Big-City-Style Gangs Find a New Frontier on Plains of Kansas : Crime: In three years, the number of gangs marauding Wichita streets has burgeoned to 90, and drive-by shootings have become commonplace.

Police Officer Brad Carey can pinpoint the evening that urban America’s dreaded scourge arrived here.

It occurred in December, 1989, when a young man was spotted selling crack outside a squat tenement on the northeast side, Carey recalled. Identifying himself as a member of the Los Angeles-based Crips, the suspect warned arresting officers that a flood of others like him would follow, Carey said, “but we thought that was all a lot of bluster.”

Were they ever wrong. In three years, the number of gangs marauding Wichita streets has burgeoned to 90, according to police, and drive-by shootings have become commonplace. Last year, despite a massive crackdown against gang violence, there were 14 gang-related homicides.

Surrounded by miles of wheat farms and cattle ranches, Wichita is an overgrown town of 300,000. Ice-cream trucks trill daily through neighborhood streets. The most popular weekend hangout is the Marriott hotel disco. And there is one church for every 500 locals, as many as four in one block in some cases.

But Wichita also is the nation’s ninth-largest haven for gangs, according to a study last year at Pepperdine University.

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Long associated exclusively with major urban areas, gangs are expanding their turf into the heartland. In 1991, police reported 12 gang-linked homicides in Omaha and eight in Oklahoma City. This year, gangs have appeared even in the sleepy Kansas town of Dodge City, famous for cowboy gangs of another era.

“As far as street gangs are concerned,” said Carl Upchurch, organizer of a major gang summit in Kansas City, Mo., in May, “Middle America represents the new frontier.”

Big-city gangs branched into Minneapolis, Denver and other mid-size cities in the late 1980s, largely in reaction to aggressive police tactics against them in Los Angeles and elsewhere, according to Upchurch and other urban affairs experts.

The onslaught has caught Wichita off guard. “People here are God-fearing,” said the Rev. L.C. Drew, pastor of Grant African Methodist Episcopal Church. “They are also laid-back and self-content. They work hard at keeping this a calm place.”

But the quiet was broken on Easter Sunday, 1990, when one gang member gunned down a rival at Joyland, a popular amusement park, in the first display of open gang warfare.

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Any illusion that it was an isolated incident was shattered a few months later in an isolated park on the city’s edge. There, on a sultry August evening, four local youths kidnaped, raped and stomped a young mother to death in what turned out to be an act of retaliation by members of the Insane Crips, a local gang.

“That was one of the biggest shocks the city ever had,” said Cammie Funston, an administrator at Project Freedom, an anti-gang community organization. “It woke me up to the fact that something around here had gone very wrong.”

The incident hit Funston particularly close to home. One youth convicted and jailed in the case was Rodney Hicks, 14, a junior high student council leader and after-school playmate of Funston’s son.

Since then, public gang feuding has become more commonplace. Initially motivated by the drug market, it now seems driven more by tit-for-tat violence, according to officer Kent Bauman of the police gang unit, although, like most big cities with violence problems, there are many neighborhoods that are calm and safe.

Last year, Wichitans reported 237 robberies and other gang-related armed assaults. They also reported more than 300 drive-by shootings, more than half of them gang-related and many more gang-inspired, police said.

In one case recently, a gang leader answering a knock at the door of his motel room was shot in the mouth with a shotgun. In another, a gang member suspected of withholding money was burned repeatedly on the back with a clothes iron.

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Police and the sheriff’s department of surrounding Sedgwick County have joined to create special narcotics and gang units. Project Freedom, founded by local community activists, declared its own grass-roots war against gangs.

For three years, authorities and gangs have fought an open tug of war, with each seeking to stake out turf across the city’s sprawl of homes and stores.

When police realized that members of the Bloods and Crips gangs were commuting from Los Angeles and nearby Tulsa, Okla., and tutoring gangs here, they organized a regional anti-gang police network with Tulsa, Oklahoma City and Kansas City, Mo.

Since then, however, out-of-town gang members largely have left town, police said, but gang membership continues to grow. Although gangs based in Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and Tulsa have chapters here, police said, most of the city’s 90 street gangs are home-grown.

When gang members first concentrated drug sales in a back street dubbed “Crack Alley,” police closed it down in a series of busts. But the crack trade expanded to other areas here and remains a focus of gang activity, police said.

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This year, gangs have responded with increased efforts to cover houses and abandoned buildings with graffiti, including eulogies for slain members and death threats for rivals, as a way of claiming the surrounding neighborhoods.

Funston, in turn, organized “paint-outs,” at which volunteers painted over the graffiti on more than 100 houses.

Peeved by the gangs’ persistence, police launched a gang-intelligence unit. Its officers circulate nightly throughout the city’s northeast section, largely African American and low-income, with notebooks containing biographies of 500 gang members, including their street names.

“The idea is to gather as much information as we can about the culture that created the gangs and what keeps them going,” Carey said. “Over time, we have a little something on the majority of gang members here.”

When Cornelius Baker, a 2nd Street gang member, was gunned down in May, uniformed officers and a police helicopter were at the funeral. While some officers staked out entrance ways and parking lots, others photographed gang members.

This head-on approach has resulted in arrest and conviction of several hundred gang members in the last three years. Nevertheless, gang membership has increased from 980 to 1,250 in that time, police said.

Although initially composed almost exclusively of African-American males, the gangs now include more whites, Latinos, Asians and women, according to Carey, and the average age of members has dropped from 18 to 14.

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African Americans make up about one-third of Wichita’s population, and gangs affect nearly every black family in some way, said the Rev. T.L. Wade, pastor of New Jerusalem Baptist Church. “We used to consider gang members fringe elements,” he said. “But now we recognize that they are our sons and nephews.”

Cory Menefee, 15, is one example. He was reared by his mother after his father left home. For several years, he bounced among schools, skipping classes and failing others while trying to play quarterback.

Two years ago, Menefee was approached by a member of the Black Gangster Disciples, the local branch of a Chicago gang. “All my home boys were signing up,” Menefee said. “So I did, too.”

After his best friend was shot in the head and killed in a gang fight, Menefee started carrying a gun. Targeted by a rival gang, he was shot in the foot last December in a drive-by incident.

Although the shooting turned Menefee’s graceful athlete’s stride into a hobble, he is undeterred. “Once you join,” he said, “you’re in for life.”