SUBURBAN GANG -
THE AFFLUENT
REBELS UPDATE
(The following update, provided by the author, is divided by general topics as it relates to the
text, and, where applicable, specific chapters are referenced. Where
appropriate, older update content is noted by the year that it was first
posted. The
following update is only to be interpreted in the context of the entire
text and not by itself. If you do not have a copy of the text,
we do not advise applying or referencing any of the following. It is anticipated that
expanded discussions of some of these topics will appear in the 2nd ed. of
the text which is expected to be published in 2006. While some of the
concepts provided in this "live addendum" can be immediately
applied, other concepts are provided in the spirit of raising new and
important research questions. Please feel free to copy and use any
of the copyrighted information in
this update with the following
copyright acknowledgment: Dan Korem,
Suburban Gang Update, (International Focus Press,
2001.)
8/22/05 Update
Suburban and Small Town Gangs on the Rise: How Many?
The number of gang members per 50,000 (small towns and
suburbs) was 200-500 in the late 1990s. As the number of youths decreased
and the implementation of community interventions was applied, that number
dropped to about 100-300 as of mid-2004. This is based upon samplings from
police data bases. As the number of juveniles has increased and the
at-risk environment has remained about the same, jurisdictions across the
US are reporting more gang activity. This increase is not as a
result of street gang recruitment. Rather, these are gangs formed by
youths in those communities.
Suburban and Small Town Gangs and Terrorist Link
I've written extensively about the terrorist-affluent gang link (more
below). It is now a reality. In my new book
Rage of the Random Actor,
Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber" who tried to blowup an American Airlines
jetliner, was a gang member from a suburb of London. He was not an
"inner-city" youth. Most suicide bombers are 17-24 and it is expected that
more recruitment of secondary and college/university students will take
place in the US by domestic (like Tim McVeigh) and international terrorist
cells. An entire chapter in Rage of the Random Actor looks at this
link and how to stop gang recruitment.
Prior Updates
Missing Protector Strategy (MPS)
The application of the MPS (Missing
Protector Strategy) is now providing hard data that this strategy
will deter most at-risk youth behavior for youths who receive a protector,
regardless of socio-economic or ethnic considerations. The
MissingProtector.com website
will be operative by March 15, 2002 and will provide updated data.
As you will recall, the MPS was originally identified to thwart gang
recruitment. But, when applied reduces most at-risk youth behavior, as
noted on the website. A complete write-up of it application will be
provided in the 2nd editions of Suburban Gangs (2003 release) and
Streetwise Parents, Fool-Proof Kids (summer 2002 release).
Gangs & Terrorist Activity
The January 1996 Dallas Morning News
article I submitted, discussed the potential for new forms of
terrorism. While there is a significant threat, there are domestic
ideological gangs that have continued their attacks (over 5 fire bombings
in the US since September 11, 2001 attacks). Law enforcement and
researchers should recognize that this internal threat potentially poses a
greater threat than the external threat because of the numbers of these
individuals.
Number of
at-risk youths catastrophically high
In the US, there are approximately 64
million youths. Over 40 million of these youths have one of the five
classic risk factors for gang recruitment noted in CHAPTER 5. That's more
than the entire population of Canada. Over 32 million youths alone come
from broken homes.
New Risk
Factor
There is a new risk factor that now accounts for 5–15%
of gang recruitment outside of the inner-city: Both parents work
full-time jobs, and both parents don't have to work full-time jobs.
This is now a common factor for other at-risk youth behaviors outside of
the inner-city. Briefly, kids are made to feel like they have everything,
but they are left without daily guidance, assurance, discipline, and so
on. For many of these kids, it only fuels their rage.
We are not talking about both parents working to earn enough to keep one
of the kids in college or to pay for grandmother's medical bills.
Here, parents have put earning income as a higher priority than raising
and nurturing their kids. This new trend was referenced in CHAPTER 7 in
the Boca Raton, Florida case.
As a counterpoint, there are now many dramatic examples of parents who
have quit their jobs, taken part-time jobs, work out of their home, etc.
in order to give their children the time they deserve. The result? Severe
at-risk behavior often comes to a halt.
Look for significant dialogue and changes in the workplace as this common
sense factor becomes more widely known.
Tip for Employers: Employees who have stability at home, almost
always are more productive and focused. They will produce more in fewer
hours. Adjust hours for needy employees so they can be home before kids
come home from school. Allow for certain types of tasks to be taken home
that can be performed after kids go to sleep. It not only makes good
business sense, its also the right thing to do.
Missing Protector Strategy (MPS)
The Missing Protector Factor has given rise to the Missing
Protector Strategy. Please go to this page and learn how what
started as an idea, is now actually working in schools. The MPS is also
deterring most severe at-risk behavior for at-risk students . . . not just
reducing gang recruitment.
New Terrorist
Youth Gangs
In 1996, I posted the following comments, shown in
brackets, warning of new terrorist youths gangs. New comments follow.
[Throughout Suburban Gangs I
warned that we must take preemptive
action to halt the formation of
suburban gangs or face the
consequences. In a 1996 OP-ED article
syndicated on the Knight-Ridder
syndicate, I closed with an urgent
warning:
Affluent gangs will be with us
long into the next century. The
choice is preemptive action now, or
engaging a new uncontrolled form of
terrorism in the future-the very near
future.
Two weeks after the article ran,
three thirteen-year-old youths were
arrested in a Syracuse, New York
suburb. Their crime? They downloaded
instructions for making a fertilizer
bomb, had obtained the necessary
materials, and were plotting to plant
the bomb in their junior high.
Numerous similar isolated
incidents have occurred during the past two years. In fact, almost every
week for the past year, a bomb has
gone off in an affluent community
somewhere in the US. Some were built
by youths acting on their own, but
many were built by youths in affluent
gangs. Today, the conditions are ripe
for youths from affluent families who
fit the profile detailed in Chapters
6 and 7 to carry out even terrorist
attacks. There are many at-risk
youths who might not have the
physical constitution to engage in
physical assaults, but they do who
have the money, mobility, and
connectivity through computer
terminals to cause wide-spread
destruction. If this is hard to
fathom, just imagine the violent
bombings of the 60's translated to
high school and junior high
teenagers. Then you'll get an idea of
what we are facing with increasing
frequency - and will only grow over
the next few years. In some ways,
these youths pose a greater
concentrated threat per individual
then their inner-city gang
counterparts, because of their
affluence and mobility.]
Those comments were posted in 1996, long before the first random terrorist
shootings in communities like Jonesboro, AR; Pearl, MS; Springfield, OR.
And, three years before the bombings in Littleton, CO in 1999.
There is still significant resistance to type the incidents in Pearl, MS
and Littleton, CO as gang activity, but that is what they were. Youths in
a group context committed crimes. Even researchers for federal studies
resist classifying these groups as gangs, but this will probably change as
the number of incidents increases.
There is no evidence whatsoever that this trend is going to diminish. Our
research only indicates that this will continue to grow.
Every day during the 2000–20001 school
year, youths were found with bombs and automatic weapons with plots to
take out their schools. This is an unprecedented trend in world history.
Very few of these incidents are ever reported. And
as Korem & Associates has warned, it is fully expected that this trend
will extend to university campuses, reminiscent of the terrorist events in
the late 1960s.
In response to this threat, Korem
& Associates has trained more education and law enforcement
professionals (over 15,000) on this issue than any other organization in
the world.
Number of Gangs Members
Increasing
The number of
gangs in affluent, upscale
communities has risen significantly
since the publication of Suburban
Gangs-The Affluent Rebels in
January of 1995. At that time, it
wasn't uncommon to find 50-250 gang
members in a community of
50,000-75,000. In 1995 in three
Dallas suburbs, for example, the
numbers of youths were as follows:
Plano 150; Richardson 100; Farmers
Branch 150 (reduced from 250 in
1992). Prior to the publication of
Suburban Gangs, obtaining reliable
statistics regarding gangs in upscale
communities was difficult, typically
due to political pressure preventing
the collection or release of such
surveys. This trend is now slowly
reversing itself, similar to the
reduced resistance by communities in
the 70s and 80s when acknowledging
increased youth drug use. Today,
after numerous interviews over the
last two years with law enforcement
agencies across the US, and surveys that Korem &
Associates has conducted with local educators and law enforcement, the numbers
of gang youths in these communities
has risen to an average of 200-500 in the typical
non-inner-city community.
The overall number of youths in
gangs is over 900,000 in over 25,000
gangs according to the1996 National
Youth Gang Study conducted by the National
Youth Gang Center. We know that
the numbers are actually much higher,
because many rural communities have
gangs, and these communities were not
included in the report.
Additionally, it is a common practice
by most suburban communities to
under-report their actual gang
statistics by at least 50%.
Therefore, the best estimate today of
the total number of gang members is
about 900,000–1,000,000.
Appearance of Leftist
Anarchist Gangs in America (1997 and 2001)
When
I keynoted at the National
Youth Gang Symposium (Dallas, June
1996) I talked about the
appearance of leftist/anarchist youth
gangs in America. In
Chapter 13, I predicted that these
gangs would one day appear. Three
months after Suburban
Gangs was published, I
received the first hard evidence that
these were now a reality in the US, even using
bombs.
What
follows is an excerpt of January 5,
1996 correspondence I received from
the Salt Lake Area Gang Project
providing a brief overview of one of
these new gang variants, which should
be compared to similar gang variants
in Poland, noted in Chapter 13, and
their predictable inspiration points
and activities.
The gang described were youths
involved with a youth subculture
called Straight Edge. It should be
noted, however, that the Straight
Edge subculture is primarily
comprised of youths who are not in
gangs. Most Straight Edge youths
embrace a non-violent philosophy that
rejects drugs, alcohol, and
pre-marital sex and criminal
activity. The youths in the gang
described below simply adopted the
Straight Edge facade for their gang.
They also incorporated other
non-Straight Edge elements, such as a
neo-Nazi, fascist persona.
As noted in Chapter 11, youths can
adopt a facade, but not choose to
form a gang, such as youths who adopt
the skinhead persona but don't join
gangs and commit crimes. As noted above, the majority
of youths who call themselves
Straight Edge are not violent nor do
they identify with the neo-nazi
persona described in the following
example. The example below is a gang
hybrid and not representative of the
whole Straight Edge culture.
[We first began tracking the
Straight Edge phenomenon in 1990. At
that time, it was mostly isolated to
the upper-income areas on the east
side of Salt Lake county. Recently,
however, it has spread to most of
Salt Lake County, predominantly
located in suburban and upper-income
areas. Additionally, Strait Edge has
been growing rapidly in Davis and
Weber counties in similar areas.
There appear to be 2 segments of
Straight Edge: the militant or
hard-core, and the straights. The
militant and hard-core Straight
Edgers are frequently
"vegan," who abstain from
eating or wearing any animal products
(i.e., dairy products, leather,
etc.). The militant Straight Edgers
locally have actively enforced their
belief system (no drugs, no alcohol,
no tobacco) on outsiders. The
militant Straight Edgers have been
involved in numerous assaults and
aggravated assaults. While they tend
to steer away from using guns
(apparently based on a belief that
guns are carried by "gang"
members), other weapons of choice may
be used, including knives, bats,
clubs, brass knuckles, chains and
mace. They have also been linked to
the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), an
animal-rights terrorist group which
has committed several local bombings
targeted against businesses who sell
meats or animal products (leather).
The Straights tend to make up the
majority of Straight Edge members.
While they may subscribe to the vegan
philosophy, they also appear to be
non-violent. Straight Edge
identifiers include big or baggy
clothes, shaved or dyed hair, long
sideburns, and X's tattooed or drawn
on hand, heads, necks or legs.
Straight Edgers in our area are
typically involved in body piercing
(tongues, lips, eyebrows, belly
buttons, genitals), and frequently; have detailed and artistic tattoos.
They will frequently carry or wear
heavy silver chains, which can double
as a weapon. Recently, they have been linked to graffiti with racial
overtones, including swastikas, other
Nazi symbols, and slogans such as
"White pride" and
"Skins."]
2001 Notes: As noted at the presidential
inauguration of President George W. Bush this year,
anarchists caused severe disruptions, even hurling
bottles at the presidential motorcade. Look for more
of these groups to develop over the next few years
and become increasingly violent, as occurred at the
World Trade Organization protests in December of
1999 in Seattle. Those violent protests caused the
cancellation of Seattle's millennium celebration.
Most similar groups are comprised of teens and young
adults.
Tagger Gangs (1996)
In
Chapter 4, a gang is defined as: 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 members of the gang.
Groups of youths who simply have a
subculture bent but don't commit
crimes should not be classified as a
gang. Chapter 11 addresses the many
aspects of the youth subculture that
affects and inspires gang activities,
including graffiti. A relatively
recent graffiti style that appeared
in the 1980s was the "tag,"
also described in Chapter 11. While
graffiti is a form of vandalism, I
resisted classifying groups of youths
who tag as gang members. It was a
prejudicial decision based upon the
fact that taggers typically aren't
violent. But over the last couple of
years, homicides have been committed
by taggers to protect their
territory, and thus these groups of
youths should be classified as a
variant of a delinquent gang (described
in detail in Chapter 12).
