EXPAND THE USE OF POLICE GANG UNITS

Abstract

Gangs grew dramatically in the United States during the 1990s. This dramatic growth prompted a variety of responses to gangs. Many of these responses missed the mark, making the problem worse (Decker and Curry, 2001), creating moral panic about gang problems (McCorkle and Miethe, 2002), failing to implement “grand” designs for gang intervention (Klein and Maxson, 2006), or fostering the isolation of gang responses from the community and other institutions of the criminal justice system (Katz and Webb, 2006). This context hardly seems like one in which to recommend the expansion of a key innovation of the 1990s, the police gang unit. Yet that is precisely the position taken in this essay. In 1988 1,439 gangs and 120,636 gang members were documented in the United States. In 1995 the National Youth Gang Center (NYGC) conducted its first assessment of the national gang problem. Of 3,440 responding agencies, 2,007 reported youth gang problems. The 1995 survey revealed 23,388 youth gangs and 664,906 gang members. The number of cities with gang problems identified by the NYGC increased dramatically between 1995 and 1996 (the peak year for gangs, gang cities, and gang members) with 3,847 cities reporting gang problems. The number of gangs peaked at 30,818 reported gangs in 1996 and declined to 21,600 in 2002. The pattern for gang members is somewhat different, however. Although the number of gang members rose dramatically between 1995 (644,906) and 1996 (846,428), it did not decline as dramatically from 1996 to 2002 (when 731,500 members were reported) as did the number of gangs and gang-problem cities. These data suggest that many gangs are growing in size, even as the number of gangs declines. Based on these data, it is not difficult to establish the premise that a large number of police departments provide public safety in jurisdictions that have gangs and that those gangs do not seem to be transitory in nature. Equally important is the impact that gang membership has on criminal involvement. Simply put, being a gang member increases the frequency and seriousness of criminal involvement. Three longitudinal studies (the Denver Youth Survey, The Rochester Youth Development Study, and the Seattle Social Development Project) provide consistent conclusions about the relationship between gang membership and crime. Each of these studies documents the finding that being in a gang increases the level of criminal and delinquent involvement. During periods of membership in a gang, the level of criminality of gang members increases compared with the period of time before they joined VOLUME 6