This is a stupid headline or what? as if we didnt know this. instead of prosecuting gangs, federales are busy persecuting law abiding Whites like Hale. And chickenshit White voters wont write their congressman and even so much as complain.

Mean streets once again: Gang activity surging

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=676&e=1&u=/usatoday/20040721/ts_usatoday/meanstreetsonceagaingangactivitysurging


By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY

A decade after police crackdowns on drug gangs helped lead to historically low crime rates in cities across the nation, gangs suddenly are re-emerging in waves of violence that have jolted officials in Tulsa, the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., and many other communities well beyond the groups' traditional big-city bases.



The resurgence of gangs whose names became symbols of the turf wars over crack cocaine during the 1980s - the Crips, the Bloods, the Mexican Mafia, the Gangster Disciples and others - is helping to lift homicide rates in several cities at a time when overall crime rates remain low.


Some police officials - including those in Tulsa, where federal, state and local authorities now keep an intelligence database on suspected gang members - say they can trace the recent violence to the releases of senior gang members from prison. Others note that the violence has flared as police agencies, facing budget cuts and increased concerns about terrorism, gradually have dismantled anti-gang units. Now, officials from Durham, N.C., to Los Angeles are scrambling to assign more cops and prosecutors to deal with gangs.


"We had a chance to pull the weeds out of our communities for good a few years ago," says Tim Twining, director of gang prosecutions in Denver, where budget cuts forced the elimination of the district attorney's anti-gang unit in 2002 before it was re-established last year. "We didn't do it; we got distracted. Now, the weeds are back."


Nationwide, gang-related homicides jumped by 50% from 1999 to 2002, according to a report commissioned by Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, a coalition of big-city police chiefs. In 2002, the most recent year analyzed in the study by Northeastern University professor James Alan Fox, 1,034 of the 16,204 homicides across the nation were linked to gangs - the most since 1995, when there were 1,237 gang-related slayings.


A separate Justice Department (news - web sites) review this year found that 42% of the 2,182 cities that responded to the 2002 National Youth Gang Survey reported that gang activity was "getting worse," up from 27% the previous year. In the same survey, 87% of U.S. cities with populations of at least 100,000 reported problems with gangs.


Two weeks ago, the U.S. House of Representatives responded to increased reports of gang violence by approving the creation of a National Gang Intelligence Center. If approved by the Senate, the center would provide additional federal agents and prosecutors to track gang members involved in crimes


Authorities say that in many cases, gangs have branched out from their traditional homes in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City because they have found new drug markets - and less scrutiny from police - in smaller communities. In a few instances, authorities say, youths from troubled urban neighborhoods who were sent to live with relatives in safer, smaller towns have wound up starting new criminal groups.


Clamping down on gangs


The spread of gangs into America's heartland, and into middle-class areas, was apparent here on June 8 at a gleaming high-rise condominium building that is home to doctors, lawyers and academics.


A dozen heavily armed cops in bulletproof vests shocked residents of the Central Park condominiums by rumbling into the building's glass-and-tile lobby and up to the 11th floor. Three blasts from a battering ram later, the door to a condo was knocked in and the Tulsa officers rushed in to what they described as a home of Crips gang members.


There, investigators say, they hit a jackpot: more than a pound of powdered cocaine and a lesser amount of crack, concealed in the false bottom of an aluminum Cheetos container. The drugs were valued at about $10,000; suspected Crips members Jamia Stith and Marcus Dupree Smith were arrested later on drug charges.


"I was shocked," said Linda Younger, the owner of the condo who had leased the unit to Smith. "All I knew was that they hadn't paid the May rent."


Gangs have operated in Tulsa since the late 1980s. Like many other cities, Tulsa was slow to respond to them. But during the early 1990s, Tulsa police formed a squad to clamp down on gang turf wars and illegal drug sales.


Nearly a dozen officers were assigned to the unit at its peak during the late 1990s. As crime declined, several officers were reassigned to more pressing priorities. That all began to change last year, when Tulsa had a record 70 slayings, 17 of which police linked to gangs. Then came a flurry of violence late last spring, after a local gang leader was released from prison.


"We knew he was coming back," says police Capt. Walter Busby, who asked that the gang leader not be identified because he is a focus of several pending investigations. "When he did, (violence) started to spike significantly."


Tulsa authorities now suspect that the gang leader has been involved in as many as a half-dozen killings since his release from prison in late March. Meanwhile, police in this city of 393,049 estimate that more than 3,300 residents have at least some tie to a gang, and that the number is rising by about 200 people a year.


Tulsa's murder rate is down this year; there have been 24 slayings. But police have linked about one-third of the killings to gangs, a higher percentage than last year.

For many Tulsa residents, the escalating danger posed by gangs became vivid in late February, when police were called to the modest, North Side home of Ples and Shelly Vann. The couple had been executed, apparently because their sons had been involved in a dispute with Crips members, police say. Philip Summers, a suspected Crips member, was charged in the slayings and is awaiting trial.

The Vann slayings shocked the city and reinvigorated Tulsa's anti-gang efforts. Police Maj. Mark McCrory says the brutality of the slayings was "an eye-opener" that led city officials to put unprecedented pressure on gangs and to conduct almost-daily raids on suspected safe houses.

Since mid-April, a new police team of a dozen officers has joined Tulsa's existing anti-gang unit on 92 raids. Authorities routinely have recovered drugs and bundles of cash and guns, including several assault weapons. More than 100 people, most of them alleged gang members, have been arrested.
.............

..........
'Hitting them as hard as we can'

McCrory, a burly officer who oversees the raid teams in the manner of an enthusiastic football coach, says he believes the aggressive tactics by police have helped to slow the violence. "We're hitting them as hard as we can," he says. "Our goal is to make life as miserable as possible for these people."

In Tulsa, a coalition of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies has been formed to chart gang membership. Each week, representatives of the FBI (news - web sites), the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Tulsa police, Oklahoma's state prison system and the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office meet to examine the spread of gang membership in the area.

The officials keep track of gang members with a database that includes information from patrol officers, informants and other sources. The idea is to learn who is joining gangs and to find out more about gangs' crime networks.

Tulsa's process of designating people as possible gang members is based on a range of factors, officials say. Those in the database - about 3,300 residents - might have criminal records or tattoos or brands on their skin that claim an allegiance to specific gangs. Or they might be frequent associates of known gang members.

Tulsa officials say that to avoid violating privacy rights, the intelligence files are restricted to suspected gang members and do not include information on others.

Two years ago, Denver police dropped a broader database effort after residents accused the department of compiling "spy files" against innocent people. The Denver database included information about thousands of residents, including some who had been involved in lawful protests or demonstrations. Denver officials disbanded the database and issued public apologies.

In Tulsa, McCrory says, authorities have used the database to track gang members' movements through the community and state prisons. Last month, some of the intelligence led McCrory's officers to the brick home of a 27-year-old admitted Crips member and suspected cocaine dealer. The man had been released from prison two months earlier after serving 18 months for a drug conviction.

Police say that when they broke through the man's door, the last of his cocaine supply was swirling down the toilet. Police salvaged some of the evidence when an officer yanked the toilet from its foundation and fought through a gusher of water to retrieve a small amount of crack.

Police hope the seizure will give investigators enough leverage to turn the suspect into an informant.

"I got no weapons," the man, hands cuffed behind him, said as officers searched his house. The man is not being identified by USA TODAY at the police department's request because police say he could be key to other investigations. He told officers that he was through with gang life, primarily because none of his fellow Crips visited him in prison.

"I had 3 grams (of cocaine) here, that's all," he said. "I was just trying to make ends meet."

Busy with anti-terrorism efforts

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. authorities have been consumed by the threat of terrorism. But this year, a spate of violence in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., that involved suspected members of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang caught the attention of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft (news - web sites).

In a February meeting with Paul McNulty, the U.S. attorney in Alexandria, Va., Ashcroft expressed concern that gangs were threatening several communities a short drive from the nation's capital.

In a follow-up memo, McNulty called the gang threat "serious" and "growing" and said U.S. authorities had begun to help local police deal with an estimated 2,700 gang members and their associates in northern Virginia's mostly affluent suburbs. A string of recent attacks has underscored the increasing gang activity there.

In May, a suspected MS-13 member was charged in a machete attack on a 16-year-old boy in Alexandria. Three weeks ago, U.S. authorities who are investigating MS-13 announced charges against four of the gang's members in the slaying of a pregnant, 17-year-old member who had become a government informant.

Meanwhile, gang violence has exploded in Durham, N.C., where police Sgt. Howard Alexander says there were three gang-related slayings and "too many shootings to count" just last week. The city of 187,035 had a record low 22 homicides last year. Already there have been 18 this year, and more than half have been linked to gangs, Alexander says.

"We've got murders, armed robberies, home invasions and witness intimidation," says Alexander, who says Durham's gang wars, like those elsewhere, are rooted in disputes over turf and the local market for illegal drugs.

The violence has led Durham police to increase the city's anti-gang unit from seven to 20 officers.

The resurgence of gangs, some law enforcement analysts say, can be traced to police departments' post-9/11 emphasis on preventing terrorism. Analysts say such efforts have drawn attention from basic community problems.

"This (gang) problem has been around for a long time, but we've taken our eye off the ball since 9/11," said John Moore, director of the National Youth Gang Center. Funded by the Justice Department, the center monitors gang activity across the nation.

As gang violence spreads, it also is surging in places where it has long been a problem. In southern California, authorities estimate that there are 100,000 gang members in Los Angeles County, home to about 9.8 million people. Gang membership has been stable during the past two years, but Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton says gang-related killings have contributed to a 5% increase in homicides in the city this year.

"This thing is growing, but it has been masked to a great extent by reports about how overall crime has been coming down," Bratton says. "Not a lot of people are paying attention to this. But the way it's going, it has the potential to explode as it did in the early '90s." [end]

"I had 3 grams (of cocaine) here, that's all," he said. "I was just trying to make ends meet."

don't you love this excuse?