Indian Reservations Harried by Youth-Gang Crime Wave

Meldon Fulwilder says he tries to help young Pima Indians stay off the street-gang path by encouraging them to practice their traditional culture.

It’s an uphill battle.

Just last month, his nephew and another young man were shot and killed by an ice cream truck driver on the nearby Gila River reservation in what police said was an attempted robbery. Last year, another nephew was stabbed to death on the Salt River reservation.

“My sisters wanted me to talk to the young people about gangs,” Fulwilder says. “I tell [the youths] if they’re strong enough and brave enough to stand up to the whites, they should be strong enough and brave enough to walk away from the gangs.”

The reservation, which is sandwiched between the Phoenix suburbs of Scottsdale and Mesa, has been at the forefront of a disturbing trend: the expansion of street gangs from cities to American Indian reservations.

The number of Indian gangs has more than doubled since 1994, federal law enforcement officials told a U.S. Senate hearing recently. And violent crime has come with them.

This year, five members of the reservation’s East Side Crips Rolling Thirties gang were convicted of murder and other offenses under a federal organized-crime law.

The tribal-gang boom is straining already scarce resources and threatening to overwhelm tribal police and courts. The problem is particularly acute in Arizona.

Nineteen gangs are operating at Salt River. Officials at the Gila River reservation, south of Phoenix, say 20 gangs operate there. The Navajo Nation, which sprawls across remote areas of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, reports on the existence of at least 55 gangs. One Navajo housing development is nicknamed “Beirut” because of the gang-related violence there.

At Gila River, a 32-bed juvenile jail is sometimes crowded to more than three times its capacity, said Laura Yergan, who manages the lockup run by the Gila River Pima-Maricopa tribe. So the Gila River tribe is building a 112-bed juvenile jail.

“But we’re not just building detention beds,” Yergan said. “We’re also balancing that with prevention, early intervention and alternatives to detention, like group homes, boot camps.”

Salt River tribal officials saw gangs booming and formed a gang-fighting task force in 1994, said Sgt. Karl Auerbach of the Salt River tribal police.

“This was not something which was ignored or put on the back burner,” Auerbach said. “The problem was identified and programs were implemented immediately.”

Navajo Nation President Albert Hale estimates that the tribe has one officer for every 1,000 people patrolling a reservation the size of West Virginia.

A study found Navajo gang members aren’t afraid of getting caught, David Nez of the tribe’s Police Department said at the Senate hearing.

“Now only a few gang members get in trouble with the law because the Navajo Nation lacks the capacity to get them in trouble,” Nez said.

Indian youths join gangs for many of the same reasons others do--to gain a sense of belonging, for excitement, for profit. Then there are the problems unique to Indian country--unemployment rates 50% and higher, a huge youth population, and the slipping away of tribal languages, traditions and cultures.

“We’re having a cultural identity crisis because families aren’t teaching [children] the traditional ways,” Fulwilder says. “Now they’re influenced from the outside, joining gangs that are already there. I tell them, ‘This is not who we are.’ ”