Taking On the Gangs
Pondering a social problem as complex and as painful as youth gangs tempts many Southern Californians simply to turn away in frustration, perhaps on the pretext that gangs are the worry of someone else--the police, the prison system or the residents of faraway ghettos and barrios most often victimized by gangs.
But denial of the gang problem does not minimize its effect on the whole society--the terrible loss of life in gang violence, the costs of trying to control the gangs, and the sense of vulnerability that washes through all neighborhoods when random violence occurs, no matter how far away. Clearly something must be done. But what?
A useful start would be to define the problem better. Too often people think of “gangs” as a monolith. Even the press lapses into oversimplification at times. The result is a pointless debate among groups that think they’ve got the solution to the problem. They focus on some police strategy, an education program or even a social ill (single-parent families, drugs or joblessness, etc.) whose elimination would resolve everything. In fact, solving the problems that gangs cause will require many different approaches, no one of them likely to be effective in every case. Once over this hurdle, it is easier to avoid frustration at the persistence of gangs and to concentrate on dealing with them.
For example, one good result of the widespread concern over local street gangs is improved coordination among various law-enforcement agencies. Communication about gangs among the Los Angeles Police Department, the county sheriff, the district attorney and the Probation Department is better today than ever. The local agencies, in turn, keep in better contact with state agencies like the Department of Corrections and California Youth Authority. Even federal agencies, including the U.S. attorney’s office and the FBI, now join in anti-gang activity when the need arises. Such cooperation must improve even more.
Los Angeles County and other jurisdictions must also keep supporting innovative programs like the Community Youth Gang Services Project, whose street counselors keep tabs on youth-gang activity and try to prevent violence. The key to their effectiveness is that most project workers are themselves former gang members, with knowledge and insights about gangs that are practical and useful. They do not pretend that gangs can quickly or easily be abolished; they simply try to limit the damage that gangs do. That is an important place to start dealing with the problem.
Another way for state and federal governments to limit the damage that gangs do is to further strengthen gun-control laws. In particular, they must not lose the opportunity--created by public outrage over the recent schoolyard killings in Stockton--to ban the sale of automatic combat weapons like the AK-47. Easy access to such high-powered weapons makes today’s street gangs much more deadly than their predecessors.
In the long run, government at all levels must revise the strategy being used to stem the flow of illegal narcotics into this country, especially the cheap rock cocaine known as crack. The high profits from crack are major contributors to gang violence as rival groups battle to control the market just as bootleggers fought each other in the 1920s over liquor sales. Police who try to stem to flow of narcotics to this country’s streets do a courageous and commendable job. But they will be fighting a war that they cannot win until the demand for illegal narcotics slows or dries up. That can happen only if more money is put into treatment programs to help addicts and education programs to persuade people to stay away from illegal drugs in the first place.
Most proposals for dealing with gangs involve police action, but it would be folly to think that a complex problem like gangs can be solved just by tougher law enforcement. The social ills that lead or drive young people into gangs must be attacked, too. As this country learned from its experience with the War on Poverty in the 1960s, such efforts can be costly and controversial.
It became fashionable in the anti-government heyday of the Reagan Administration to question the effectiveness of government spending on social programs. Some were inefficient, even wasteful, but many others did a great deal of good. Even the Defense Department is wasteful and inefficient at times, but no one seriously suggests dismantling the nation’s defense system as a result. By the same token, it is shortsighted to dismantle all social programs that help preserve tranquility.
As part of solving the “gang problem,” taxpayers must spend more for education, especially of youngsters from poor families so that they stay in school at least through high-school graduation. The fewer dropouts on the streets, the fewer young people for gangs to recruit. Even critics of the War on Poverty concede the value of education programs like Head Start.
For young people who have already dropped out of school, more job-training programs must be created to prepare them for meaningful, productive careers. Again, the War on Poverty provides a successful model in the Job Corps program. The programs should focus on helping a particularly vulnerable group--single mothers trying to keep their families intact. By helping them raise healthy and well-educated children, society helps ensure that young mothers are not simply raising another generation of poverty.
No single answer to the gang problem is likely to work in every instance. Youth gangs, and the more sophisticated adult gangs that grow out of them, are likely to persist in some form or other no matter what is done to control them. But that is no argument for not trying. Los Angeles has made a start in dealing with gangs as a crime problem. But that is just treating the symptom. The illness will be cured when American society decides that eliminating the social problems that help bring youth gangs into existence is just as important.
