If Police Call It Gang Crime That Doesn’t Make It True

Law enforcement officials in Los Angeles have repeatedly cited dramatic increases in “gang homicides” to justify a series of extraordinary get-tough policies. If their statistics are misleading, the public may be seriously misdirected, both in appreciating the problem and in searching for a solution.

Among social researchers, compiling statistics on gang crimes is a notoriously treacherous business. When an investigator looks into police files, the very lack of good information about the identity and motivations of the killer can make the “gang” label attractive. Someone is shot by someone who speeds away; bystanders or the victim’s neighbors indicate that the traditional categories of domestic conflict, street brawl and robbery don’t seem to apply; the police don’t have intelligence that would link the victim to illegal drug transactions. Pressed to code the case “gang-related” quickly, the police are tempted to see any sign of gang involvement as conclusive. Months or even years later, confessions and evidence in unrelated cases may indicate that severe mental instability, a dispute between individual drug dealers or vengeance for a personal insult was the key force in the killer’s motivation. But there is no procedure for correcting mistaken attributions of “gang involvement” on this type of police record.

More subtly, the fact that the killer may have had gang affiliations does not mean that gang involvement was causally important. Los Angeles news readers should keep in mind that criminal violence everywhere is committed disproportionately by young men, that young men everywhere often commit their crimes collectively, and that young criminals distinctively commit “crazy” violence not related to any instrumental objectives they may have, unprovoked by the victim and not bothered by the limits of reason. Gang symbolism goes through extreme swings of popularity in ghetto youth cultures, but the destructive consequences of collective, non-rational youth violence remain relatively steady.

When gang symbolism--graffiti, clothing, hand signs--is prominent on ghetto streets and in the media, it is easy to believe that gang organization causes the violence. The same killing that would be treated in the media as a sign of well-organized youth gangs in Los Angeles may be understood as evidence of disorganized drug dealing in Washington, D. C., and as a robbery reflecting chaotic ghetto conditions in Chicago. Despite Los Angeles’ high-profile gang culture, criminal homicide here has for years been close to the rate in New York City, which has not been publicized as besieged by youth gangs since the ‘70s. And in Los Angeles, criminal homicide really has not mushroomed in recent years, even though media attention to gang life has increased explosively.

It may be surprising to be reminded that criminal homicide here has been much lower in the late 1980s than it was in the early ‘80s. Somehow the daily barrage of emotional detail on murders and the bellicose statements of law-enforcement officials create an almost irresistible impression that things are always getting worse. Much has been made of a rise in criminal homicide in the first half of 1989, but put in a decade-long perspective, it is an unimpressive statistical blip. The homicide rate in 1988 was about 25% lower than it was in 1980; in absolute numbers, that means that last year, even with a million more people in Los Angeles County, hundreds fewer people were murdered than at the beginning of the decade.

If gang homicides have been going up during the last couple of years in significant measure, the decline of criminal homicide overall might mean that there is some very hidden, very good news out there. Somehow an unprecedented degree of understanding must have blossomed in previously vicious domestic relations; drug dealers must have discovered nonviolent means of dispute resolution with their suppliers, competitors and customers, and robbers must have found a kinder, gentler way to practice their trade. More likely, the change has been in the inevitably slippery business of coding cases as “gang-related.”

The correct understanding of the relationship between gang symbols and criminal youth violence isn’t just another tedious matter for academic criminologists. If gang affiliation is coincidentally associated with, rather than the cause of, criminal youth violence, the Police Department, with its “gang sweeps,” and the county district attorney, in his newly declared eagerness to lock up “gang members” for six months for drinking in public, are pursuing a seriously counterproductive policy. When they arrest and lock up poor young minority men who are flashing gang symbols but not ready to back them up with violence, law enforcement agents powerfully intensify gang affiliation.

Across the country since the 1960s, gangs have become much stronger organizations within prisons and jails than they are on the streets. Lock up a young man who has been playing with the symbols of being “bad” and you give him strong motives to bond with very nasty buddies who will help keep others from playing with him.

It is almost certain that, through repeated “sweeps” and the Draconian treatment of misdemeanors, the “hard core” frequently will be missed and less dangerous youths nailed. Social researchers and police officials who work at the street level in gang areas usually conclude that a very small percentage of the young men who find gang symbolism attractive--by their reckonings well under 5%--engage in serious criminal violence. On “sweeps,” when officers are drawn away from their usual assignments and mobilized in extraordinary numbers to make mass arrests on unfamiliar streets, there isn’t much chance to make careful distinctions. When police and prosecutors actually have solid evidence for attributing vicious crimes to gang members, they don’t need to make punishment for minor infractions into a major law-enforcement policy.

In some areas, gang cops already spend most of their street time trying to figure out who’s who. With tens of thousands of young males entering the vulnerable ages each year in gang areas, no one has a magic formula that can systematically distinguish the marginal from the core.

But because they treat gang kids with personal respect, gang cops are remarkably successful, after criminal homicides occur, in getting information that supports legally sound cases. Faced with good evidence, youth gang criminals are relatively defenseless. For all the talk about gang organization, street gangs today are extremely chaotic and unsophisticated. Ghetto kids don’t protect each other with code-of-silence traditions of omerta and they lack the resources to escape punishment on fancy technicalities.

Then again, if Los Angeles’ new enforcement ideas are truly well-founded, they shouldn’t be wasted on just South-Central and East Los Angeles. Nationally, white and black males 15 to 19 years old die at about the same rates; both succumb to reckless conduct at several times the rate of their female counterparts. Of course, white youths die much more often from cars driven in criminal fashion and black youths much more often from street criminal activity. But in both contexts, drinking in public and semipublic areas is frequently associated with fatal episodes of wild adventure. Why wait for intoxicated young people in the Valley and on the Westside to get into their cars and start threatening the lives of innocent bystanders if we can so easily put them away for six months for drinking in public?