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July 21, 2004
Hate to say I told you so
I'm not happy to hear this. But didn't I hear someone say a year ago, that "ignoring street gangs won't make them go away?"
Mean streets once again: Gang activity surgingA 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....
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 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.
Posted by Mike at July 21, 2004 03:09 PM
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