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Penalty of Prosperity : Gang Violence Spreading to the Old South

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Times Staff Writer

A nighttime rumble in the parking lot of a deserted shopping mall: shots ring out. A member of a teen-age gang called the Q Boys is hit in the back and dies. Two members of a rival gang, the Vice Lords, are charged with murder.

Such stories are usually associated with the gang-infested ghettos and barrios of cities like Los Angeles, Chicago or New York. But, in a bitter twist that discloses a grim side of the South’s economic renaissance, the slaying of Q Boy member Charles Louis Triplett took place in this once-sleepy Mississippi capital, now the self-styled “Crossroads of the South.”

Before the Sun Belt boomed, gang violence was virtually unknown in the “Old Plantation” South--a region stretching from Louisiana, across Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia and up through the Carolinas into Virginia.

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With the South’s new-found prosperity, however, people by the millions have been lured from the depressed urban centers of the Frost Belt, many of them families with teen-agers previously involved in, or familiar with, gangs. And, as decay in Southern inner cities has begun to match that in the North, gangs have found a natural breeding place.

Jackson is only one example of the growing gang problem below the Mason-Dixon Line. In Virginia Beach, Va., a high school student was fatally stabbed last month when a fight broke out at a skating rink. Police charged two members of the Ebony Playboys, a gang that circulates in the Norfolk-Chesapeake-Virginia Beach area, with murder.

Chattanooga Slaying

In Chattanooga, Tenn., where police reportedly have identified 15 to 20 gangs, an 18-year-old died from a gunshot wound inflicted last October when he was caught in the middle of an argument between members of a gang and other teen-agers.

In Atlanta, a notorious and well-organized gang known as Down by Law has been linked to a string of murders, robberies, rapes, assaults and harassment of public housing tenants in recent months.

“This is a whole new phenomenon in American society,” said Walter B. Miller, a Cambridge, Mass., authority on organized youth gangs and former director of the National Youth Gang Survey. “Until 1979, there never were any reports of problems with youth gangs in the ‘Old Plantation’ South.”

Since then, he added, at least 10 cities and perhaps 20 or more have reported incidents of gang-related activity, including Baton Rouge, La., Mobile, Ala., Memphis, Tenn., and Greenville, S.C.

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Gang Arrests Cited

“I have a copy of a report to (Atlanta) Mayor Andrew Young from the then-deputy police chief which is dated November, 1984, and says that, over the past 12 months, records indicate that 46 arrests were made related to gang activity,” Miller said.

In Jackson, a city of 203,000 with booming downtown and suburban development but stagnating inner-city neighborhoods, gang activity first drew strong public attention in April of last year, after the shooting death of a junior high school student as he was walking down a street with friends.

“The majority of the gang members are kids whose parents moved to Chicago from Mississippi years ago and then decided to move back to the South when the economic prospects and the social climate looked better here,” said Charles Robinson, youth services coordinator for the Jackson Urban League.

Two of the biggest Jackson gangs--the Vice Lords and the Folks--have adopted not only the names but the dress customs and identifying symbols of long-established Chicago gangs. The Vice Lords wear their hats tilted to the left and spray-paint buildings in their territory with five-pointed stars. Members of the rival Folks slant their hats to the right and mark their turf with six-pointed stars.

The murder of Q Boy member Triplett at the Jackson Mall in July provoked such a widespread community outcry that Mayor Dale Danks created a 62-member gang task force to study the problem and opened a teen center in the section of town where gangs are most heavily concentrated.

‘Time on Their Hands’

“I think these kids’ economic needs are not being met,” said Jimmy Bell, director of the criminal justice program at Jackson State University and co-chairman of the mayor’s task force. “They have a lot of time on their hands, and they’re not involved in any supervised recreational activities. What’s more, we don’t have enough child advocacy groups focusing on their needs.”

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However, in a sign of the split in public opinion over how best to combat the gang problem, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, the city’s leading newspaper, said in a tough editorial that the mounting gang violence calls not for “namby-pamby talks or studies by sociologists, but for strong police action to break the backs of these gangs and put them out of business.”

In Atlanta, officials set up a special police squad in July to combat growing gang activity. “Mindless packs of street hoodlums and predatory thugs will not be allowed to intimidate our city,” City Council President Marvin Arrington said in announcing creation of the police gang unit.

So far, the squad has identified seven of the youth gangs active in the city. In addition to Down by Law, the most infamous, they are the Five Percent Nations, Valley Boys, ChiLites, Awesome Six, Ladies by Law and Bad Girls. The two female gangs, Ladies by Law and Bad Girls, were started by girlfriends of members of the male groups.

The typical Atlanta gang, like gangs in cities elsewhere in the South, is composed of black males between the ages of 16 and 25. The average membership ranges from 20 to 25 youths, and some members are reputed to be armed with automatic weapons.

Down by Law started as a group of teen-agers who armed themselves and moved in packs for protection during the rash of child murders that plagued Atlanta between 1979 and 1981. Last month, Timothy Antwan (Peanut) Harris, the gang’s reputed leader, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a member of the rival Five Percent Nations.

10 Charged in Rape

Two other Down by Law members are among 10 youths charged with the rape of a woman kidnaped from a nightspot in Atlanta’s affluent North Side in June. Atlanta police Lt. W.W. Pope said that one of the 10 young men had recently moved to Atlanta from the North and had bragged that “he was going to show them how they do it up there.”

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Down by Law, which takes its name from a rap song lyric, has become the scourge of East Lake Meadows, a southeast Atlanta public housing development at which gang members reportedly meet to plan crimes and retaliation against rival groups.

“They’re out there right at my building, cussing, shooting guns and beating up people,” a 14-year East Lake Meadows resident said recently in an interview with the Atlanta Constitution. “There are a lot of people here that are afraid.”

Local officials and law enforcement authorities are often reluctant to admit that a gang problem exists in their cities, partly out of a natural tendency to play down any adverse conditions in their localities but also to avoid bad publicity.

Southern cities appear eager to project an image of the Sun Belt boom as combining the best of the old and the new while avoiding the urban problems that have plagued cities in the North and West.

Gang Problem Discounted

“We don’t have a serious gang problem yet,” said Fred J. Warner, deputy police chief of Memphis. “We have had individuals that we have arrested on criminal charges that stated they were members of organizations. However, we have yet to prove that any organized criminal activity is being committed by gangs.”

Nevertheless, the gang problem is serious enough that Memphis has joined Atlanta in setting up a police task force to counter the rising tide of gang-related activity. The unit was set up after reports of assaults, robberies and intimidation of people attending a June 7 concert at the Mid-South Coliseum of Run-D.M.C., a nationally popular rap music group.

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“When gang problems hit a new locality, there’s always what I call the underplay-overplay ploy as far as the police are concerned,” said Miller, who headed the National Youth Gang Survey from 1975 to 1980. The survey was funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and Harvard Law School.

“Prior to the time gang problems become so severe and so obvious, the police and city officials always tend to play down the problem, saying things like, ‘Well, they’re not real gangs, they’re just loosely organized.’ Then, after two or three highly publicized gang incidents, they flip over and say, ‘We have a terrible gang problem in this city and we’re going to need more and more resources to fight it.’ ”

To be sure, gang problems in Southern cities pale in comparison to those in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago.

How Many Deaths?

When Jackson police Lt. Will Gardner talked to Sgt. Michael Cushings of the Chicago Police Department’s gang crime section to learn the practices of Windy City gangs, one of the first things Cushings asked Gardner was how many gang-related deaths Jackson had experienced in the past year.

“Just one,” Gardner replied.

“We had 30 deaths last year,” said Cushings. “That’s a problem.”

Still, some experts on youth gangs warn that the gang problem in the South is likely to intensify.

“I think the problem is going to get worse,” said Julius Debro, director of Atlanta University’s Criminal Justice Institute. “In attempting to solve these kinds of problems, cities tend to try the quick fix and ignore long-term methods of prevention. So, the media coverage will die down in six months, but the gang problem will continue.”

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