published study questions the fairness and effectiveness of anti-gang strategies such as the one deployed by Greensboro, suggesting that by focusing on group affiliation rather than complaints of criminal offenses they run the risk of actually strengthening gangs and alienating the police from the community.
“Heavy-handed suppression efforts can increase gang cohesion and police-community tensions, and they have a poor track record when it comes to reducing crime and violence,” authors Judith Greene and Kevin Pranis write in the 2007 Justice Policy Institute study Gang Wars. Capt. John Wolfe, who oversees Greensboro’s gang enforcement unit, acknowledged that the police crackdown on gangs might have the unintended consequence of reinforcing their sense of unity, but ultimately he hopes the threat of arrests will create a sufficient deterrent effect to persuade gang members to quit. “I think when people feel endangered they seek safety in numbers,” he said. “That threat can act as a strengthening force. That’s part of the package. I ill tell you that we’re talking about very minimal numbers of people [actively involved in gangs]. I’d like to see people who realize they’re in over their head say, ‘I’d like to go down a different road.’” The Greensboro gang unit’s campaign of surveillance, intelligence gathering and arrests against the Latin Kings, an organization that grew out of the Illinois prison system in the late 1960s and early 1970s and reseeded in New York City in the 1990s, and others is based on an assumption that it constitutes a criminal gang, Wolfe said. “It’s an aggressive strategy against validated criminal gangs,” Wolfe said in a recent interview. “We’re targeting people who are operating as criminal gangs, and there’s evidence to support that they’re operating as criminal gangs.”
At least three members of the North Carolina Latin Kings have served or are currently serving prison sentences for crimes ranging from assault with a dangerous weapon to possessing stolen goods — all for crimes that were committed before Cornell publicly announced his campaign for peace. Subsequently, a group of Latin Kings broke into a house and attacked a 52-year-old man in his bed in retaliation for a home invasion before realizing they had the wrong person. The victim, Louis Young, received a letter of apology from Cornell.
By the gang unit’s standards, the Latin Kings easily qualifies as a criminal gang. The gang unit’s Standard Operating Procedure defines the term loosely, sweeping in individual and coordinated activities, and crimes committed both in the past and the present: “A criminal gang is a group of persons (two or more) who have a common identifying symbol or name, and whose members individually or collectively engage or have engaged in a pattern of activity, creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation within the community.”
Wolfe dismissed the notion that criminal acts independently carried out by individual gang members might be distinguished from criminal acts carried out on behalf of the gang. “They have to have something in common,” he said. “Their motivation has to be to improve their position in the gang, or to improve the organization’s status in the gang world.”
Defining what exactly a gang member is has long preoccupied those who study gangs and spawned reams of text. Tim Delaney writes in his 2005 book American Street Gangs that “every definition includes some mention of the word ‘group’…. Is a group of young people hanging out together a gang? What if this group is hanging outside a convenience store talking loud and acting proud? What if this group creates a name for itself, starts identifying members with specific clothing, and uses secret hand signals and handshakes and intimidating nicknames such as ‘killer’ and ‘assassin’? But the group just described could actually be a sports team! Add to this description the commission of a number of deviant acts and fraternities and sororities would also fit this profile.”
Greene and Pranis’ review of gang literature and crime statistics suggests that gang activity rarely rises to the level of coordination to qualify as organized crime.
“Researchers
who study gangs generally find, however, that most ‘gang crime’ is not
well planned or centrally directed, but is instead committed by
individual members or small groups on an ad hoc basis,” they write,
adding in another passage that “gang members account for a small share
of crime (including violent crime), even within communities and
neighborhoods where there are gang problems.”
Citing FBI Uniform Crime Reports, the authors wrote that cities across North Carolina
witnessed an increase in gang membership in conjunction with a decrease
in crime from 1999 to 2004; Greensboro, in contrast to other North Carolina cities, also saw gang membership drop sharply over that period.
“A
recent influx of Latino immigrants may have led officers to misidentify
young Latino men as gang members,” Greene and Pranis write. “On the
other hand, it is conceivable that gang activity could be growing even
as crime falls, since gang members account for a very small share of
the crime problem. In any case, the data provide no support for the
notion that North Carolina is experiencing a gang crime crisis.”
By
2005, perceptions of a rising gang problem in Greensboro were beginning
to create a political mandate to crack down through an aggressive
law-enforcement approach and today the gang enforcement unit enjoys
widespread support from a city council otherwise riven by infighting
and acrimony.
Campaigning in September 2005 to fill the open District 2 seat on city council, Goldie Wells listened to a fearful resident allude to a growing gang menace at a session with the Fisher Park Neighborhood Association.
Today, she sponsors a faith-based initiative called Love, Youth, Faith,
Empowerment, or LYFE, to keep children from becoming involved in gangs.
About a month later, police Detective Ernest Cuthbertson,
considered the department’s resident gang expert, drew an alarming
picture of the gang situation in Greensboro for members of the Guilford
County School Board when he told them that graffiti reading “Blood for
life” had been spray-painted at Peeler Elementary. The principal
disputed the claim, writing in an e-mail that “if this happened this
school year the police must have cleaned it up without my knowledge
(which is highly unlikely).”
The following summer Mayor Keith Holliday lead a news conference in Greensboro with other North Carolina
mayors to urge the passage of legislation that would have ratcheted up
offense classifications for any person who convicted of a crime in association with an organization deemed a
criminal street gang, resulting in more severe sentencing. The
legislation was eventually passed by both houses of the General
Assembly and signed into law by Gov. Mike Easley in August 2008.
Public pressure on the city to address gang activity increased with the 2007 municipal election. Among those raising the issue was blogger and write-in mayoral candidate Billy Jones, who commented on YES! Weekly’s neglect: “Why no mention of Greensboro’s gang issues? Is life so good on your end of town that you don’t know they exist?”
As the election
approached, the city council allocated $500,000 to form the gang
enforcement unit without increasing the police department’s overall
budget. At-large Councilman Robbie Perkins, who was elected in
2007 and is widely believed to aspire to the position of mayor, said
his support for the Greensboro Police Department’s handling of gang
activity is absolute.
“In terms of the gang unit, we had a
huge outcry from the community,” he said. “We directed the police
department to do something about it, and they’re doing something about
it. They’ve got an aggressive approach to policing gangs, and I support
it.”
As to whether the gang unit is effective, Perkins said he would
rely on police Chief Tim Bellamy to tell him, and only if the chief
volunteered the information in a briefing or report to council.
“My
supervisor knows what I’m doing and the city manager knows what I’m
doing, and I’m being fair and above-board,” Capt. Wolfe said. “We
developed those goals last September and released them to the public.We
told the public: ‘We’re brand new, and if the community has any issues,
let’s hear them.’ I don’t know why we’re talking about this in December
2008.”
The controversies raised over the degree to which gangs threaten
public safety and the social roles played by gangs are hardly unique to
Greensboro. Greene and Pranis write that New York and Los Angeles, large cities with ongoing tensions in the years after World War II, undertook dramatically different responses to gangs, with New York
achieve a high degree of success through a social-work approach and
heavy-handed law enforcement suppression resulting in gangs
metastasizing in Los Angeles.
Chicago’s 1960s gang history may offer a glimpse into Greensboro’s current condition.
The authors of Gang Wars write
that the Blackstone Rangers and the Devil’s Disciples were drawn into
community organizing pioneer Saul Alinsky’s outfit, The Woodlawn
Organization, which received funding from the federal Office of
Economic Opportunity to create jobs, while simultaneously antagonizing
municipal government under the administration of Mayor Richard Daley.
Another
gang, the Conservative Vice Lords, reportedly allied with civil rights
activist Jesse Jackson and “attracted funding for a host of social
programs. But at the same time that the Lindsay administration in New York
was embracing community action programs such as these, and deliberately
enlisting gang leaders from among the city’s ‘worst kids’ to serve as
staff for recreation and jobs programs, Mayor Richard J. Daley’s
response was quite different.
“Daley feared the gangs’
increasing role in building grassroots power, and the liberal allies
they were attracting would upset his political machine,” Greene and
Pranis write. “As TWO was launching its OEO-funded youth
programs, the Daley administration was beefing up the police
department’s gang intelligence unit and initiating a crackdown of
intense police harassment.”
The report continues with an account of how gang members flooded into the Illinois
prison system in the late 1960s and early 1970s, resulting in the
prisons being controlled from the inside by what had become the Black
P. Stone Nation, Vice Lords, Disciples and Latin Kings.
The
city of Greensboro favors what is known as a balanced approach,
launching Project Hope under the parks and recreation department to
engage teenagers in wholesome activities, alongside the new gang unit
in October 2007. A city press release compiled from information
gathered by the police stated that 12 nationally organized gangs were
represented in Greensboro — among them, Latin Kings and Vice Lords,
along with well-known organizations such as Bloods, Crips and MS-13.
Greene and Pranis’ report treats balanced approaches, which seek to
pair law- enforcement suppression with community support for young
people who want to avoid or get out of gangs.
The authors
contend: “Most community stakeholders lack the resources necessary to
become real partners in collaborative gang control efforts.
Councilwoman
Wells counts herself as a supporter of prevention, but endorses the
work of the gang enforcement unit as complementary to her own efforts.
“I
think they’ve been quite effective,” she said. “We’ve seen a decline in
gang activity.” Roger Pitney, president of the Shoppes at Pyramids
Village, a retail hub developed from the hull of the old Carolina
Circle Mall, was among the members of Wells’ LYFE organization that met
at Evangel Fellowship on Dec. 11. The members made reports on a variety
of community improvement efforts, including a program to teach young
boys etiquette, a pilot drill-team program, a proposed block of
Scripture study for public-school students, an upcoming clothing
giveaway at the Claremont Homes public housing community. For Wells’
part, the councilwoman discussed her efforts to have a swimming pool
funded by bonds approved by Greensboro voters in November sited in her
district as an economic-development driver.
At a previous
meeting, Pitney had released statistics developed with the police
department showing that crime dropped 60 percent in September, compared
to the same month in the previous year, at his shopping center.
He
described the gang unit’s role as part of a larger effort. “If we see
graffiti on the walls we call the gang task force,” he said. “They come
out and evaluate the graffiti. The landlord is notified, and then the
graffiti is removed.”
Pitney’s management team has also taken
a proactive role. “We are bringing it to the attention of the tenants
and the consumers that this is a safe environment,” he said. “You have
an openair area, and it’s illuminated. The police are taking a look at
the patrol’s they’re doing.”
Capt. Wolfe said the gang unit’s
activities go beyond suppression, and officers take the opportunity to
divert low-level members from the gang. Gang enforcement unit reports
referring 23 people to Project Hope in the past five months. Sixty-five
percent were black, with the remainder being Hispanic, white, and
Asian. The group included three females.
“I can’t tell you how
many young people we’ve come in contact with that we’ve helped out of a
jam with the criminal justice system or helped out a jam with a gang,”
Wolfe said. “We are using our discretion with regard to the crimes they
may have committed, to help them. I’ll give you an example: You’ve got
a kid who’s fairly new in a gang, and he’s committed a misdemeanor
offense. If that kid says, ‘Look, I did it because I’m involved in this
group,’ we can use the discretion of the state to say, ‘If you really
want help, we can help.’ If there’s a victim, we can discuss the option
of quitting before they get charged. We’re not in the business of
introducing kids into a criminal justice system that otherwise wouldn’t
be there.”
Wolfe said he recognized that some, if not all, of
the Latin Kings’ time together is taken up with wholesome pursuits.
“They participate in social activities like any other group, like a
church group, like a club,” he said. “I know that soccer is big, that
they’re involved in sports. They’re involved in family outings and
cookouts. I recognize that they’re human. I don’t have a biased eye
that says that every time they’re together, something fishy is going
on. I’m not in that place, and I don’t think my people are in that
place. In fact, I know that my people are not in that place.”
To comment on this story, e-mail Jordan Green at jordan@yesweekly.com.
Latin Kings members and their children posed with Guilford College students last month. Capt. John Wolfe, who oversees the GPD’s gang unit, acknowledged that sports and family outings occupies a significant amount of the group’s time. (photo by Jordan Green)
