Street Gangs…just how organized are they?

A recent comment in one of my posts about 4th Generation Warfare brought up a common controversy in law enforcement/public policy circles. Are street gangs organizations with structure and hierarchies like traditional organized crime, networks of criminals that share some sort of loose commonality but essentially act independently, or some other type of grouping.

It usually serves the interest of law enforcement and elected politicians to claim that gangs are highly organized groups that resemble a corporation in structure like General Motors. After all, if you have a threat like that you can justify all sorts of policies and expenditures that wouldn’t otherwise pass muster among the general population.  Also, by making street gangs (or whatever the threat d’jour is) essentially evil mirror images of our police forces you get a nice narrative that explains why we have so much trouble eliminating them.

My experience has been that gangs want to be organized and structured (the desire screams through in their correspondence and rules that attempt to impose some sort of rankings to their members) but ultimately, members put their individual interests ahead of those of the organization. This leads to a sort of “Tragedy of the Commons” run amok. Most members, complements of an inflated sense of self worth, think that they are superior and have more intrinsic worth than their peers. Hence the large number of gang members willing to become informants and give evidence against those that they swear loyalty to unto death. My guess is that they watch Scarface and the Godfather too many times and draw the wrong lessons from each.

In some areas of the country I’m sure gangs do exhibit the sort of internal discipline necessary to establish a hierarchy and structure but the vast majority of gangs operate via informal relationships and try to take more out of their relationship with the gang than they’re willing to put into it. It matters more who grew up in the same project as who or who is the natural leader rather than which person has the title of ‘5 star general’.

I guess one argument against gangs being 4^th Generation warfare threats is their political blindness. Regardless of their criminal behavior, most gangs and gang members are firm believers in Western capitalism whether they know it or not. That is why, despite being economically deprived with little hope of advancing, gangs don’t try to alter the underlying political structure but rather just try to leap frog ahead of others in the race to get more stuff.

The problem with virtually all street gangs (at least from their point of view) is that they aren’t able to make decisions or plans that extend beyond the short term. My opinion is that this is because many people who become gang members have difficulty in conceiving of life in the long term (for an example of such thinking check out the documentary ‘Reversal of Fortune‘ which, while it doesn’t discuss gangs and crime, I think gives a wonderful glimpse into this mindset I’m talking about here) and so don’t seem to be able to plan much further beyond immediate needs or desires. That is why, the vast majority of crimes committed by gang members can best be described as ‘impulse’ crimes. That is, crimes either designed for immediate monetary reward or some sort of retaliation for a (real of perceived) slight. If street gangs are the scourge of many parts of the country than why, after more than thirty years of existence (in their present manifestation) are they still overwhelmingly focused on retail narcotics sales, robbery/burglary, assaults and other crimes that carry relatively low profit potential along with high risks of getting caught?

Now, please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that street gangs today pose no threat to the general population. Research has demonstrated that gang members do commit more crime than their delinquent non-gang peers and certainly many people are legitimately frightened by gangs that may be active in their neighborhoods. But that does not necessarily mean that gangs are highly organized or that their actions are dictated by a centralized command structure.  And (finally) I can come full circle back to my original post.  I don’t think a threat has to intend to destabilize a system in order for it to be a threat to that system.  Street gangs are both a threat to the existing civic structure as well as a manifestation of the flaws within that structure.  The only way to get rid of the former is to eliminate the latter.

4th Generation Warfare and Law Enforcement

I was over at the D-N-I website the other day and saw this post which talks about ‘4th Generation Warfare‘. From Wikipedia:

Fourth generation warfare (4GW) is combat characterized by a blurring of the lines between war and politics, soldier and civilian, peace and conflict, battlefield and safety…the fourth generation signifies the nation states’ loss of their monopoly on combat forces, returning in a sense to the uncontrolled combat of pre-modern times.

I found the concept of 4GW interesting because it seemed to mesh well with my experiences in Afghanistan. While there, I saw a number of parallels between the type of ‘warfare’ being fought there and the threats that seemed to be emerging in the law enforcement arena. For example:

• In the shooting wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, our enemies are non-state actors. They have wide ranging motivations such as political ideology, religion, economic interests or apolitical power grabbing. All however wish to erode or destroy the authority and power of the state.
• In the U.S., the biggest threats (at least, as described by the state system) have evolved from structured, hierarchical ones (the mafia, the Soviet Union and their clients) to unstructured, networked ones (street gangs, leaderless resistance terrorist groups, etc.)
• In both circumstances, it is quite clear that hierarchical structures (like us) don’t do well against unstructured ones. They are slow moving, reactive and have difficulty in understanding and fighting anything that doesn’t look like themselves.
• In many cases this lack of understanding results in situations where the ’structured entities’ (us) devolve into self promotion and institutional preservation. Look at the emphasis in Vietnam on body counts to demonstrate our inevitable victory there. Or today, the regular press releases about how many of Al-Qaeda’s ‘top leadership’ we’ve killed and captured to demonstrate we’re winning the War on Terror or in Iraq. Even worse, consider arguments which point to increases in spending or expansion of bureaucratic institutions as progress in the War on Terrorism.

The same holds true in the law enforcement arena. As organized criminal groups began to suffer from the superior organization and resources of the state system (RICO prosecutions, money for more cops and prosecutors, better information systems), a niche for criminal networks have arisen which make such tools less effective.

So, what is the typical response? In law enforcement at least, the trend has been to try to cram these groups into the ’structured organization’ mold. Therefore, when you see a press release for a big arrest of a street gang, you’ll usually see a chart demonstrating the organization of the gang that makes it look like it was run like a major corporation. Such organization is frequently more present in the minds of both the criminals and law enforcement than actually occurs. Dumb criminal organizations (usually the ones that get caught) try to emulate a highly structured and organized system, usually because they think such a system is the way it has to be done as well as providing an important sense of self worth (if every gang member spent as much time actually working at being a master criminal as they spend in trying to imitate one with images taken from Scarface, The Godfather and whatever else is discounted at Blockbuster this week we’d be in real trouble).

By trying to treat these 4^th generation threats as 2^nd generation we never make any real progress. Ever wonder why, when we have more people incarcerated than ever before in our history and despite almost constant trumpeting of “biggest drug seizure ever!”, “violent gang that terrorized city broken up” or “Number 3 Al-Qaeda man killed” we don’t seem to be making much progress either in serious criminal issues or the War on Terrorism? In many cases it’s because we still have difficulty in getting out collective head around the very nature of the conflict we’re engaged in.

Some point to street gangs (specifically MS-13) as examples of 4th GW in domestic terms but I’d have disagree. At least here in the U.S., they don’t constitute a significant threat to the existing state order. Like many other gangs, anecdotal tales of horrific violence are assumed to be normal behavior for the majority of members (which just isn’t true) and events that occur in other countries are assumed to be occurring here or ‘just around the corner’. So, while MS-13 and similar groups have a much greater influence in a number of Central American nations, and could potentially threaten the existence of the state, the same is just not true here in the U.S.

I discussed this with a colleague of mine and he thought that that one of the signatures of 4^th GW was the intent of the threat to destroy the existing system, which would exclude most of criminal groups existing today. Most criminal groups enrich themselves by acting as parasites on the existing system and require some form of stable system in order to operate efficiently. People need to be able to have jobs and make money in order to charge them for drugs, steal their possessions or con them out of their savings.

I don’t think intent is necessarily a defining characteristic of 4^th GW threats. Rather, it seems to me that so long as the threat, through it’s actions, has the capability of destroying the existing system (intentionally or not), it should be considered a 4^th GW threat. Do we care if network A wants to tear down the social fabric of our society and build another according to their ideology or if, for some other reason their actions destabilize our society? It seems to me the result is of the same severity which demands the same level of mobilization in order to eliminate the threat.

There is a danger in such an argument though. This certainly opens up the possibility to declare anyone who disagrees with goals of the state a mortal threat which should be silenced. We certainly don’t want to give aspiring Orwellian Big Brothers a justification to oppress citizens exercising their constitutional and human rights. How such a compromise could be reached is not clear to me but worth some more thought.

I’m also wondering if our current approach to threats might be misguided. Right now we tend to divide threats into categories based upon the type of threatening activity they are engaged in. So we have narcotics, terrorism, organized crime, and other specialized units to focus on those threats and rarely interact with each other, even when part of the same organization. It also tends to encourage law enforcement to focus on the threats they can easily disrupt rather than those that actually pose the most serious threat (and law enforcement certainly isn’t alone on this. Iraq had the misfortune of being the weakest and most easily invaded of the ‘Axis of Evil’ and so suffered the consequences. To argue it was a most significant threat to the U.S. and it’s interests of the three is just silly.)

The threats in 4^th GW, however, are likely to move in and out of these and other categories to suit their needs. I wonder if it would be better to focus on the severity (or potential severity) of threats rather than just what type of activity they’re engaging in. Apart from institutional self interest and bureaucratic inertia, does such a division of labor make sense given the declarations that we are facing ‘existential threats’? Perhaps these threats aren’t as serious to our existing order as we’ve been told but if they are it seems like the best course of action is to adapt to this new world we’ve found ourselves in rather than expecting our opponents to be concerned about making our jobs easier for us.

The 2007 NJ Gang Survey - Part Deux

The media’s take on the 2007 NJSP Gang Survey is starting to be revealed today. I think the decision not to include total gang population estimates was a good one since it looks like it’s forcing people to read the report rather than latching onto a number like a Titanic survivor clinging to a life preserver and ignoring everything else. As a result, the stories seem more informative and well rounded than I remember in the wake of the 2004 Survey.

Here’s a roundup of some of the stories out there:

Asbury Park Press - Pretty good focus on Monmouth and Ocean counties.

Gloucester County Times - Focuses (as you might expect) on Gloucester County. Good discussion about gang migration and gangs in suburbs.

The Star Ledger - Good general overview with discussion about links to the Governor’s newly released crime plan.

The Times of Trenton - This is a pretty good article with the exception of the description of MS-13 as ‘movers and shakers’. MS-13 hysteria has more to do with a few grisly acts that get a lot of media play as well as linking to the anti-immigrant feeling sweeping the country than the true nature of the threat.

Some of the interesting themes in most of the stories:

G.R.E.A.T. got mentioned a couple of times as a tactic to help keep kids out of gangs. Unfortunately, like D.A.R.E., the program doesn’t actually seem to do much other than make people feel like they’re doing something. The two programs cost a great deal of money and there’s very little evidence that they’re effective.

A few of the article pick up on the fact that the report is actual a survey of law enforcement’s perception of the gang environment in their jurisdiction rather than an attempt at any sort of objective description of gangs. Those two could be very different depending on a host of factors like agency experience in identifying gangs, public/political pressure, agency priorities, etc.

Many people have been beating the drums about the fact that gangs can’t be considered solely an inner city issue. The problem is that most people have deeply ingrained images of both gang members and a gang neighborhood and it’s hard to get your head around the fact that someone could be in a gang and not fit that stereotype. There’s been some good academic literature comparing crime (specifically juvenile crime) in depressed, inner cities and in the suburbs. The criminal justice system is much more likely to identify urban, minority criminal suspects as gang members while white, suburban individuals charged with the same (or similar) crimes are often regarded as delinquents or even ‘boys raisin’ hell’. As a result, every time some report comes out talking about gangs in the suburbs there’s both alarm (Oh, my god! Get my gun!) and disbelief (I haven’t seen any people dressed in red hanging out on the street corner selling dope, that report must be a lie!). We should expect gang members in a middle class suburb to act in the exact same ways that gang members in a inner city housing project would.

The 2007 New Jersey Gang Survey

The New Jersey State Police released their 2007 Street Gang Survey today. This is the third survey (others were in 2001 and 2004 although the first survey did not result in a published report) in what looks to be a regular three year cycle. Highlights from the findings include:

• Gang presence in New Jersey is widespread, but generally ‘thin on the ground’ -Types of gang theft crimes reported tend to be ‘crimes of opportunity’ or ‘impulse crimes’ rather than crimes requiring planning, resources or organization. meaning that although many (43%) municipalities report the presence of gangs, the size of gangs in these towns is usually (84%) relatively small (fewer than 50 members, and often more like a dozen).
• Types of gang theft crimes reported tend to be ‘crimes of opportunity’ or ‘impulse
  crimes’ rather than crimes requiring planning, resources or organization.
• Violent crime in schools (aggravated assault, attempted homicide, homicide) is very rare.
• The Bloods street gang was named by a large majority (87%) of municipal respondents reporting the presence of gangs. No other gang was named by more than half of the municipalities with a gang presence.

A very interesting and positive aspect of the survey is that it refrains from making estimates of the total numbers of gang members in the state. There’s often big demands to make such estimates in order to justify political points of view but such numbers generally have little real practical value. Thus, the report states:

The 2007 New Jersey State Police Street Gang Survey makes no attempt to estimate the total number of street gang members in New Jersey. The quality and precision of available data does not support such efforts, and past attempts to generate statewide gang membership estimates have been incorrectly characterized and misrepresented in public discourse.

The 2004 Gang Survey (which is worth checking out as well to compare with the new report) estimated almost 17,000 gang members throughout the state but my question was (and remains), so what? Would there be a policy difference if the estimate was 15,000 or 20,000? How about 10,000 or 30,000? Basically, once you get to these sorts of numbers I think you cross a line where variations of the estimate don’t effect how you react to them. Best to just say: “There’s a whole heck of a lot of gang members out there.” and move on.

Of course there’s also the problem that there are no universally held definition for gangs or gang members. New Jersey has 567 municipalities, 21 counties and several state law enforcement agencies, each of which can independently decide what constitutes a gang, gang member and gang crime, assuming they want to define them in the first place.

More later as I digest the report and commentary…

A rose by any other name…

What is a gang? The question isn’t as simple as it might appear, especially once you get beyond the easy cases of guys wearing red, calling each other ‘dawg’ and selling narcotics. NJ statue defines a gang as:

“…three or more persons associated in fact. Individuals are associated in fact if (1) they have in common a group name or identifying sign, symbol, tattoo or other physical marking, style of dress or use of hand signs or other indicia of association or common leadership, and (2) individually or in combination with other members of a criminal street gang, while engaging in gang related activity, have committed, conspired or attempted to commit , within the preceding three years, two or more offenses of robbery, carjacking, aggravated assault, assault, aggravated sexual assault, sexual assault, arson, burglary, kidnapping, extortion, or a violation of chapter 11, section 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 of chapter 35 or chapter 39 of Title 2C of the New Jersey Statutes regardless of whether the prior offenses have resulted in convictions.”

That’s not a great definition (what’s ‘gang-related activity’?) but even if it was right on target we’d have problems defining gangs and gang members.

I’d recommend checking out this paper about one of the issues we face when discussing gnags. The paper argues that the threat of gangs in schools have been overestimated and that gang classifications have been biased against racial minorities.

The paper begins with a good example on the (mis)uses of surveys in its study of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Their survey asked several questions about gang activity beginning with the statement:

“We’d like to know a little more about any gangs at or around your school. You may know these as street gangs, fighting gangs, crews, or something else. For this survey, we are interested in gangs that may or may not be involved in violent or illegal activity.” (italics added)

First, why would anyone be asking about, or interested in, groups not involved in illegal activity? I couldn’t help thinking about efforts by law enforcement and the DoD to track other law abiding groups: (here and here, and here) and wonder if there’s just a general ‘culture of suspicion’ about anyone not ‘like us’. The consequences of going down this road is that instead of doing the (admittedly difficult) task of actually assessing threats we end up with a grab bag that consists of criminals, law abiding anti-establishment groups, and weirdos. That forces us to spread our collection and analytical resources that much more thinly.

But I digress….

Next is a section titled ‘Gangs and Racial Stereotypes’. It outlines the current problems with gang databases (easy to get put in them, almost impossible to get off them, gang-related versus gang motivated) which have been discussed numerous times but not generally in law enforcement circles.

But, by far, the best part of the paper begins on page 962 in the section titled ‘Gangs, Race and Social Class’ (if you don’t read the whole paper the section from 962-975 is worthy of your attention). Examining several incidents (the Columbine killings, the Spur Posse, and The Saints and the Roughnecks) the authors make a convincing case that race and social class have much more to do with classifying groups as gangs than we’re aware and plays some role in common stereotypes that gangs are primarily a function of minorities and the poor.

So what does this mean for us? Well, check out assessments, articles, web sites, etc. dealing with gangs after you read this and I’d be willing to bet you’ll see some of the same issues the authors point out. Are we missing threats because our internal and institutional biases are preventing us from seeing them properly?

Street gangs and gang strategy

Last month, the Justice Policy Institute published a report titled “Gang Wars: The Failure of Enforcement Tactics and the Need for Effective Public Safety Strategies“. The subtitle kind of gives away the central idea of the report but it’s still worth checking out. It gives one of the best reviews of current gang thought out there and dispels a lot of ‘conventional wisdom‘ that’s bandied about. Some of the key findings:

• Gangs do not dominate or drive the drug trade.
• Most gang members join when they are young and quickly outgrow their gang affiliation without the
  help of law enforcement or gang intervention programs.
• Most youth who join gangs do so between the ages of 12 and 15, but the involvement of younger children
  in gangs is not new.
• 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.

They do a great job of profiling some high profile anti-gang strategies and how they do (or more usually don’t) work.

Unfortunately, I fear this work will be quickly ignored. The fact is that the law enforcement-industrial complex (and I write that only slightly tongue in cheek. A considerable industry had arisen around the law enforcement process with consultants, private prisons, specialty software, training, etc.) has a lot invested in there being no significant change to how we deal with gangs and gang crime. In spite of that, the research is becoming overwhelming that endless cycle of crime-arrest-incarceration isn’t going to be broken by hiring more cops or building more prisons. A few agencies recognize this and are trying to adapt but most don’t do much more than adopt some of the terminology and trappings of the new findings and then do the same old things that haven’t worked for years.

The report isn’t particularly optimistic even for those areas that want to do more than arrest everyone wearing a red shirt and a bandanna hanging out of their pocket. The fact is that there aren’t many agencies or community groups that have resources or organization that can match what law enforcement can mobilize. That means that virtually any plan, no matter how well thought out, is likely to have a weak, disorganized social/community aspect and a vigorous law enforcement component. It’s like a body builder who only lifts with one arm and lets the other atrophy.

Check out the report. It’s well worth the time you’ll spend on it.

Update: I forgot to mention that one of the authors of the report was recently interviewed on NPR. He talks about the hyping of MS-13 as the nation’s ‘most dangerous gang’. It got that moniker, in part, because of a bogus story that came out a few years ago that MS-13 was partnering up with al-Qaeda to smuggle terrorists into the U.S. (I believe the origins of that story had much more to do with law enforcement anti-gang units trying to cash in on all that homeland security money that was flowing like the mighty Mississip after 9/11) plus there were a number of high profile violent crimes committed by MS-13 members that took place in the Washington D.C. metro area in 2005/2006. When the people who work in the D.C. area got caught up in the hysteria, their influence spread throughout the rest of the country and so MS-13 became a sort of ‘bogey man‘. It doesn’t hurt that MS-13 members are Central American and so can further stoke the xenophobia about illegal aliens.

It’s all about the ‘Benjamins’ (part 1)

This article claims to have interviewed a number of Sheriffs in Texas that are claiming that terrorists are using the notoriously porous U.S./Mexico border to enter the country.

There are a number of significant problems with both this article and the information contained in it.

First is the source. CyberCast News Service was originally known as ‘Conservative News Service’ but changed its name in 2000. The organization has a long reputation for shady news articles and has a distinctly right wing bent.

Secondly the content can lead you into only one of two conclusions. Either this is a hoax or there are some very stupid terrorists out there. While I’ve never been a terrorist or tried to sneak into a foreign country I do know a bit about military operations. One of the very first rules of conducting a covert operation is that you don’t bring along identification with you. Doesn’t anyone find it peculiar that Iranian ‘terrorists’ would travel from their home country to Mexico (apparently in their military uniforms - very inconspicuous) and then cross the border into the U.S. (still in their uniforms!) where they finally change, presumably into something a little less noticeable, like a Barney costume. They must have their uniforms on when they cross the border because the patches they’re finding are in U.S. territory.

One thing I didn’t know was that terrorists are very considerate. Just in case you don’t speak Arabic and can’t find a translator, they make their message very clear by having patches that show a plane flying into a building!

The article likes to try to scare its readers by saying that the Department of Homeland Security estimates hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants are entering the country from coutries OTM (other than Mexico). Wow…where are they coming from? Pakistan? Iraq? Afghanistan?

Well, more likely Honduras, Guatemala and Peru. The most recent estimates I could find (from here ) was that only 4% of illegal immigrants came from areas we might consider ‘high risk’ (Africa and the Middle East). 80% came from Latin American countries (including Mexico), 10% from Asian and the remaining 6% came from Canada or Europe. Now these numbers are for immigrants illegally entering the U.S. through all points, not just the U.S./Mexico border. While I don’t have numbers backing this up, my guess would be that the Latin American numbers would be even greater if we were only talking about that point (if a 2,000 mile border can be called a ‘point’) of entry.

What often gets overlooked is that all organizations have a variety of ‘motivators’ that drive both what, why and how they focus on specific subjects. Is it possible, for example, that law enforcement agencies along the border states want more federal funding (for analysts, fusion centers, etc.) and so are willing to stretch the truth when it comes to terrorists coming across into the U.S.? If, in fact, that sort of thing happens (and quite honestly, it happens all the time), the danger is that someone reading this sort of thing might alter their picture of the threat and divert scarce resources to address problems that don’t exist.

A couple of years ago a number of law enforcement agencies started spreading (and many in the media were more than happy to contribute to the fear mongering) the word that a dangerous street gang (MS-13) was partnering with Al-Qaeda and smuggling terrorists into America. As soon as I heard those stories, my first thought was that one or more anti-gang police units in the nation (most likely on the Mexico border) was probably trying to figure out a way to dip into the huge Homeland Security funding pie (just in case you didn’t know, in the first few years after 9/11 particularly, all you had to do was was the words ‘homeland security’ or ‘counter terrorism’ and, like magic, the federal government threw more money at you than you could imagine) and so came up with this highly dubious scenario. Up until 9/11, gang units were really the big benefactors from state and federal law enforcement grants but after 9/11 they suddenly found themselves treated like red headed stepchildren.

That was one of my first, and most surprising lessons, working with government agencies.

“It’s not necessarily what is the biggist threat that gets the resources but rather what the organization thinks it needs to build it’s empire.”

The Armchair Generalist puts it much better than I do with The Rules:

1. It’s always about the money.
2. Everyone is a whore.
3. The better looking people get more.

This post is getting a bit lengthy so I’ll continue it later….