CHAPTER
4
Suburban
Gangs-The Affluent
Rebels
A BRIEF
HISTORY OF THE AFFLUENT GANG
Excerpted from SUBURBAN
Gangs-The AFFLUENT REBELS by Dan
Korem (Richardson, Texas:
International Focus Press, 1995) ISBN
0-9639103-1-0
The slang term
"gang" has been fearfully
and romantically used to in-dicate a
group or band of persons bonded
together because of common emotional
and social needs, whose behavior is
antisocial and criminal. Old West
gangs such as the Dalton and James
(Jesse James) gangs of the 1880s were
romanticized in newspapers and pulp
books, and this romanticism persists
in today’s cinema. During the
Roaring Twenties, when the term
"street-gang" became
popular, gangs became highly
organized and ruthlessly
business-like, thriving on
bootlegging, prostitution, extortion,
and illegal gambling. Over a thousand
of these gangs were summarized by
researcher Frederick Thrasher in his
classic book, (1936).The Gang
During the last
twenty-five years, the word
"gang" has been typically
used in the American media to specify
inner-city gangs primarily
comprised of young men and women. (In
the United States,
"inner-city" refers to
run-down or lower-income
neighborhoods, whereas in Europe, it
designates the section of town within
the "ring" or highway that
encircles the heart of a
city—both business and
residential. And it is not
necessarily a lower-income area.) The
images usually evoked by inner-city
gangs are ethnic and racial bands or
packs (even though there are White
gangs as well) that flourish in
economically depressed areas, where
hope and opportunity are abjectly
circumscribed. The self-perpetuating
ferment in these places leads to
moral decay, desperation, and
dramatic lawlessness.
The current
American psyche has been traumatized
by soaring crime, random violence,
daily murders, and the dark presence
of youth gangs—not only in the
inner cities, but in the usually calm
rural and suburban areas. Americans
are fearful. They have become
defensive and wary. They invest in
security systems, buy guns, and hire
security people to patrol their
streets. Some cities impose curfews,
but the average citizen stays home,
behind locked doors, at night; and
they watch their backs. The 1994
Crime Bill passed in Congress will
put 100,000 new officers on the
street, pump nearly $7 billion into
prevention programs, and allow
thirteen-year-olds charged with
violent crimes—such as murder,
armed robbery, and rape—to be
treated as adults. In most
metropolitan cities, killings and
other violent crimes associated with
these gangs occur daily and rising
criminal violence among youths shows
no sign of abating. While adult
violent crime is down
slightly—in New York City, for
example, homicide was down
approximately 15% and robbery and
auto theft down 13% in the first nine
months of 19941—juvenile crime
is escalating and even hardened
homicide detectives are alarmed.
The reason for this
fear is that violent crimes committed
by youths are more unpredictable,
victims are often randomly selected,
and the assailants are increasingly
younger. Innocent bystanders are also
routinely killed or injured. The
prevailing perception is painfully
obvious: we aren’t as safe as we
were twenty years ago. The juvenile
crime statistics show this to be
true, and the increasing numbers of
unpredictable violent crimes among
youths exacerbate this fear. Slayings
by teenagers, for example, rose 124 %
from 1986 to 1991.2 Minors killed
over 3,400 people in the United
States in 1992 and assaults with
deadly weapons grew from 73,987
incidents in 1982 to 143,368 in
1992.3 Contrary to the stereotypical
opinion that most crimes are
committed by ethnic groups, the
breakdown is different: 49% of those
arrested for violent crimes were White
and 49% were Black in 1992. Only
13% of those arrested for violent
crimes were females. The shocking and
alarming figure is this: 30% of
all youths arrested for violent
crimes were under the age of 15.4
The 15-19-year-old age group commits
20.1% of all US crimes and is the
largest group in the US. (Crime rates
for all other age groups are as
follows: 10-14, .04%; 20-24, 19.4%;
25-29, 16.2%; 30-34, 14.3%; 35-39,
10.1%; 40-44, 6.1%; 45-49, 3.2%;
50-65, 4.1%.5) Regarding murder, 57%
were committed by Black youths, but
White youths (56%) were more likely
to be arrested for aggravated
assault.6 In 1992,
seventeen-year-olds were almost five
times as likely to be arrested
for a homicide than a
thirty-three-year-old adult.7
And there is only
more bad news on the horizon.
Criminologists
predict that because the number of
youths under the age of 18 will
increase from 60 to 70 million by the
year 2005, overall crime rates
are expected to rise as well as
juvenile crime rates. James Alan Fox,
dean of the College of Criminal
Justice at Northeastern University,
observed, "To prevent a blood
bath in the year 2005, when we will
have a flood of fifteen-year-olds, we
have to do something today with the
five-year-olds. But when push comes
to shove, prevention programs often
fall by the wayside in favor of
increased incarceration."8
It should be noted
that US crime rates have cycled
through five- and ten-year cycles and
some perspective is as follows:
Criminal
justice experts say the
reasons for the [recent] drop
in [the overall] crime [rate]
are many. Cocaine use has
diminished in recent years.
Local governments have
imprisoned more criminals,
and with longer sentences.
More police officers have
been put on street beats.
Finally, and perhaps most
important, the
aging of the
76-million-strong post-World
War II baby boom generation
has made the population
grayer.
[Regarding
the national homicide rate],
it soared from 4.8 to 9.8 per
100,000 in the 1960s and has
hovered between 8 and 10.2
murders per 100,000 since
1970. . . . Criminologists
attribute a dip in homicides
from 1980 to 1985 to the fact
that the number of baby boom
youths between 17 and 24
peaked in 1980.
Criminologists [had]
predicted more than a
decade-long decline in
violent crime as the
population aged; they just
didn’t count on the
arrival of crack cocaine in
1985.9
Because a
significant percentage of these
crimes are committed around the
periphery, if not directly by
inner-city gangs, most of the public
focus has rightfully been on
inner-city gangs and associated
violence. The infusion of crack
cocaine and an almost unlimited
supply of guns in the 1980s in the
gang crime scene is believed to be
one of the biggest contributing
factors to the institutionalization
of inner-city gangs and violent
crimes associated with the drug
trade. Some of the common
characteristics observed in
inner-city gang members and their
neighborhoods are: absent fathers,
depressed socioeconomic conditions,
deteriorating schools, lack of
recreational facilities and programs,
absence of strong political and
community leadership, and chronically
high crime rates from theft, assault,
and murder.
If it is still hard
to imagine what could drive youths to
commit vicious and senseless acts of
violence and terror, this background
profile of a female gang member who
held her boyfriend’s gang
together while in jail will help.
The
perception of what
constitutes trouble depends
on the magnitude of the
dangers that are routinely
survived. It’s useful to
look at violence from the
other side, to suspend
morality and, for a moment,
fear. Imagine you are 15.
Your stepfather has raped
you, and the only thing
keeping you from another year
in foster care is your
sinking mom. You have learned
that the only way to keep
your mother away from liquor
is to beat her. It takes 20
minutes to subdue her. After
you do this, you must calm
your little sister. This
private weekend life makes it
easier to mug a stranger for
money that you need,
especially when a mugging
lasts no more than two
minutes. The money means you
do not have to ask your
overwhelmed mom, who hates
you when she’s sober. Or
the money is for your mom or
your little sister, people
for whom you hold much shame,
obligation and guilt.10
Fostered by this
combined fear of violent youth crime
and constant images of inner-city
gangs on evening news reports, when
gangs started to appear in affluent
communities in the 1980s, many
assumed that inner-city gangs were
expanding their turf and recruiting
more members. This is incorrect. The
first gangs observed in affluent
communities were either composed of
White youths or youths hostile to
ethnic groups.
APPEARANCE
OF AFFLUENT GANGS
Since the early
1980s, essentially three types of
gangs have been observed in affluent
communities: delinquent, ideological,
and occultic gangs. Each has one
thing in common: the youths commit
crimes in a specific context.
A brief characterization of the
context in which each gang type
commits criminal acts is as follows:
•
Delinquent Gang:
Desire for profit and
thuggery.
•
Ideological Gang:
Attachment to a specific
ideology, which may or may
not be political, such as
skinhead gangs that target
ethnic groups for assaults,
justified by an ideology of
"ethnic purity" or
nationalism.
•
Occultic Gang:
Attachment to beliefs in
occultic powers.
A more detailed
explanation of the typology used for
the three gang types is discussed in
chapter 12 and a thorough examination
of each gang type is found in
chapters 12-15. The first affluent
gang types to appear in the United
States were the ideological and
occultic gangs.
Beginning around
1983, occultic gangs were
noticed on the West Coast and
eventually became visible across the
United States by the mid- to
late-1980s. Gangs formed around the
central theme of attaining occultic
powers, which is why many were
mistakenly labeled as cults. Their
criminal activity was principally
limited to small-time drug
trafficking, although some violent
crimes were committed. These gangs
surfaced almost exclusively in
affluent communities with few ethnic
members.
Around the same
time, ideological gangs—most
notably skinhead gangs—also
appeared. These gangs initially
surfaced in middle-income
neighborhoods and were aggressively
anti-ethnic. Then in the late 1980s,
youths from affluent communities
started forming their own gangs as
well as joining existing
gangs. The criminal activity of these
gangs involved physical assaults and
even murder directed towards minority
and ethnic groups, such as Blacks,
Hispanics, and Jews. Some of these
gangs also engaged in low-level drug
trafficking. The assumption was that
groups such as the Ku Klux Klan were
solely responsible for spawning these
gangs. Consequently they were not
labeled gangs but subversive groups.
The emergence of
the delinquent gangs as a
trend didn’t begin until the
late 1980s and early 1990s. Isolated
cases of delinquent gangs have always
been present, but delinquent gangs as
a trend is a recent
development. The criminal activity of
these gangs has run the
gamut—assault, theft, burglary,
and drug trafficking. This gang type
will probably grow the fastest over
the next ten years.
It is imperative to
recognize that in the beginning
youths from affluent communities
chose to form their own gangs separate
and apart from inner-city gangs.
In most cases, these youths did not
form gangs at the recruitment urgings
of inner-city gangs. The spill-over
effect of inner-city type gangs
recruiting youths into their fold
didn’t become a significant
factor in affluent communities until
the early 1990s. The Andy Kriz case
(chapter 3) is one such example.
Typically, gangs that did form
because of the direct influence of
inner-city gangs became delinquent
gangs and didn’t attach
themselves to a particular belief
system or ideology like the occultic
and ideological gangs. As of this
writing, affluent gangs forming at
the urgings of inner-city gangs
doesn’t represent the majority
of affluent gangs. However, because
of the large numbers of at-risk
youths present in affluent
communities and the increasing
influence of inner-city gangs, this
is a potential trend that warrants
careful monitoring.
In the media an
inaccurate characterization was often
conveyed about the types of gangs
that were forming in affluent
communities. Gang members were
usually characterized as those from ethnic
groups. In the summer of 1993,
the New York Times printed a
front-page story on the spread of
gangs to the suburbs, entitled,
"Gang Membership Grows in
Middle-Class Suburbs." Although
the interior of the article
recognized that "Gangs are
attracting more teenagers from all
backgrounds and socio-economic
groups,"11 the front-page
picture used showed two ethnic youths.
Pictures of White youths were
noticeably absent. This kind of
characterization in the media, often
done to protect the local
community’s image or as a result
of ignorance, fed the misplaced,
popular belief that inner-city youths
were the cause of initial affluent
gang formation.
It is crucial to
recognize that the affluent gang
trend began and grew on its
own—that affluent youths on
their own (in most cases) formed
their own gangs without direct
external direction. Why? Because
unless communities acknowledge the
actual cause-and-effect relationship,
effective action can be neutralized.
When communities think that gangs are
solely forming because of
"outsiders," then valuable
resources will be ineffectively
appropriated and the problem will
only grow and spread.
Another factor that
contributed to the failure of
recognizing these groups as gangs in
affluent communities was due to
"boosterism." City hall in
many affected communities failed to
acknowledge that they had a gang
problem for fear of tarnishing its
image and driving away business. A
typical example was the suburb of
Carrollton where I personally
investigated several gangs around
1989 and 1990. City officials
declined to acknowledge their own
gang problem and initiate effective
action. (As a counterpoint,
neighboring Farmers Branch, a suburb
with a similar community, recognized
its gang problem and took action.
They implemented a model for
prevention that has attracted the
attention of officials from cities
across the US. How they approached
this issue is addressed in chapter
19. It should also be noted that by
1992, Carrollton reversed its
previous denial of its gang problem.)
A police officer from another Dallas
suburb during the same time period
said, "You know there are gangs
and I know that there are gangs. But
the word from city hall is: ‘We
don’t have a gang
problem.’"
Vocal recognition
of an affluent gang problem by a
handful of local communities
didn’t begin until around 1990,
but by 1992 many upscale communities
were forced to acknowledge the growth
of gangs. For example, in Tucson,
Arizona, in the late 1980s the first
recognition of gangs properly focused
on inner-city gangs that were
spreading to lower-income areas of
Tucson. Gang members from other
cities, such as Los Angeles, moved
into Tucson. They were fleeing police
crackdowns and were motivated by
profits from the sale of
"crack" cocaine. This began
the public perception of gangs in the
1980s. But by 1990, local law
enforcement acknowledged that gangs
were now in affluent communities.
This was puzzling to local officials
because there wasn’t a direct
connection to the new inner-city
gangs that moved to town.
In 1990, the Arizona
Daily Star quoted several
officials who noted the appearance of
gangs in affluent parts of Tucson.
Pat Carrillo, supervisor of juvenile
intensive probation for Pima County
Juvenile Court Center, said,
"It’s here now. . . .
I’ve seen places where they let
it go and let it go. . . . It’s
like doing nothing about cancer.
Sure, it doesn’t hurt now, but
it will spread and eventually it will
kill you."12
Sgt. Ron
Zimmerling, then head of the
ten-member, anti-gang unit for the
Tucson Police Department, added that
"our estimates are always low.
There’s so much intimidation in
gangs that a lot of people don’t
report them."13
Former Tucson police officer, Warren
Allison, who worked for the Tucson
Unified School District on a
two-member anti-gang task force,
observed that the gang phenomena was
spreading to middle- and upper-middle
class suburbs: "In Tucson, it
used to be typical barrio gangs in
certain neighborhoods [referring to
Hispanic gangs]. But now it’s
spreading. I don’t know
why."14 Mr. Allison’s
bewilderment was characteristic of
many communities throughout America.
Eventually by 1993, most communities
that had gangs began openly
discussing their dilemma. Even those
that had formerly resisted began to
take action. The problem
couldn’t be
ignored.
The
cause-and-effect relationship of why
gangs are forming in affluent
communities is presented in detail in
chapters 5 through 11. For reference
purposes, a condensation of a typical
flow of events that lead up to
gangs in affluent communities is as
follows:
1. Chronic
family breakdown in at least a
segment of a community.
2. Severe
expressions in the youth
subculture is seen, evinced by
their dress, hair styles, music,
public behavior, graffiti, and so
on.
3. Drug abuse,
which includes alcohol, becomes
chronically endemic.
4. Unexpected
eruptions of violence.
5. The ferment
now exists for the formation of
gangs.
Naturally, not all
communities will experience each of
the above in the sequence presented
before gangs appear, but most have.
HOW
MANY GANGS?
A 1994 New York
Times/CBS News Poll revealed that
18% of White youths stated
that gangs were a problem in their
school. The results of the
seventy-three questions in the survey
pointed towards the fact that most of
the 1,055 youths were not from
inner-city areas.
The number of gangs
present in affluent communities,
however, is uncertain. The trend is
too new for law enforcement to have
gathered abundant and reliable data.
States don’t require the
mandatory reporting of gang activity
by all communities. It has only been
in the last couple of years that
states, driven by public fears, have
begun to collect reliable data on
inner-city gangs. (Some states, for
example, that have long been affected
by chronic juvenile crime, are just
now agreeing to share youth crime
data with public schools so that they
can more effectively be a part of the
solution to reduce violent juvenile
crime and gangs.)
Another reason for
uncertainty is that the problem
isn’t nearly as chronic as it is
in the inner-city. The wake-up call
has been sounded. It’s not
perceived as sufficiently threatening
to incite sophisticated, nationwide
studies. Additionally, hard data is
difficult to obtain because affluent
youths don’t usually brag about
their gang membership. They
don’t want the police monitoring
their activities, and they don’t
want to be hassled or arrested. This
is very different from inner-city
gangs where identification is part of
their bravura code. In 1993, though,
I noted that the number of youths who
had indicated gang activity in
their own neighborhood seemed to have
markedly jumped.
Each summer from
1988 to 1993, I spoke to several
thousand youths at sports camps on
the subject of deception and
how it appears in various social
trends, such as gangs. These youths
were predominantly from affluent
families across America. At the end
of these presentations, I asked:
"How many of you know about gang
activity in your own neighborhood?"
The purpose of my question was to
find out if the affluent gang trend
was growing or if it was a momentary
youth subculture phenomenon.
Up until 1992, only
about 5%-10% indicated that they knew
of such activity. The summer of 1993
was different. The needle jumped. The
average response leaped to 40%-60%.
Because of the extraordinary
increase, I fine-tuned my question
and asked, "Had you simply heard
about gang activity from someone
or through the media—you know,
secondhand and thirdhand stuff? Or do
you actually know people in
gangs in your neighborhood?" The
response was "personal
contact." In October of 1993, I
lectured at the FBI National Academy
to over fifty law enforcement
officers from across the US on the
subject of gangs. When asked the same
question, their response mirrored the
student’s response that summer.
Like the students, the officers’
perceptions were not based upon
increased media coverage of this
issue. They knew about it firsthand.
The same percentage has continued to
remain steadfast through 1994.
(Note: In 1993 and
early 1994 I made a similar inquiry
of college students in America at
various universities, aged 18-21,
during lecture presentations. Some of
the campuses included: USC,
University of Minnesota, Louisiana
Tech, Penn State, and West Virginia
University. Although my survey
isn’t strictly scientific, the
sampling is compellingly empirical.
Over 10,000 students indicated that
only about 10-15% had come in contact
with some kind of gang activity in
their neighborhoods. However, a
larger number, as high as 20%,
indicated that they knew about gang
activity in their neighborhood that
began after they had started
college. This suggested that the
younger the youth, the more likely
that he or she had come into contact
with gang activity. This matches the
typical age for gang involvement
(12-17). Also, students polled in
more stable communities with lower
crime rates like Minneapolis, had
predictably lower percentages than
communities like Chicago or Los
Angeles.)
There doesn’t
appear to be any particular reason
why affluent gangs suddenly increased
in numbers—seemingly
overnight—other than it had been
a growing trend that had finally
reached a critical mass. As already
noted, gangs such as skinhead and
neo-Nazi types already existed and
were now being recognized as gangs in
local communities. This may have
accounted for a sudden surge in law
enforcement numbers.
A
WORKING DEFINITION OF A GANG
I sought out
numerous sociologists with expertise
in gang research to obtain a workable
definition of gangs. Malcolm Klein,
Ph.D., director of the USC Social
Science Research Institute, states:
"A gang is a bunch of guys
involved in delinquent and violent
activity,"15 His definition focuses
solely on "street gangs"
and excludes groups with a specific
goal orientation such as biker and
skinhead gangs. He writes in his
book, The American Street Gang
(to be published in 1995), that he
finds it necessary to exclude almost
as many different groups as he would
include to avoid unwanted
stereotyping.
Irving Spergel,
Ph.D., a sociologist at the
University of Chicago, when asked
about the idea of affluent gangs,
said, "It’s almost a
contradiction in terms," as his
research has primarily dealt with
inner-city gangs. About the
possibility of affluent gangs, he
characterized them as "a bunch
of guys that get together and raise
some hell. They’re an odd-ball
gang. Maybe they’ll steal, but
then they’ll disappear."16
The FBI Law
Enforcement Bulletin featured an
article on gangs in which the
authors, an officer with the
Baltimore Police Department and a
university professor, wrote: "A
gang is a group of youths . . .
banded together for antisocial and
criminal activities."17
Developing a
"scientific" definition for
the term "gang" isn’t
practical because not all gangs are
comprised solely of youths. Neither
do all youths join gangs in order to
commit crimes, nor do all gangs
commit crimes of violence.
For the purposes of
having a working definition for this
book, I have modified the above
definition to specify a youth
gang. There is also a general
consensus in America that the term gangs
should specify that criminal
activity is afoot, even if a specific
youth doesn’t have the intent of
committing crimes. Groups of youths
who adopt the gang
façade—attire, hand signals,
speech, etc.—but who don't
commit crimes will not be labeled as
a gang. To qualify as a gang,
criminal activity must be a
characteristic of the group. The
crimes committed don’t
necessarily have to include more
severe acts of violence, such as
murder, but can simply be limited to
assault—as in fist fights. In
fact, some gangs may completely avoid
violent crimes and simply buy and
sell drugs. For these reasons, the
definition of a youth gang is
as follows:
A group of
youths who are banded
together in a specific
context and whose activities
include, but are not limited
to, criminal acts. Adults may
or may not be a part of this
group, but when there is
adult involvement, they will
only represent a small
minority of the gang
membership.
(The reason for the
inclusion of the possibility of adult
members is that young adults, under
thirty years of age, are sometimes
gang members.)
This modest
refinement will help provide a
specific context for the rest of this
book, separating a youth gang from
other terms that are part of
professional and popular
jargon—clubs, cults, social
movement, mob, or even Mafia.
Compare, for example, the definition
of a youth gang to a working
definition of a cult, whose
application can be equally ambiguous:
A cult is
an isolated and/or
anti-social group of persons
who give their allegiance to
a leader or leaders, whose
purpose and/or goal it is to
attain manipulative power
through unquestioned loyalty
to a system of beliefs.18
Cult is also a word
that can be used quite broadly, and
among sociologists is another word
that has never been definitively
defined with such specificity as to
become standard. The definition
included here was developed in order
to provide a referential framework
when comparing different groups.
Gangs and cults can of course overlap
each other. For example, in some
youth gangs there might be a leader
who seeks unquestioning allegiance to
a belief system, but in many gangs
this isn’t present, such as the
Andy Kriz case. In Kriz’s gang,
youths simply committed themselves to
each other to profit from theft.
There are cases, however, where a
gang might also qualify as a cult,
particularly in some occultic gangs
in which youths give their allegiance
to a particular belief system at the
urgings of a manipulative leader,
such as The Satanic Cult (chapter 3).
Popular expressions
such as "hanging out,"
where youths simply gather together
usually at a specified places,
wouldn’t qualify as a gang
because crimes aren’t typically
committed. "Hanging out" is
often a forerunner to the beginning
of gangs, but by itself wouldn’t
constitute a gang.
THE
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN INNER-CITY
AND
AFFLUENT GANGS
At the present,
gang experts in America have focused
their attentions on the inner-city
gang problem, the affluent gang trend
taking a back seat. One sociologist
when asked for information about
affluent gangs, expressed concern
that attention shouldn’t be
diverted from inner-city gangs
because this could lead to a
reduction of resources and manpower
to address this problem. This caution
is well noted, but if the affluent
gang problem isn’t addressed
now—especially in a preventative
mode—the long-term effects could
be disastrous.
Inner-city gangs
have and will probably continue to
dominate the public’s attention
for the next few years. The sheer
volume of news coverage of inner-city
gangs, however, has created
inaccurate stereotypical impressions
of affluent gangs. For this reason,
it is important to clarify the
significant differences between
inner-city and affluent gangs. Each
of the differences discussed should
be preceded with the qualifying word
"typically," because not
every gang will follow every observed
trend. The following explanations are
only intended as guidelines and must
be evaluated based upon individual
cases.
Territorial—This
is one of the most obvious
differences between current
inner-city and affluent gangs.
Inner-city gangs are typically
"turf" gangs. They mark out
a specified territory as their own
with graffiti and acts of
intimidation and violence. Gang
members know that to enter the
territory of a rival gang is to take
one’s life in one’s hands.
Affluent gangs have rarely been seen
to be territorial with an "own
the neighborhood" mentality. The
exception are some delinquent gangs
that mark off territories where they
can steal and sell illegal goods.
Affluent youths have more money and
are therefore more mobile. There
isn’t the need to feel that one
has to stake out a territory; they
like the idea of seeing new sights.
Inner-city youths often don’t
have the same ability to be mobile,
so there is a lot of currency
attached to being the king of
one’s "hood." A large
street gang with two or three hundred
members taken as a whole, however,
often does have mobility with
increased illegal revenue, evinced by
gangs spreading their crime networks
to other cities. The average
individual gang member, though,
doesn’t.
Institutionalized—Inner-city
gangs are now entering the third and
fourth generation of membership. It
isn’t uncommon for one’s
father, uncle, or cousin, or even
grandfather to have been a member of
the same gang. For this reason,
inner-city gangs have well-developed
infrastructures and are an intimate
part of the substructure of
economically depressed communities.
Connections have been made and
contacts networked that have endured
for twenty and thirty years. Affluent
gangs are a relatively new phenomenon
and don’t have these kinds of
entrenched roots. Currently, they
don’t continue on in a community
for more than a couple of years.
Unlike inner-city youths, most
affluent youths after a period of
time lose interest and start thinking
about getting a job or going to
college. For this reason, affluent
gang activity is a much easier
problem to attack. Most of the youths
in affluent gangs are separate and
apart from the mainstream of the
youth culture. They are more isolated
and therefore easier to target for
disengagement and preventative
action. But unless affected
communities act, individual acts of
affluent gangs can be just as deadly
as inner-city gangs. Bullets can kill
just as easily when fired by a youth
in a project as a bullet fired from a
youth from a white-column home.
Ideology—Inner-city
gangs typically don’t have an
ideological bent (some exceptions are
noted in chapters 13 and 14). The
turf and the trafficking of drugs are
the key factors that bind inner-city
gangs together, as well as social
needs. Of the three affluent gang
types, ideological and occultic gangs
are more likely to attach themselves
to an ideology. Most delinquent
gangs, including those in affluent
communities, usually don’t form
with an ideological bent.
Disengagement—Disengaging
any kind of youth from a gang is
difficult, but in the inner-city most
professionals agree that once a youth
is in a gang, it is a slim chance
that he/she can be talked out of
their gang. This isn’t
pessimism, this is just the reality
of the problem. Many, including
myself, are upbeat about preventative
action that will keep youths out of
inner-city gangs, but once a youth
becomes involved, the hostile nature
of many neighborhoods provides cover
from attack. This doesn’t excuse
gang activity, but this fact has to
be reckoned with before most youths
will exit as most gangs have severe
penalties for those who decide to
disengage. For affluent gangs, the
prognosis isn’t as dismal. There
aren’t as many day-to-day
pressures that would necessitate a
youth remaining a part of a gang.
Like inner-city gangs, however, it is
easier to launch preventative
measures that will work than to
attempt to disengage a youth who is
involved in a gang. Once a youth
joins a gang, there is a strong bond
that is often difficult to break.
Unpredictability—The
random violence committed by
inner-city gangs is one of the
greatest threats they pose. You
can’t predict when or where they
will strike next. What is predictable
is that the allegiances are well
staked out and easy to identify as
they have persisted for years. Up
until the present, affluent gangs
haven’t been as violent as
inner-city gangs, but random acts of
violence can appear just as easily as
seen in cases cited later in this
text. What is unsettling about
affluent gangs is that money and
increased educational know-how can
combine together to create especially
frightening terrorist types of gangs.
The structure and nature of
inner-city gangs hasn’t changed
much over the last ten years, except
for the merchandise or drugs being
sold. Affluent gangs, though, are
more likely to change and develop
rapidly, inspired by what is
currently in vogue in the youth
subculture. Secrecy is a big part of
the affluent gang aura as well as a
greater need to act out in new and
creative ways, fueling their
unpredictability.
Female
Members—In inner-city
gangs, female membership typically
hovers around 10%19
according to recent surveys, except
for Hispanic gangs where
"auxiliary" female
counterparts are common. Affluent
female gang membership is
considerably lower. Precise numbers
aren’t available, but based upon
firsthand inquiry into scores of
gangs in the US and Europe, less than
5% is a reasonable estimate. Female
crime as a whole has been
persistently lower than male crime
figures in the US and Europe.
Logically, however, it is not
uncommon for females to be found
around the periphery of a gang dating
gang members, although criminal
participation is minimal except for
the ingestion of drugs. (Because
female affluent gang membership has
not been a major factor in affluent
gangs, discussion of females in gangs
is limited in this text.)
Identity
Factors—Identity factors
refers to how a gang distinguishes
itself from other groups of youths.
Gangs usually rely upon things one
can see or hear, with preference to
what one can see. Turf, attire,
initiations, lingo, hand signals
(which operate like passwords) are
some of the distinguishing devices
used by gangs. This is true in
inner-city and affluent gangs. Music
fads, dress fashions, and visual
media are quick inspiration points as
they are easily conveyed to youths
who look towards an idol to emulate.
The key difference is that an
affluent gang is more likely to rely
upon nonvisual or more subtle means
of identification so as to remain
invisible to adults. Affluent gang
membership isn’t yet something
to be widely flaunted for fear of
police monitoring. For some affluent
gangs, such as an occultic gang,
developing a concealed, secretive
cover is part of the thrill. Being
part of a group without even
one’s peers knowledge adds to
the excitement.
EUROPEAN
GANGS
As is true in the
US, gangs are forming in affluent
communities across all of Europe from
England to Germany to Hungary to
Switzerland to Poland to Holland. No
country has been able to escape this
new trend. The appearance of urban
and affluent gangs has been rapid in
some countries, while others are just
now being affected. (Also in common
with the US are the escalating
violent juvenile crime rates in most
of these countries. In England in
1994, for example, Scotland Yard
broke with its long-standing
tradition of unarmed British bobbies,
and a few dozen specially trained
officers in "armed response
vehicles" started strapping on
sidearms in hip holsters.)
In Hungary, after
the fall of Communism and the
authoritarian rule—albeit not as
severe as in other countries such as
Romania—gangs started to
proliferate20 according to Laszlo
Czendes, an officer in Hungary’s
Department of Crime Prevention and
one of Hungary’s leading
juvenile gang experts. He notes that
crime overall from 1989 to 1990
increased 51.3% according to Ministry
of the Interior studies. Regarding
gang activity, Gypsy gangs were the
first to begin to grow in numbers.
(His comment is not a racial slur,
but rather an observation similar to
stating that inner-city gangs are
typically ethnic in the US.) The hard
authoritarian rule kept a lid on
these types of gangs. This same
observation has been made throughout
Eastern (Central) Europe and the
former Soviet Union—especially
Russia. Czendes adds that most of
these gangs weren’t violent,
just motivated by greed or survival.
Currently, this trend is changing,
though, and gang activity has been
observed to be more violent.
Additionally, affluent gangs have
begun to appear with greater
frequency. He attributes this to
severely dysfunctional family factors
that are further addressed in chapter
6.
Even in
Switzerland, a country worlds apart
from Hungary, gangs are forming in
small but perceivable numbers in
affluent communities for the first
time. This is hard to believe.
Switzerland was the first European
country to embrace democracy, is
virtually slum-free, has the highest
standard of living in Western Europe,
and has relatively few ethnic groups.
The Swiss have traditionally felt
safe in their country that maintained
its neutrality during WW II.
During a 1994
lecture tour, I was asked to speak to
a group of police officers in Zurich.
My facilitator for the lecture drove
me to a building in the equivalent of
a downtown district in the US. His
daughter, four, was in the back seat.
He jumped out of the car, and started
to escort me into the building. His
daughter was still in the car. I
said, "You forgot Sabrina."
"No,
she’ll be okay," he said
confidently.
"You
can’t do this. Let’s take
her up. Someone could abduct
her," I insisted.
"This is
Switzerland. This is Zurich.
Don’t worry, my friend!"
"But what if a
foreigner walks by who isn’t
Swiss? Aren’t you afraid?"
"No. This is
Switzerland," he said proudly
and with authority.
This is how safe
people have traditionally felt in
Switzerland, but this is changing.
Switzerland in 1968 did have social
protests on campuses, but on a much
lower scale than the US. (One of the
worst took place in Lausanne. One
result of these protests is that when
the University of Lausanne was
expanded, the campus was built on the
outskirts of town with few
dormitories. This forced students to
live spread out across the city, thus
making it more difficult for students
to organize.) In 1992, during my
first trip to Switzerland, I noted in
my journal that gang activity was
likely to surface soon. Grotesque
volumes of graffiti, often a
forerunner of gang activity, was
evident throughout Zurich and Bern,
and drug abuse had been a hardened
trend among young people.
Although not
chronic, skinhead gang activity had
been present in Switzerland since the
mid-1980s. The police officers to
whom I presented my lecture in 1994
acknowledged that they were starting
to see a marginal, but not chronic,
increase of affluent gangs for the
first time. The trend seems to be at
about the same level seen in the US
in the very early 1980s. There was
unanimous agreement, though, that
this new gang trend would probably
continue to grow just as it has in
every other European country.
The types of urban
and affluent gangs found in Europe
are far more diverse than in the US.
Barbara Fatyga, a sociologist with
the University of Warsaw and one of
Europe’s foremost gang experts,
has charted numerous gangs that have
formed in Poland. Many of these gangs
have severe ideological bents like
the skinhead groups in the US. She
has documented, for example,
ecological gangs that premeditate
crimes such as assault. These
aren’t just social protests
crying out against the pollution left
by years of Communist rule that have
threatened many of Poland’s lush
forests. She has observed that many
of these ideological gangs commonly
display street gang activity and
violence similar to other
nonideological gangs. And like other
countries, many of these gangs are
comprised of youths from families
that are not financially destitute.
This diversity of ideologies that
Fatyga has found in Poland is common
in all the Western European
countries, and is explored in greater
detail in chapter 14.
It has become
increasingly important to maintain
some global picture of the types and
variants of gangs that are forming in
Europe. Some, such as skinhead gangs,
have already inspired American
youths, and other types could appeal
to educated affluent youths desiring
to be "different."
Emulating one’s foreign youth
counterparts to the puzzlement of
adults is something that could have
enormous appeal, and the nature of
the youth subculture today makes it
easy to transfer ideas back and forth
across the Atlantic. For those who
desire to take preventative measures
in the US, keeping abreast of current
European developments (or other
affected areas of the world) is
imperative as it can be a valuable
source of information.
Finally, some might
assume that youths in Europe join
gangs for different reasons than
youths in the US. This is a
misconception. While the precise gang
type and variant a youth joins will
be influenced by the local culture,
there is a predictable continuity of
the profile of a youth who is likely
to join a gang, what he/she expects
from gang activity, and the reasons
why a youth will disengage. In short,
once one has spent time with youths
of one type of gang in a country, one
is likely to meet similar youths in
another country. And after talking to
a couple of dozen of these youths,
the mysterious façade of gang
activity easily peels away. Only the
cryptic beliefs of a handful of gangs
might pose a challenge.
RISE
AND FALL OF CURRENT TRENDS
Gang activity in
affluent US and European communities
will continue to increase. This is
almost a virtual certainty based upon
current social conditions. Chapter 6
presents the predictable profile of a
youth who is likely to join a gang,
and there has been no change in the
present social conditions that
suggests that fewer youths will be at
risk of gang involvement. Only more.
What is impossible
to predict precisely is which gangs
will and won’t gain favor among
affluent youths. My guess is that
occultic gangs, which are currently
not as popular as three or four years
ago, could easily resurge in another
few years—when another group of
youths reaches the peak period for
involvement, ages 12-17. For reasons
explained in chapter 12, I think that
delinquent gangs will become more
popular and US expressions of
European ideological gangs could
become the most popular with those
who possess the sharpest minds
intellectually. But this is just
speculation. What isn’t
speculation is that there is a
definitive profile of a youth who is
likely to join a gang and the numbers
of these youths only appear to be
rising.
The Art of
Profiling
Reading People Right the First Time.
Reading people is a natural
reaction. Now learn how to profile
people like a trained
professional—with comprehensive
and systematic accuracy that extends
beyond just reading body language.
Back to chapter three
To
chapter one
Gang Update | Article/Overview | Reviews
FAQ | Excerpts | Photos
