MENU TITLE: Law Enforcement Youth Gang Conference .
Series: OJJDP
Published: Draft 9/89
98 pages
209,243 bytes

Law Enforcement Youth Gang Definitional Conference

Held at the
Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority
Chicago, Illinois, September 25, 1989

Edited by 
Irving Spergel, University of Chicago
Lawerence Bobrowski, Chicago Police Department

National Youth Gang Suppression and Intervention
Program
School of Social Service Administration
University of Chicago

Distributed by:
Juvenile Justice Clearinghouse
Box 6000
Rockville, MD 20850
1-800-638-8736

------------------------------

Symposium Participants

Chicago Police Department (CPD)

Deputy Chief Matthius Casey
Captain Kenneth Alexander
Sgt. Edward McCloskey
Officer Larry Bobrowski

Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD)

Captain Ray Gott
Sgt. Wesley D. McBride

Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)

Commander Lorne Kramer
Sgt. Robert Jackson

New York Police Department (NYPD)

Deputy Austin P. Mulryan
Sgt. John Galea

Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)

Mr. David J. Leroy, Office of Intelligence

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention (OJJDP)

Mr. Dan Bryant, Research Division
Mr. Leonard Johnson, Special Emphasis Division

Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority
(ICJIA)

Mr. John Firman, Research and Analysis
Dr. Carolyn Rebecca Block, Statistical Analysis
Center

------------------------------

Advisory Board

Mr. Miguel Duran, Los Angeles County Probation
Department
Mr. Michael Genelin, Hard Core Unit, Los Angeles
District Attorney
Dr. Cheryl Maxson (for Dr. Malcolm Klein),
University of Southern California
Dr. Walter Miller, Professor Emeritus, Harvard Law
School
Commander Sollie Vincent, Chicago Police
Department
Ms. Barbara Wade, Mayor's Office, Miami

------------------------------

Project Staff (University of Chicago, School of
Social Service Administration)

Dr. Irving Spergel
Dr. G. David Curry
Mr. Ron Chance
Ms. Alba Alexander

------------------------------

FIRMAN (ICJIA): My name is John Firman, I am the
Associate Director of the Illinois Criminal
Justice Information Authority. I want to welcome
you all to our conference room and offices. If
there is anyway we can be of assistance to you
during the day, if you want to make a phone call
or telefax anything, please let us know.

Our broad mandate in the Illinois government is to
improve the workings of the criminal justice
system through the transfer of information and
provision of research and policy information. So
the work that you are about to do today is
something that we are extremely interested in. I
would like to commend you on your efforts and wish
you good luck. And with that, I will turn it over
to Dr. Spergel. 

SPERGEL (U of C): I just want to take about five
minutes to introduce a topic that doesn't need
introduction. This day is testimony to the fact
that academics and law enforcement people can talk
to each other. I hope it proves that law
enforcement people can also talk to and agree with
each other. I think almost everyone here today is
an expert and very familiar with the youth gang
problem. I know that several of our law
enforcement experts are well published and
certainly well interviewed in the media. About the
only thing that some of us academics have on you
these days is age. This is a very able and
distinguished group and I am certainly delighted
that you are all here today. 

My task of introduction is to very briefly
indicate what I think are the values of a common
set of definitions of the terms, youth gang, gang
member and gang related incident. All of you are
aware that these terms are used differently across
cities and jurisdictions and even within the same
city. A law enforcement officer referring to a
gang and gang incident in one city does not
necessarily mean the same thing as a law
enforcement officer in another city. 

I see at least four important reasons for
establishing a common meaning for these terms:
knowing, accountability, community mobilization
and evaluation. The first is simply being able to
communicate and understand the scope and
seriousness of the problem across cities. At this
time we have no way of knowing with validity
whether we have a gang problem of similar or
different magnitude across cities; whether the
problems are, in fact, different or whether the
definitions are different and the problems quite
similar. We don't really know. There is no way of
validly comparing the number of gang-related
homicides across our major cities because of
different conceptual and operational definitions
of the term gang-related homicide. We also have
difficulty comparing the nature and scope of the
problem across settings, such as schools and
correctional institutions. 

Second is law enforcement agency accountability.
The police need to discover the best or most
efficient and effective means for controlling and
reducing a problem that seems to be growing in
certain cities. A variety of policies, programs,
tactics and organizational arrangements have been
devised. Sometimes a strategy works or does not
work in a particular city. But we don't know
whether it will work or fail in another city or
jurisdiction, because the problem has been
identified or reported differently. If common
definitions of a gang or gang incident existed, it
would be possible to test the same or similar
strategies employed in other cities and determine
their comparable or external validity.

The third reason is community mobilization. Based
on our recently completed survey of youth gang
problems and organized or promising approaches in
45 cities, we found that cities with agencies that
shared a similar definition of a gang related
incident had a better likelihood of reducing the
problem or at least perceiving that the problem
had been reduced. In other words, the more that
police, other criminal justice agencies, youth
service agencies, community groups and others
agree on a definition of components of a gang
incident in a particular city the more likely that
city will deal effectively or at least perceive
itself dealing effectively with the problem.
Recognition of the existence of a gang problem,
preferably in common terms, may already be a
significant step in resolving the problem. Perhaps
there is a major or leading role here for law
enforcement in facilitating this kind of common
definitional process within a city. 

A fourth value is for research and evaluation.
More specifically, there is no way at the present
time to test whether a particular suppression,
social intervention, community organization or
opportunities provision strategy, or combinations
thereof, works across cities. There is no way for
the federal government to determine whether the
same strategy of suppression or community
mobilization that works in Cabrini-Green, Chicago,
also works successfully in South Central Los
Angeles or vice-versa. While the gang problem may
seem to be similar in these two communities in
terms of specific demographic, age, geographic,
and population mobility factors, definitions in
reporting procedures may be a key intervening
variable. Evaluators need common definitions to
begin to disentangle the effects of various
strategies in different community circumstances.
The Justice Department will need to know how
effective its policy initiatives and presumably
expenditures of new and large sums of money will
be in regard to the problem in specific locations
nationwide using a common standard.

Thus, there seem to be good reasons for the
present group coming together to tackle issues of
definition. The results of your discussion could
set in motion model definitions for the rest of
the country. If you make some progress in
resolving these issues I believe it could
contribute to resolution of the youth gang problem
itself.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): Thank you Dr. Spergel, I will
[act as moderator and] lay down some of the ground
rules for today's discussion. You all have an
agenda, I hope. The first thing we want to do is
present a statement of our goals and objectives
for the meeting. We are going to try and keep the
discussion focused because we have a lot of
different views on this subject, and quite a mix
of law enforcement people from L.A., New York,
Chicago, as well as academics from the Midwest,
West Coast and the East Coast.

Our aim is to achieve a uniformly applicable set
of definitions to assist local and national
assessment of the street gang problem. We want to
come up with a definition that each police agency
can use. Everybody seems to have his own
framework. We would like for law enforcement
agencies to get together with each other. The
purpose of this meeting is primarily to assist law
enforcement. The academics will have to struggle
with the definitions that we come up with, and
that's their job later.

We want to put this phenomenon of gangs under a
microscope today. If I could borrow an analogy
from biology, when you put an organism under a
microscope you can focus it at different depths
and see different things. We each come with a
different lens and a different perspective on the
problem and hopefully we can come together to
describe this phenomenon in a uniform way that
makes sense to everybody at his own particular
focal point.

We have three discussion objectives: to define the
gang as an object of law enforcement, i.e., what
is our target when we say we are out to interdict
street gang crime; secondly, what is a gang
related event, and this grows out of the
definition of a gang; and the last thing, is to
develop a uniform method for reporting so the
academics can follow on and provide feedback to
the law enforcement community. We will start out
with a presentation by Dr. Miller on just what it
is that we are going to put under a microscope
today. 

MILLER (Harvard): Well I am completely sold. When
I came here I was uncertain about how important it
was to define street gang and so on, but after
these two presentations I am a complete booster
and I think it is a very important enterprise.

As I understand it, our major job is to come to
some agreement on a term or the term that refers
to our major subject of concern. If that sounds
vague it is because I am trying to avoid using the
word gang for reasons that I hope will become
clear soon. The entity or phenomenon, as Officer
Bobrowski said, that we are concerned with, can be
more easily defined as to what it isn't than what
it is. It could be described as non-transient
groups of non-adults whose members engage
routinely in illegal activities. 

You might feel with some justification that the
issue has already been settled by the very fact
that Officer Bobrowski used the word "street gang"
in his introduction; but the name of the project
sponsoring this discussion is the "National Youth
Gang Suppression and Intervention Program", its
major literature review document is entitled
"Youth Gangs: Problem and Response", and its major
informational survey is called, "Survey of Youth
Gang Problems and Programs". It would seem pretty
obvious that the major object of concern is youth
gangs, and that "youth gangs" should be the term
whose definition we will try to be getting some
agreement on. 

But if you look through the various materials
produced by the project so far, it turns out that
it is not quite so obvious after all. In the first
draft of the literature review and also parts of
the second draft, the terms "gang" and "the gang"
are used far more often than the term "youth
gang". In the beginning of this document it is
stated "Street gangs are the center of attention."
The terms "juvenile" and "delinquent" gangs and
groups are also used in the materials. Illegal
behavior by some groups is sometimes called
"delinquency" and sometimes called "crime" without
very much consistency. The questionnaire that
forms the basis of the major survey also is not
too consistent in this respect. It asks the
respondents, "Do you have gangs in your city?" It
doesn't ask, "Do you have 'youth' gangs?" It asks
what is your definition of a gang, not a "youth"
gang. It asks for the age of juvenile offenders
and adult offenders, but not of "youth" gang
offenders.

There is considerable discussion in the materials
that present day gangs are not only composed of
juveniles but in fact most often involve people in
their late-20s, 30s or 40s and older. If this is
so, neither the term juvenile gang nor youth gang
is accurate. 

I did not find in any of the materials a specific
discussion of the term "youth gang" -- why it is
being used instead of at least a dozen other terms
that have been and could be used to designate our
major unit of concern. Because of this I felt that
before we start to try to get some agreement on
definitions we should first try to make sure that
what we are trying to define should be called
"youth gang" rather than something else. I wrote a
memorandum that discusses a dozen other terms that
have been used and are being used, and what I feel
are the strengths and weaknesses of these terms
for our purposes here. I won't go into the details
of that discussion. 

I will discuss, however, one issue that is brought
up in the memorandum. One of the major criteria I
use for judging the suitability of various terms
has to do with an issue that has plagued the field
of law violating groups for many years. This issue
comes out of [a] legal distinction, made in all
U.S. jurisdictions, between the age category
"juvenile" and "adult". By and large under the law
the criminal justice treatment of adults and
juveniles follows different procedures, mandating
different treatment for the two categories. This
means that there is a major lack of fit between
the juvenile/adult legal distinction ...and the
social reality of law violating youth groups. As
they exist in the community, a relatively small
proportion of all such groups fit neatly into the
juvenile or adult category. In many cases both
juveniles and non-juveniles are members of the
same group. 

The legal distinction between juvenile and adult,
if it is accepted, affects the problem of
selecting an appropriate term in several ways. If
the term juvenile is used, as in the term
"juvenile gang", you are excluding from
consideration all group members above the ages 17
or 18. I guess in New York it's 16. Excluding
people in their late teens or early 20's who in
many cases pose the most serious problems is
certainly one option that in my view is not a
useful one for present purposes. Similarly, if we
accept the legal distinction between "delinquency"
as illegal behavior by juveniles and "crime" as
illegal behavior by adults. terms such as
"delinquent group" or "delinquent gang" are not
useful unless we decide to restrict consideration
to group members below the age of 17 or 18 -- a
choice I don't recommend. 

The memo discusses the terms: gang, group, club,
juvenile gang, teenage gang, youth gang,
delinquent gang, violent gang, fighting gang, drug
gang, street corner group, and street gang. What
do I recommend? It probably will come as no
surprise to you that my personal preference is the
term "youth gang". And in the memo I try to make
the case that this is the most useful term for our
purposes. But it is quite possible that there are
other ways of designating the major units that
would be equally or more suitable. The memo ends
with five recommendations as follows:

1) any attempt to achieve consensus on definition
should be proceeded by an attempt to achieve
agreement on the term to be used to designate the
kind of unit group that is to be defined;

2) the term "group" without an adjective should be
used to refer to persons who may or may not be
involved in illegal activity;

3) the term "gang" without an adjective should be
used only to refer to groups whose members engage
routinely in illegal activity;

4) the term to be defined should consist of one
noun and one adjective;

5) of two terms that appear most useful in
designating the unit of primary concern, "street
gang" should be chosen as the term to be defined
if there is a decision to include children and
adults, and "youth gang" should be chosen if there
is a decision to limit primary attention to
persons roughly between the ages 10-25.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): Thank you, Dr. Miller. In
Chicago, we use the term "street gang" although I
don't think youth gang is objectionable -- so long
as we know what we are talking about. What term
does New York use?

GALEA (NYPD): ...Youth gang ... Even though we use
the term youth gang I think the other terms
invariably come up. This was the term since I came
on board. Juvenile gang is more restrictive. Youth
gang is not as restrictive as some of other terms,
and that was probably the reason we used it. It
wasn't restrictive and it also kept us from going
into organized crime gangs, especially in a place
like New York.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): In Chicago, the Detective
Division classifies homicides [as gang motivated],
and has peremptory authority for classifying all
crime. But they have traditionally used the terms
"street gang" homicide or "teen gang" homicide,
and all of us in the Chicago Police Department
know what this means.

Matt Casey, Deputy Chief of the Chicago Detective
Division, do you want to explore the differences
between using the terms "juvenile" and "youth",
and what implication that has for our operation?

CASEY (CPD): I have never made the distinction
between youth and juvenile violence. Maybe I did
years ago when I was a young policeman, but I
don't know what distinction to make between the
two terms now.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): Is there a use in making any
distinction at all?

CASEY (CPD): No, not any that I know of.

MILLER (Harvard): So you disagree with my argument
that the juvenile is a person under 17 or 18
anywhere. That's the legal definition. Do the
juvenile laws apply to people who are 19 and 20?

CASEY (CPD): In Illinois? No.

MILLER (Harvard): Are gang members 19 or 20?

CASEY (CPD): Sure.

MILLER (Harvard): Well then, presumably the
distinction is important in Illinois.

CASEY (CPD): Well, not for us in the Chicago
Police Department. I have never heard anyone
discuss it or bring it up. It's never made any
difference to us. We don't use the term
"juvenile". We dropped it because it seems to have
some onerous or pejorative sense. We now call them
"youths". We have a Youth Division. For criminal
code purposes, we call them juveniles, but they
are handled by a "Youth Officer".

I still think of them as juveniles, but the new
word is "youth", and I've never had any problem in
talking to another policeman [such] that he didn't
know what I was talking about ...whether I used
the word "youth" or "juvenile". It's cutting in
the baloney a little too thin for me.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): Ok, maybe the distinction between
the term juvenile gang and youth gang isn't
important. What about L.A.?

GENELIN (D/A,LA): By law in California, a juvenile
is under the age of 18, and I don't believe we
have a legal definition of "youth". I accept Dr.
Miller's view that it covers a period up to the
age 25. We use the term "street gang". I think it
fits our needs a lot better, and we still have
several different definitions.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): In Chicago we also employ the
term "street gang" in reporting for statistical
purposes because we like to characterize the
events that we are reporting as being not
something else (like organized crime). Gang stuff
is happening in the street.

GENELIN (D/A,LA): Exactly.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...And that's why we use the term
"street gang". It's understood to include anybody
from 3 to 80, or over. Age is not particularly
important.

LEROY (DEA): In Washington, D.C. we have this
fellow on trial. Now that guy is 24 years old. So
if you use 25 as a cut off for a youth gang, 24 is
pretty old. This fellow is on trial for RICO
violations. He will be on trial for homicide.
Juvenile is 18 or under. I have been in the
business for a long time and when you say
"juvenile", that's what I usually allude to
without a formal definition. "Youth" is a little
too much of a spread. When you get up to 25,
that's an adult. 

JACKSON (LAPD): ...As far as L.A. is concerned,
for years back in the early 70s we always seemed
to have the juvenile gang image. It took us a
number of years to actually put it in proper
perspective. Yes, juveniles are involved but they
are only a part of the overall gang problem.

We find now with Black gang activity and narcotics
they are staying in the gangs longer. They're
being more active and more obvious for a longer
period of time. An arbitrary cut at 25 or 26,
whatever it might be, would be inappropriate. The
definition as far as "street gang", [or] whatever
the term is, would have to include a wide range of
age activity to be sure that we could still
address the problem.

GENELIN (D/A,LA): ...I think we are making a
fundamental mistake. What I mean is, if you go to
any state, you may have a particular state
definition or city police definition in
relationship to the law of the state. You may also
have a newspaper definition. What we ought to do
is decide that we are dealing with, a phenomeno-
logical definition, because we are really trying
to identify a social phenomenon, and forget the
specific legal processes that we use in any given
state or jurisdiction.

MILLER (Harvard): ...I think, as you said, we have
certain purposes here in trying to get a
definition. The distinction between adult and
juvenile is not a trivial distinction. Juvenile
processing and adult processing really makes a
difference in the United States. 

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Well, yeah, but for
definitional purposes the argument has been made
by Bob Jackson that gang phenomena are not age
dependent processes.

MILLER (Harvard): ...But we cannot take on 30, 40
and 50 year olds in this project.

JACKSON (LAPD): Sure we can, why not?

MILLER (Harvard): ...Well, because then we are
taking on a much large chunk than we should be. I
think we have to make a restriction by age. That's
my feeling.

SPERGEL (U of C): Originally the project was
called "Juvenile Gang Suppression and Intervention
Program". This was because of the legislation. If
the group is primarily juvenile, OJJDP can deal
with it. It's not a problem if you get some guys
who are older. There seems to be flexibility in
the OJJDP approach.

VINCENT (CPD): Of course, age is a consideration,
but the reality is that the policeman is concerned
with what the gang does. Kids are involved in
certain things, but when they get a little older,
they can become involved in other things. I think
Bob Jackson already alluded to the fact that with
the growth of gang involvement in narcotics the
age range has expanded. Now we are very sensitive
to the age factor in Chicago. We had some gangs
that started off as street gangs, but based on
what they tend to do now, they should no longer be
regarded as street gangs. What they are about now
is organized crime.

We still use the name "gang" as far as these
particular groups are concerned. At the same time,
we have some kind of a mid-range of types of
gangs. Other people connect with the street gang
to utilize their members for trafficking. We tend
to look at these particular situations as being
transitional. Some street gangs have already made
the transition into organized crime, based on
their activity. At this particular point in time,
certain kinds of distinctions can be made. When it
comes around to age range, we've run into kids as
young as 9, all the way up to people who are of
retirement age. They are still involved somehow in
this particular activity, and we call it street
gang activity. It has not reached the organized
crime level but the gang apparently is in
transition. 

MILLER (Harvard): ...So, hooking into the
organizational structure is more important than
describing whether a particular age category
applies to the gang term.

VINCENT (CPD): ...It seems to me that's the
particular kind of reality that we are dealing
with.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...What about the term "street".
In some cases these kids aren't based in the
street. They don't have turf. They focus, even as
youth, on particular crimes. Sometimes they have
colors, sometimes they have names, sometimes they
don't. That's a problem in the southeastern part
of the country. The drug gangs tend to be non-
turf.

MILLER (Harvard): ...The term "street gang" was
used by professionals in the 1950s but less
frequently now; more so by media. Although the
impression given by the term "street" may at first
seem clear, on closer examination the term appears
to be vague. The term is used widely in English:
on the streets, street life, street smarts, but it
is not precise and it is not used as a legal term.
The term juvenile is a legal term, street is not.

To be useful the adjective "street" should make a
difference between gangs that you call street
gangs and other kinds of gangs which are
presumably not "street" gangs. Now you made the
distinction between street gangs and organized
crime. If you are going to use the word street
gangs, there are going to have to be some kind of
gangs that are not street gangs. The use of the
term street gang implies the distinction between
activities or operations that take place outdoors
rather than indoors. You could very usefully apply
the term to groups that hang out regularly on a
particular street or street corner. But such
groups, as Irv just said, are not common in many
areas. For many groups the primary arenas of
operations are indoors, pool halls, crack houses,
housing project apartments or basements and
others. To call such groups street groups is
misleading. In addition, many groups make
extensive use of automobiles for purposes of
congregation and transportation. To call largely
motorized groups street groups conveys an
inaccurate impression. 

The vagueness of the term street gang however, can
be an advantage if a decision is made not to
include an age range in the term to be defined. A
street gang can consist of persons of any age and
can, of course, include or consist of adults. If
this term is chosen it would be necessary to
define with some precision what the term "street"
means. It's very vague, we all sort of feel we
know what it means, but if you are going to use it
as a basis for definition, and particularly on a
nationwide basis, we would have to do some careful
thinking about what "street" really means in this
context. We would need to specify the kinds of
non-street gangs that we are not going to be
considering.

SPERGEL (U of C): It seems to me that the
discussion leads us in the direction of using the
term that's left: "gang". But OJJDP is restricted
to policy and program in regard to juvenile gangs.

MILLER (Harvard): I can't accept the term "gang"
by itself. Gang means Al Capone, gang means
cartel...

LEROY (DEA): When we talk about organized crime,
traditional organized crime, we rarely talk about
a gang per se. The media has twisted a lot of
this. We've been swept away by the media. I think
[we] in law enforcement know what we are talking
about.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): The adjective "organized" here
modifies the activity [not the participants]. The
rackets are organized not the group itself. On the
other hand, the nomenclature is inverted when we
are talking about the street gang phenomenon.

I keep going back to the term "street gang"
because that seems to be the most agreeable to the
law enforcement agencies here. Does it present a
problem for New York to adopt the term "street
gang" instead of "youth gang"?

GALEA (NYPD): We have used them interchangeably. I
mean, my unit was the street gang unit. It was
also the youth gang unit. Next week if you come up
with another name we will use that. We are going
to lock up the same people, whatever name you use.

MULRYAN (NYPD): For policy purposes though, we can
go ahead with "street gang" in New York.

VINCENT (CPD): It's no problem [in Chicago]. I
don't see it as a problem.

CASEY (CPD): Okay, ...no problems with the term
"street gang".

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...LA, LAPD?

KRAMER (LAPD): No problem.

GOTT (LASD): Let me add something from the [L.A.
County] Sheriff Department's standpoint. There is
no problem with "street gang" because it is all
inclusive. Let me just add some additional
information to the issue of age and the
restrictions of some of the other definitions.

As some of you are probably aware, the Los Angeles
Sheriff's Department runs a computerized gang
information system. It's housed in our shop it's
called G.R.E.A.T., Gang Reporting Evaluation and
Tracking. In that Los Angeles County System,
including the Los Angeles Police Department, we
currently have 69,430 index identified gang
members. 

We just did a run at the end of August and this is
very much similar to [Chicago offender age
distribution data]. The peak age on gang activity
is 23. If we were to talk about juvenile gangs
according to the code in California, we are
talking about less than 9% of our gang index who
are actual juveniles, under the age of 18 years.
If we were to talk about youth gangs up to age 25,
we are excluding in excess of 22,000 from our file
because we have gang members that run from age 10
to age 40. So, if we are talking [about "juvenile"
or "youth"] gangs, we're excluding a whole lot of
gang members that are committing gang-type street
crimes.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...The average age of offenders
in street gang case reports in Chicago, according
to Bobrowski, is 19.4 years, with a mean value of
18 years. The median for males is 17 years. The
sources of data are different in the two cases.
The Chicago data is based on current arrests or
incidents for 1987-88, The L.A. County data is
based on people in your data file, which could be
people who are not active ...or were active a year
ago or two years ago. Is that right?

McBRIDE (LASD): ...It is possible that they may
not be active currently, they could be in state
prison...

SPERGEL (U of C): ...That could account for the
difference...

McBRIDE (LASD): ...These are identified gang
members, identified by gang experts in the various
agencies and input into the system.

MILLER (Harvard): ...Irv's point is that they are
going to be getting older each year as they stay
in your system...

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Sure they are, we'll be adding
young ones too.

JACKSON (LAPD): ...As far as the file is
concerned, I know our file for LAPD will be purged
on a yearly basis. And anybody without a contact,
a gang type contact for the prior five years is
automatically removed from the gang file. So the
information will stay as current as possible ...if
they are not active in criminal activity.

GOTT (LASD): ...Another point is that we keep
county-wide stats. All police departments report
their statistics to us and we compile them. In the
first six months of this year we arrested, (and
this does not include LAPD's numbers), 9,565
adults, 18 yrs. of age or over, and 4,909
juveniles, 17 or under. That's almost twice as
many adults as juveniles. 

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...I think there is certainly
good agreement here that "juvenile gang" is not a
good term. It also seems to me there is a lot of
agreement that "street gang" is probably the most
useful term for law enforcement agencies. Is there
any objection? Would any of the law enforcement
people feel that a [term] which excludes people
over age 25 would not be useful for law
enforcement purposes?

GOTT (LASD): Yes. It [would be] no good.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...So in other words, you would
want a [term] that would make it possible to
[include] people over the age of 25 ...and call
them gang members.

JACKSON (LAPD): Yes.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...If that is the consensus then
it seems to me "street gang" is the term that
should be used.

KRAMER (LAPD): We have no control over who joins
the gang.

VINCENT (CPD): I think we are resolved on that.

MILLER (Harvard): My major argument in terms of
including adults is a matter of scope and it
arises out of the original mandate of the project.
We had to really push pretty hard to get non-
juveniles included as far as this project is
concerned. But if you are looking for some kind of
universal definition that would be useful to law
enforcement people throughout the country, and
having people who are legally classified as adults
included in your jurisdiction, then I think the
term "street gang" should be used for those
purposes.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Most of the people that you
are going to be encountering in studies within one
standard deviation are going to be juveniles, or
youth, rather. ...Forget about the term juvenile.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...That means that we should
include people over 18 or concentrate as much on
them as [on] the younger ones. Is that the case in
New York City?

GALEA (NYPD): ...Excuse me?

SPERGEL (U of C): Do you deal with the same age
range of gang offenders as Chicago or LA? Are you
arresting or classifying older people in gangs to
the extent [that] you are juveniles?

GALEA (NYPD): ...We've had them as old as 43, yes.
But just go back to that definition for a minute.
Even though we officially term them youth gangs,
most of the time I write, "New York City street
gangs". I know it might make a technical
difference, but I guess everybody knows what we
are talking about when we use the term "youth
gang" or even "juvenile gang". We are all talking
about the same people. They might be a little
older in one place, and they might be a little
younger in another; but they are primarily talking
about the same people.

MULRYAN (NYPD): ...New York does have a youth
offender category. The term "youth" in New York is
a legal term.

SPERGEL (U of C): Let's hear from Michael Duran.

DURAN (LA Prob): I have no quarrel or problem with
either the term youth gang or street gang. It all
depends on what I'm dealing with. But I think what
is necessary is to have the definition of the
other types of gangs too. The reason I use street
gang or youth gang is that somebody else does not
confuse me with prison gangs or motorcycle gangs,
which is a problem that we've got in Los Angeles
or the state of California.

When I am talking about youth gangs again I'm not
talking about juvenile gangs, I'm talking about a
particular type of individual, and youth can
extend itself as far as I want it to extend. I
brought along yesterday's paper from Los Angeles.
We had nine murders from Friday to Sunday and in
it I have underlined at least 12 times where the
words mentioned were gang member, alleged member,
gangs, reputed gangs and the like, but they did
not use youth gang and street gang, just gang,
gang, gang...

KRAMER (LAPD): ...Well, just one last comment on
that. I think the media has taken some definitions
and some very generic ideas and blown them way out
of proportion. I think law enforcement has had to
respond to that. We are really on the defensive.
Particularly in our department. We are on the
defensive because if we were to ever try to change
the definition, that would change statistics. The
media would eat us up -- particularly if [the
changes] were to our advantage.

GOTT (LASD): ...If we were to say juvenile gangs
we could reduce our gang problem in LA by about
80%...

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Okay so we are resolved to
call this a street gang. Much ado about nothing, I
guess.

MILLER (Harvard): ...I don't think it's about
"nothing". It's important to decide what we are
trying to define.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...So it's not going to be an age
dependent thing?

JOHNSON (OJJDP): ...I would like to make one
comment. It seems like Chicago and other cities
are saying that a lot of gang members are
definitely over 18 years of age. When we get to
program development, then, OJJDP may just be out
of business, because we can't fund a project for
people 43 years old or even 25 years old. We begin
to run into serious problems of program
development.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Well I don't think you will
have this problem in Chicago. I predict it. Most
of the older people are considered street gang
members from the point of their culpability, like
the keeper of a house, or the neglectful parent or
contributing to delinquency of a minor. [But] card
carrying member? No, I don't think so... usually
not self-admitted anyway. 

GALEA (NYPD): ...Yes, I think we have to be
careful even with the term street-gang because
that could entail organized crime again. Sometimes
I look at the L.A. definition and it seems like
any two guys walking down the street having a
fight could almost be characterized as a street
gang...

Our New York City definition is probably too
restrictive. I mean very restrictive [compared] to
what's actually happening in the streets of New
York today. We are not counting the things that
are actually happening because we have to come up
with something different altogether to account for
what's happening in New York City. You have to be
careful with that term "street gang", because it
would mean maybe going to age 25, 26, or 27...
whatever. On the other hand, if 80% of that group
is under the age of 25 that would help out with
the funding sources. You also have to be careful
with bringing organized crime into this thing.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Law enforcement is less
concerned about the [age distribution] outlyers --
although we take care of that too, than we are
about what's under the bulk of that age curve. I
don't perceive that there is going to be any real
conflict with the organized crime thing. As I
stated earlier, the term "organized" in organized
crime, refers to the organization of the rackets
rather than the physical structure of the
operation, including their age.

You don't see in the activities of gangs that
organization and persistence in the rackets or the
ongoing nature of one crime operation. Lastly
there is the need for organized crime to support
local institutions, because they work out of
business communities. They don't want to see
anarchy, they don't want to see a government
that's totally inefficient. They're too well
networked to the economy and political
organization of the society. You don't see that
phenomenon in street gangs. And that would be, I
would say, the three major distinctions between
street gangs and organized crime.  

GALEA (NYPD): ...Let me just say this. I can't
speak for LA or Chicago or places like that, but I
know in New York City you might have three or four
guys that are just robbers, right? There might
even be five of them; they might even be [of] the
age of 22. But all these guys do is stick up
people. Now do we categorize that as a street gang
or is that organized crime? What I'm saying is
that... it's a stick up team or something like
that. You wouldn't necessarily call it a street
gang, but through definition they might wind up
being a street gang ...falling within our unit's
jurisdiction...

McBRIDE (LASD): ...If they all wore the same
jackets, had the same tatoos... you could.

GALEA (NYPD): ...No, I'm just saying all they do
is stick up people. In New York, we just wouldn't
consider them a street gang. They are just robbers
and we treat them that way.

BRYANT (OJJDP): ...Larry, can I [add] to the
comments made by Len [Johnson]? I don't think
there is a need to be concerned from the
standpoint of OJJDP, even though we are looking at
street gang and gang activity as a phenomena that
crosses a lot of age lines. If there is going to
be any hope of prevention or intervention in
street gang activity, its going to be with juve-
niles. Even though only 9% of our gang index are
minors under the age of 18, that doesn't mean
that's all that are involved, or come to our
attention in the justice system. There are a lot
of young kids who are developing that gang
mentality and that gang mystique -- and that's
where the emphasis of OJJDP needs to be -- even
though we are talking about a phenomena that runs
to age 40 and beyond. I don't think we should be
concerned as far as OJJDP's involvement in this
thing.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Also important is what
Commander Vincent said earlier about older groups
and organized crime. Older groups do hook into the
street gangs and use them for their own purposes.
This underscores the value of addressing street
gang phenomena in general, regardless of age. It
does affect the youth involved very directly.

Okay, we are resolved that we are going to use the
term "street gang", and that we know what we are
talking about when we use that term. So what I
would like to do now is have each agency here make
an offering as to what it defines as a street
gang. In Chicago we say that it is first of all a
collection of persons, in that they exist as an
identifiable group. That is, they have some sort
of structure -- whether it's horizontal and [they]
connect with other groups in the area [or] have
different factions of the same group; or they
[are] dedicated to different operations in a given
area; or whether [the gang has] a vertical
structure. There is some kind of a structure
...whether we have wanna-bees, peewees, juniors,
hard core members, and friends -- or whatever. But
they recognize themselves as a group too. They
know when they don't belong to it. Usually they
are told in no uncertain terms to either identify
or not belong.

That gets into the recruitment thing. Also, this
[idea of an identifiable group] grew out an
analysis of what's happening in Chicago as to
territoriality. Most of the gangs in Chicago,
except for some of the Asian gangs, do exhibit
some sense of territoriality. Most of the time
they are marking out turf using gang icons,
graffiti, or some other thing. It's in a state of
flux. The boundaries aren't usually fixed here in
Chicago. The gangs move back and forth. There is a
great deal of turf rivalry and a sense of
territoriality. Even Asian gangs in Chicago, while
there isn't a strict borderline, tend to live
together. They know: "Hey, this is Vietnamese
neighborhood activity... this is Chinese
neighborhood activity", etc. 

Out of that sense of territoriality, the thing
that we find about street gangs is they are based
in a neighborhood environment, and the community
there finds itself in conflict with the gang; and
that's mainly because the gang has failed to use
an acceptable means to achieve recognition and
influence.

MILLER (Harvard): ...Acceptable is the tough word,
acceptable to whom?

JACKSON (LAPD): ...The gang members?

MILLER (Harvard): ...The community, which
community?...

GENELIN (D/A,LA): ...The community that defines
the law enforcement task.

GOTT (LASD): ...Police officers...

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Geez, I feel like I'm in
school again! Okay, the gang for law enforcement
purposes. The gang is not particularly important
to us unless they are involved in some sort of
incivility or criminality and that's the reason
that as policemen, we are addressing the gang
problem. If the gang is out there [weaving]
baskets and they call themselves the Bloody
Knights or whatever, we don't really care -- so
long as they just keep making baskets. But when
they start shooting people, then we've got a
problem. So this is the Chicago definition.

WADE (Miami): ...Larry, I think I know what it
means, but could you just define for me what
"structured" means?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Yes, there are a two or three
different forms of structured gangs in Chicago.
There is structure by age, where we have the
peewees, the wanna-bees. There is also structure
by who's in the hardcore, who's in the marginal
and who's in the fringe of the gang, [and] who are
merely associates with the gang. Then there is the
physical structure. The gang has a faction here
and a faction there. An ally there, a rival here
and there.

There is also horizontal and vertical [structure].
I think all gangs allow members or others to know
where they stand in relationship to the group.
That's the structure.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...That's a problem for the
media, because when you say structure they are
thinking about a president, a vice-president, who
calls the shots, etc. Structure is a difficult
term to understand.

MILLER (Harvard): ...There are three levels here,
one is structured, the other is organized and the
third is formalized. Organized also conveys the
notion of a formal organization. Structured to me
is the least acceptable of those. Formalized is
kind of a weasel word, it says there is some
degree of organized relationship, but not enough
to call it a structure or an organization. I tend
to agree that the word organized is not a good
term to have in there. First because [of] it's
ambiguous meaning and, to the degree that it does
have a meaning it implies [a] much more formal
organization than in fact most gangs have.

SPERGEL (U of C): "Structured" is a little more
useful to me because every gang, virtually every
gang, does have some kind of a structure. There is
the hardcore, the more dominant individuals in the
gang. There are the associates and then the wanna-
bees, whatever you want to call them. But there is
a social class structure within every gang that is
understood.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Well, Wes McBride, you wrote a
book on the subject. What do you think?

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Well, Bob Jackson wrote that
one. 

JACKSON (LAPD): ...I helped him with the big
words.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Yeah, he helped me with the big
words. We have two or three different definitions
we work with. We have a new state legal
definition, that I think is a tad too restrictive,
and we will get to it in a moment. The word
"associate" -- we have been kicking that around
lately. I think that's a bad term. When I came in
it meant "not quite a gang member" -- more of a
friend or an associate of a gang member. In fact
what it has become is [that] an associate is a
gang member. He's a gang member [but] it's just
his degree of activity.

KRAMER (LAPD): ...A business partner?

McBRIDE (LASD): ...He's a gang member. He's not
even a partner ...he's a gang member. It's just
that he doesn't tend to be as heavily into some of
the assaults or...

(He [Jackson] gave me a note here...) Provability
might be a little bit lacking on the associate. We
don't [encounter] "structure" that means war lord,
vice president, something like that. We don't have
that, never have had it. We now have a state legal
definition of the criminal street gang:

It's an ongoing association or group of three or
more persons, whether formal or informal, having
as its primary activities the commission of one of
the following crimes ...and the law lists seven
crimes.

MILLER (Harvard): ...What are the seven? I'm
curious.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Assault with a deadly weapon,
robbery, homicide or manslaughter, sale or
possession for sale of narcotics, shooting into
inhabited dwellings or car, arson, and witness
intimidation.

I think that's a little too restrictive for me. I
think a gang [can] commit other crimes.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Yeah, I ran across that
definition, and one of things that I found lacking
in it was recruitment, although intimidation might
cover it if you stretch the word.

GENELIN (D/A,LA): ...What you can say is "criminal
acts". The reason that we put that list in, (I
find myself defending it since I wrote it), is
because we had to get it through the legislature
and that's the reason.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Well I know that, but it's
still a legal definition now. I mean it is in the
state of California, which has a common name or a
common identifying sign or symbol. Most gangs have
that, but some don't... [those] whose members
individually or collectively engage in or have
engaged in a pattern of criminal gang activity. I
can live with that -- taking out the one through
seven [crimes] and substituting "criminal
activity".

GENELIN (D/A,LA): ...How about three or more
[persons]?

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Okay. I'm not big on numbers,
putting numbers to anything. Can two be a gang? I
don't know. They probably wouldn't come to our
attention. Three? You were talking about the
robbery thing in New York a while ago. Maybe if
all three were wearing the same colors, dressing
the same and acting in concert for a period of
time, yeah, probably. We used a definition in the
book we wrote that a gang was any group gathered
on a continuing basis to commit antisocial
behavior. But that came from generations of being
taught that's what gangs were.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...I don't think we would
consider those three guys that were pulling stick-
ups in New York. I don't think we in Chicago would
consider them a gang.

GALEA (NYPD): ...We probably wouldn't either. But
if they had a name for themselves, and were
putting graffiti on the wall -- and always the
same three -- and that type of thing, yeah, we
might. 

GOTT (LASD): ...We went through an exercise
similar to this in Los Angeles County last year.
There is an organization in the County called the
Peace Officers Association of Los Angeles County
which includes all the law enforcement agencies in
that county. We have been trying to develop a
system for gathering county-wide statistics so we
can have a truer picture of the gang problem in
L.A. County. [That is, trying to depict the
problem] other than the fact that we know it's
bad.

And so, we went through this exercise of trying to
develop a definition of the gang, and we came up
with the definition that the agencies in Los
Angeles County bought, and its the current
definition we are using county-wide. Let me just
share that. It gets a little long:

"A gang is a group of people who form an
allegiance for a common purpose to engage in acts
injurious to public health and public morals, who
pervert or obstruct justice or the administration
of laws, or engage in or have engaged in criminal
activity either individually or collectively and
create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation
within the community."

That's kind of long-winded, but it encompasses
basically what you've got there.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...I want to pick up on two
things. First of all, we had a case in Chicago
that we classified as a gang related, [although]
the incident involved only one person. The young
fellow was trying to start up a gang in a school,
and he painted graffiti all over the school and
started intimidating people. He was actually
engaged in recruitment. His first three recruits
flipped on him, and he [was] arrested before the
gang could get off the ground. We did call it
gang-related, because there was damage to property
involved, and it engendered a great deal of
concern on the part of the school administration.
We classified that as a gang related event, even
though there was only one person in the gang. 

McBRIDE (LASD): ...I think that's a good call.

MAXSON (USC): ...You call that a gang member? Is
he in your files as a gang member?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...He is a gang member ...of his
own gang. Yeah!

GALEA (NYPD): When you are looking at gang type,
you may have unknown gangs involved in certain
crimes, and it would very likely follow the same
pattern. You would not always be able to identify
a specific gang, [or that they] will be the same
gang next week.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Right, and had this case not
been cleared and closed, we would still think that
there's a bunch of people out there engaged in
that activity. We wouldn't attribute it to the act
of just one person.

The other thing I want to pick up on in Ray Gott's
definition is the common denominator of conflict
by the gang with the community. Other kinds of
group related activity are not identified as gang
activity.

For example, nobody in the community apparently
saw any group conflict in an incident that
occurred not too long ago here in Chicago. A
person under the influence of a loosely controlled
substance grabbed a waitress, and it was
considered a criminal sexual assault. He wore a
group icon and a fez. Now you know what I'm
getting at. He belonged to the Ancient Order of
the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine of the Temple of
North America or ...whatever it is. Nobody seems
to call that organization a gang, even though it
had outward gang trappings.

GENELIN (D/A,LA): ...Aren't we really talking
about criminality being acceptable within that
group rather than individual people committing
criminal acts?

...I mean, that's really what we are talking
about. In every street gang you may have, for
instance, people who may not commit criminal acts.
But it is acceptable, within the group and its
processes, that other members of that street gang
commit criminal acts. The Elks or the Shriners or
whatever will not accept the criminality, and I
think that's the distinction.

MAXSON (USC): ...The thing about a gang is that
group processes foster criminality. I agree that
criminality is acceptable [within the group], in
terms of the social definition. But it's the
dynamics of the group that foster criminality.
That's the distinction there.

GENELIN (D/A,LA): ...It may or may not be. All I
know is that the acceptability of criminality is
important, and it may also foster criminality.

VINCENT (CPD): ...Larry, one of the greatest
copouts of all time that I have heard was
presented by Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black back
in the early 70's, when he was asked to define
obscenity. He said, "I can't define it, but I know
it when I see it." In other words, even in those
gangs where criminal behavior is accepted there
are certain things that might not be acceptable.
To draw a straight line and say, "Yes, that's true
in every case", would [present problems].

BOBROWSKI (CPD): [In line with that observation],
do we have anybody here whose knowledgeable about
motorcycle gangs? Because I'm not sure that all
members of motor cycle clubs, as they call them-
selves, really condone crime.

GOTT (LASD): ...The Sheriffs make a difference
between motorcycle clubs and motorcycle gangs.
There is a big difference.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Well the first thing you do is
identify the bad ones. Sure there are motorcycle
groups that are into it as a hobby, but when you
get down into the "meth" toting characters, they
are outlaws.

We have a motorcycle group in the Los Angeles
County Sheriff's Department, of recreational
motorcycle riders, who are most certainly not a
motorcycle gang, at least I hope not.

GENELIN (D/A,LA): ...The real big difference is
whether the group fosters crime. Certainly the
Hell's Angels accept criminality as part of their
group.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...The California definition may
have certain advantages, particularly for law
enforcement, because you are dealing with specific
criminal acts and you are not so concerned with
civility. Also the notion of community is a little
broader than neighborhood. If some of these gangs
move across jurisdictions you would not have a
problem.

GENELIN (D/A,LA): ...Something else pretty common
with gangs, particularly in the area of incivility
and criminality, is that the action is generally
in furtherance of the purpose of the gang,
whatever it may be: whether they are just out
raising hell, recruiting people, representing, or
whether they are involved in crime ...whatever.
That's usually the case with motorcycle gangs,
particularly Hell's Angels who are nationally or
internationally involved in sales of
methamphetamines, as a group. But I see motorcycle
gangs as being more on the fringe of organized
crime than [are] street gangs.

MILLER (Harvard): ...Irv just brought up the turf
criterion. Some cities are more turf oriented than
others. Chicago happens to be one that has a very
strong turf tradition. I talked to somebody in
Miami who said the gangs down there never heard of
turf. I don't know whether you hear that. So I
think we have to be very careful about using turf
as part of a nationwide definition of "gang".

And what I talk about is they claim exclusivity
rights over something. It can either be a
territory or some kind of an operation, say a drug
operation or extortion area. There does not have
to be the classic notion of one step over the line
and you are on our turf, and so on.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...But Walter, the advantage of
the California definition is it focuses on
intimidation and violence, so you don't label a
robbery or yacht stealing group as a youth gang or
a street gang. Its a good definition. I would like
to hear it repeated once more.

GOTT (LASD): ...Sure, I'll repeat it again. A gang
is a group of people who form an allegiance for a
common purpose, and engage in acts injurious to
public health and public morals, who pervert or
obstruct justice or the due administration of
laws, or engage in or have engaged in criminal
activity either individually or collectively, and
who create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation
within the community.

I might add that the definition was arrived at
through a great deal of blood, sweat, and tears,
and it took a number of months to hammer out the
wordsmanship to make everyone happy...

SPERGEL (U of C): ...What about New York?

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Yeah, John Galea. How are we
going to handle "Wilding" groups.

GALEA (NYPD): ...Ok, well, funny you should
mention that. First I'm going to give our
definition of a youth gang in New York City, then
I'm going to read what I've written about what's
going on in New York City to give you an idea of
what we are dealing with. Our definition has to
change, because it doesn't fit with what's going
on in the street today.

A youth gang is supposed to be an organized,
structured group with identifiable leadership and
membership which has engaged in, is suspected of
engaging in, or is considered likely to engage in
unlawful or antisocial activity which may be
verified by police records or other reliable
sources.

Then we break it down into delinquent gang and
marginal gang. Needless to say, if I utilize these
as criteria, we [probably] wouldn't have any gangs
in New York City, so I stretch the boundaries
quite a bit because we don't have the structured
groups anymore: the Vice Presidents, the Vice
Lords and the Armorers and what have you. Let me
just give you an idea of what's going on in New
York City right now. 

New York street gangs (notice, I use the words
street gangs and again that's because the words
are interchangeable, right?), no longer fit the
stereotypical image of wearing identifiable
colors, congregating in pool rooms and basements,
defending neighborhood, or home turfs and largely
continuing their delinquency to harassment,
nuisance activity and assault upon each other.

New York street gangs are unique, sophisticated
and contemporary. They can no longer be identified
by traditional features and factors. Our
contemporary and emerging youth tend to operate as
part-time groups, as random collectives. They come
together for selective and non-selective
delinquent and criminal acts. A huge proportion of
unaccountable youth have now established loosely
knit affiliations based exclusively on their
inclination and affinity to commit predetermined
antisocial and criminal acts.

They no longer operate as social families in
camaraderie and community kinship. Gangs have
always been a reflection of familial, social and
community life: substitute and surrogate families.
Twenty years ago that influence was apparent in
the formation of a structured gang framework. The
current generation reflects the phenomena of the
broken home and single parentship. The "me" as
opposed to the "we" concept. This an era of the
non-community person, the temp worker, having no
binding roots or loyalties. Their lifestyle is
deemed individual with unconnected and impersonal
social interests, often having little or no
sustained contact with their on-call partners in
crime. Now most of them perform as collective
independents or small cadres loosely tied together
in spontaneous groups, such as the emerging inter-
school conglomerates that have been the scourge of
the Public School system and mass transit system
for the past two years.

They are alleged to number in the hundreds but
function on an as needed basis. Their dress codes
are popular street styles rather than identifiable
colors and uniformity. Present teen crime or
delinquency patterns make obsolete unlawful
behavior motivated purely by intimidation or
nuisance incentives. Nearly all interest is
directed to what youth perceive as economic or
income enhancement ...better said, getting paid.
That's primarily what we have in New York.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...A radical departure from our
conceptions of gangs...

GALEA (NYPD): ...Well, I think it going to get
worse because the impact of crack is destroying
what little family structure there is -- the women
who have usually held the poor families together.
But the estimates are that half the people using
crack in New York are females. They are walking
away from their children, walking away from their
families. You have a situation now where almost
all young people in some areas are being raised by
their grandparents. Its not going to get better,
its going to get worse.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Is this the result of having
busted up traditional gang organizations? Have you
actually destroyed the Sharks and the Jets? Do you
see an alternative in this "Wilding" thing? 

GALEA (NYPD): ...Well in New York City gang
activity has been sort of cyclical. You know, it
goes and it comes, and right now it's at low ebb.
As far as the "Wilding" incident was concerned,
it's another example of a non-structured street
gang, kids just coming together committing that
one particular act. It's now the norm probably
more than anything else. Our kids are just not
acting out in name groups. We certainly have them,
don't get me wrong, but I think the norm now is
for a lot of these kids just getting together, as
I said previously, on an ad hoc basis, riding the
subway systems or just being with each other.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...What about what happened in
Brooklyn, the killing of the Black youth. That was
turf related. A bunch of guys that knew each other
that claimed territory. Wouldn't that fit in your
definition in California.

GALEA (NYPD): ...Yeah, but then again that's a
spontaneous reaction. That's not something that
happens every day. You know what I mean, I mean
Black kids walked on the block the day before.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...Then assume he wasn't even
Black, he was another color...

GALEA (NYPD): ...Well, I'm just giving you an
example, Black kids, white kids, green kids,
they've walked in that same neighborhood before.
They reacted to specific stimuli if you wish. 

SPERGEL (U of C): ...A girlfriend.

GALEA (NYPD): ...They reacted to that. These were
just kids that hung out together. Those same kids
might belong to other groups when they went to
school or other places, not necessarily with this
group. I could tell you a lot more about this
particular group, but they were not structured,
they were not formalized. They were just a bunch
of guys who, when they got off work or came from
school, hung out together because they lived in
the same place. 

...They did one thing at one time. If they
committed robberies and assaults with a deadly
weapon on a nightly basis, a weekly basis, an
ongoing basis then I would say, Irv, you've got
your definition.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...So it's got to be a durable
organization, then.

GALEA (NYPD): ...If they do it next week maybe so.

LEROY (DEA): ...What if they were a bunch of cops
setting around a bar and got into a fight and
killed somebody would that make them a gang. 

JACKSON (LAPD): ...Damn right it would.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...John you don't have a time
element in your New York City definition. It
doesn't say anything about sustaining a pattern of
criminal activity.

GALEA (NYPD): ...We've got too many definitions.
There was a similar incident the year before in
Howard Beach. There was another bunch of guys with
a little bit of turf, some poor Black guy wanders
into this area, they beat the hell out of him; he
runs away from them across the parkway and gets
hit by a car.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Well, we have to address the
fact that what we are dealing with exists on a
continuum then. We've got the spontaneous groups
that come together to commit a crime. We've got
what we call the traditional Sharks and Jets type
gang, and then we get into highly structured
groups too, which are a little easier for law
enforcement to deal with. We were successful in
Chicago in busting structured gangs. I am talking
about the El Rukns. The gang became so structured
that it actually started to solicit a foreign
country to conduct acts of terrorism here in the
United States. We were able to disrupt the gang
organization, and we still have to see where that
gang is going to evolve.

GALEA (NYPD): ...Okay, our gangs have never gotten
that sophisticated where they were involved with
other states and things of that nature. We have
kids who can't get from one part of New York City
to the other, let alone go out of the state. And I
think that's another myth that goes out. But as
far as locking them up is concerned, we have
locked them up, we've traditionally locked them
up, and we are going to continue to lock 'em up.
Now, one of the things that has happened is that
when we have the structured groups, those guys
knew that we knew who they were, right? 

And as we locked them up things started to change.
We had a group called the Tomahawks, one of the
larger groups in New York City. We knew who the #1
guy was, so they started switching things around.
They changed the #10 guy to the #1 guy. They found
out that mere identification was not enough. We
knew who they were, and they knew anytime
something in the neighborhood happened we were
going to go right to the leaders. They knew that,
and they started to change. They changed what they
were wearing and soon they went from a formalized
street gang to another group called the 5% Nation,
where they changed all of their nicknames and
screwed up all our records.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...Barbara Wade do you have a
comment on this?

WADE (Miami): ...No, I was going to ask to respond
to spontaneity, but Leroy picked it up. That's
okay.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Okay we are going to try and
forge ahead... with a definition. Let me put up
the Chicago definition and we'll get a repeat on
Ray Gott's definition.

[Displayed on overhead projector: Chicago
Definition as follows...]

[A street gang is] a law violating collection of
persons who are integrated into an identifiable,
somewhat structured group; who recognize
themselves as a group; and with few exceptions,
exhibit some sense of territoriality. It is a
group that has developed in the neighborhood
milieu, but whose behavior is in conflict with the
surrounding community due to its failure to use
acceptable means of achieving recognition and
influence.

First off though, Chief Casey made [the]
observation that we skipped over an item in the
Chicago definition that he feels is worthy of some
discussion.

CASEY (CPD): ...It's not so much that we skipped
over something. It's just that I thought it was
treated rather lightly, and that was "incivility".
Somebody didn't want that in. At every community
meeting you go to [as a District/Precinct
Commander] they talk about incivilities and
identify those with gangs. Incivilities are people
standing out late at night making noise
...probably not criminal. Incivilities are
breaking glass, drinking on the streets, when your
wife goes to work in the morning and she's on her
way to the bus [and] they are hitting her up for
dimes, nickels, quarters... that sort of thing;
they block streets, they turn on fire plugs... 

I think the people identify that as gang activity
and we have to also look at what a citizen
identifies as gang activities when they are
treated uncivilly. We spent a lot of money here
trying to computerize that so we could alert the
cars to get out to the area to deal with
incivility. So its something that I would like to
not lose. Keep it in the back of your head. Its
very important to the community, and its one of
the things that we do to serve the community as
best we can.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...One of the things that I hope
will grow out of this conference is that we can
ultimately settle upon some form of uniform
procedure of reporting street gang crime so that
not only do we have a barometer for how successful
we are in our own localities, but [that] the
academics will have some data they can use for
cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. The
thing that Chief Casey was getting at never hits
the paper. We not going to end up reporting it,
but [for] District Commanders and people
responsible at the local level for law
enforcement, the precinct level, this is the bulk
of their activity. And it consumes the most time
and manpower. The investigative aspect is usually
what we hit on and we end up reporting only a
slice of the pie. It is important from the point
of view of index and non-index crime, reporting. I
think as Chief Casey said, it bears underscoring
and is something that we shouldn't overlook...

CASEY (CPD): ...I might add a little tag. It deals
with the quality of life in the neighborhood when
its an incivil place to live. Citizens see that as
a gang problem and maybe we ought to look at what
the citizen thinks as well as what we think.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): I think as communities become
inured to these problems, we tend to pay less
attention to them too. What constitutes a serious
gang problem in a ghetto area are no longer the
incivilities, but we have vast areas of the city
here in Chicago where that is a serious problem
and engenders the most public concern. 

McBRIDE (LASD): ...We discussed that very thing
when we designed our definition. That's when we
put in injurious to public health and public
morals and all of that part of the definition.
That was the very thing, incivility, we were
considering. Many times I think that's tied very
closely to criminality. When a youth comes up and
spits on the sidewalk in front of you or something
like that. It's all of a sudden either interfering
or an assault on a police officer; and what
started out as an act of incivility becomes an act
of criminality real quick.

GENELIN (D/A,LA): ...I think when that behavior
becomes normative, the youth in the area become
negatively influenced...

McBRIDE (LASD): ...I think incivility is a very
big part of gang activity in general. One of the
things that we insisted upon was the last part of
the definition -- the creation of an atmosphere of
fear and intimidation within the community. It's a
very important part of that definition.

KRAMER (LAPD): ...I totally agree with that. I
think it's something that's not discussed enough.
If you look at the percentage of overall crime
committed by gang members and compare that to
overall Part 1 crime, it is a relatively small
percentage in the scheme of things.

But either the perception of fear or the fear
itself that citizens feel because the presence of
gangs in their community is the real degradation
of the quality of life that they have. I am
familiar with many communities, not only Southern
California but other areas of the country where
gangs are not known groups, they have not
identified themselves as gangs or are not known
for a lot of violent activity. But the fact that
they are involved in graffiti, are intimidating by
their nature, represent, give the hard looks,
etc., causes citizens to feel fear which is
interfering with their quality of life. 

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...I feel kind of guilty since I
published our stats for gang crimes. I said that
street gang crimes in Chicago were only 0.8% of
all comparable crime in Chicago -- which is true.
But I feel that these results could be fostering a
false sense of security. When you go down 18th
street here in Chicago and you look at all the
gang graffiti, and the groups hanging on the
corners, you've got to [ask] yourself, "Do the
stats give a well-founded perception of safety?"

MAXSON (USC): ...I agree with the importance of
incivility in the gang definition. I'd like to
discuss a little later a broader scheme which will
include John Galea's groups. My particular problem
now is with the Los Angeles County definition, and
the notion of the gang member's individually
oriented criminal activity. If it is an individual
act in furtherance of the gang, for whatever
reason, I would tend to agree with it. But the
fact is that many individuals, who happen to be
members of gangs, are becoming involved in a lot
of criminal acts. For instance, if the gang member
is involved in a domestic fight with his wife, it
becomes a gang matter [under the L.A. County
definition]. The particular point that I am making
is if an individual performs a criminal act, and
we are to put it within a gang context, then it
must also be in furtherance of the gang's
aspiration, and to the benefit of the particular
gang itself.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...We run into some problems with
the idea of "the furtherance of the gang", and
what that really means. However, when our people
are looking at crime, if its a domestic distur-
bance, including a husband/wife [or]
girlfriend/boyfriend living together, that takes
precedence over the fact that he or she might be a
gang member. We would not count that as gang
crime. But going back to the original premise of
how we look at gang and define gang and gang
activity, it's our belief that being a member of a
gang generally fosters criminality, antisocial
behavior, and that gang members are more prone to
commit crimes.

All gangs are bad in our street gang definition.
They are in business to commit criminal acts. The
whole influence of the gang mentality is why these
people go out and commit, maybe, an armed
robbery...

KRAMER (LAPD): ...Right. But if a particular
[person], who happened to be a gang member, went
out and committed a robbery individually, for his
own personal benefit, and no other member of the
gang was involved in it, [and] there was no other
indication of gang involvement, etc., (he was the
sole beneficiary of his act)... To say that should
be [classified] as "gang related" -- for something
that he did singularly and individually -- seems
to me to be some kind of an extension of the
reality of the situation.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...That's part of what I was going
to say. What you are talking about is the score
process afterwards. You are determining if it's
gang related or not gang related.

The problem I have with our own definition is, as
Ray Gott said, it's "an allegiance for a common
purpose", -- and it doesn't have to be a "common
purpose". It is an allegiance. Loren Kramer, you
are familiar with the study that we just did on
one of the bigger gangs, the Rolling 60's. There
would be small segments of them that would be
doing things, [and] didn't even know each other.
So when you say allegiance for a common purpose --
it doesn't have to be. I mean they're in what we
are calling a street gang for a variety of
reasons. In their allegiance to that group they
recognize each other, interact with each other on
the street, and will recognize other people as a
common enemy. For instance, the A-Trays and the
Rolling 60's know that they are common enemies and
they will band together on occasion. So all I am
saying is that segment of the definition, "for a
common purpose" is superfluous. I think it's
misleading.

GENELIN (D/A,LA): ...It may well be, but I think
the intent was not the common purpose be all
inclusive for all the gang members. For example,
you could have four or five members of a
particular gang who's common purpose is to steal
cars, and another small group whose common purpose
is to deal dope. I don't think that one common
purpose has to spread across the entire gang. I
agree that perhaps the term common purpose could
be misleading.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...I say we don't need it.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Well, we can get into that
when we discuss what a gang related event is.

KRAMER (LAPD): ...The reason I brought it up is
simply because we are trying to define a street
gang, and I don't want to define it that way. The
El Rukns may have a common purpose, but I know the
L.A. street gangs don't when they band together.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...What about the symbolic
notion? Is that useful to get at? I suppose you
could say "purpose" could be symbolic as well as
material and that would take care of it.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Well in Chicago it works both
ways, you can commit a crime for the interest of
the gang or you could use your gang identification
for your own purposes in intimidating the
potential victim.

GALEA (NYPD): ...The thing I was thinking about is
seeing somewhere in the definition the idea of
ongoing group activity. I think it has to be a
group that is ongoing, not just involved in one
particular incident. It'd be impossible for us to
track down every three or four kids who got
involved in something.

MAXSON (USC): ...But that's were the identifiable
group comes in, that they recognize themselves
with a name or something.

GALEA (NYPD): ...Yeah, but the group has to be
ongoing.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...One of the things that law
enforcement people have a problem with is finding
a hook to the gang so that we can deal with it,
and put an incident in a pigeon hole and say,
"This belongs to the so-and-so target for law
enforcement purposes". Whether it has a name or
not is immaterial, but we want to try and identify
and pigeon hole these things a little bit.

MILLER (Harvard): ...In our old definition we
tried to differentiate gang from a mob or crowd...

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Let's say its a durable
organization.

McCLOSKEY (CPD): ...Well that's what I was going
to say. Shouldn't this group, this gang be
identified as a gang? Is it a known gang, instead
of just any group of people who are going down the
street to commit a crime and then all of a sudden
we decide it's a gang? It's got to be a criminal
gang act that they've committed...

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...That's an element of the
Chicago definition.

GALEA (NYPD): ...What's going to happen with us is
that our gang crime rate is going to skyrocket
because we don't define it as such.

McCLOSKEY (CPD): ...Not necessarily, I mean if we
know that they are committing a crime as a group
and we know that they are a gang and they make the
gang signs at the time, we can attribute that to
an actual gang. But if they are just a group of
people who go out and commit a crime as a gang,
that's really not a gang crime, it's just a crime
committed by a number of people.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Let's hear from Dr. Miller,
and that will take us to lunch.

MILLER (Harvard): ...This is something I wasn't
going to talk about because its sort of academic,
but, I have a feeling that John Galea is feeling
left out here. This is something that I put
together about 10 years ago. I was concerned very
much with the whole issue of incivility of groups
in local communities. They don't go around with
codes or symbolic aspects, they don't have colors,
use graffiti and so on, but nevertheless they form
a basis for citizen complaints. They are a part of
what I call collective youth crime, rather than
simply gang crime. So I thought I would start with
the notion of a law violating youth group.

This is the overall concept of the law violating
youth group. A simple definition, although I
managed to make it very complicated in the
discussion. Here is the definition of a law
violating youth group. It includes the idea of
gang.

It is an association of three or more youths whose
members engage recurrently over a long term, not
just once or twice or sporadically, in illegal
activities with the cooperation and/or moral
support of their companion.

It's quite simple and it has elements that many
people have discussed so far, the notion of
recurrence or continued association, the
cooperation and/or moral support -- that means, if
the group itself approves of the kinds of illegal
activities that other members are engaged in. I
set up a typology that recognizes the fact that
most groups engage in lots of different kinds of
illegal activity, but there is generally one
dominant pattern.

First I want to talk about "disruptive groups".
Here I have six forms of activity and they really
correspond to the incivility thing; 1) noisy,
disorderly congregation, 2) drinking/drug use, 3)
harassment, obstruction, exclusion by force or
threat of force, (that's bugging local people and
keeping them from going into stores and so on), 4)
vandalism, property destruction, defacement,
arson, 5) fighting, assault by missiles, direct
assaults on persons, and 6) small scale theft,
burglary, robbery and larceny.

Next come "gangs". This includes the turf gang
which is larger, more formalized than those simple
crime groups. Still larger and more formalized
would be predatory gangs. These are gangs whose
primary objective is income acquisition through
predation and theft of various types. A third type
of gang would be called a fighting gang. Their
main focus of activity is assault, combat
violence.

Another category of law violating youth groups
would be "casual groups". Casual means that they
come together from time to time, sometimes even
only once. Casual disruptive local cliques would
be temporary groups that get together and are
disruptive in particular areas. Casual predatory
cliques might get together on a sporadic, basis to
engage in property crime. Casual assaultive
cliques, also would get together infrequently or
maybe only once or twice, and here I think the New
York City "Wilding" group fits.

Clearly a lot of the distinctions are arguable.
The typology permits some prioritization in the
use of law enforcement resources.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...I see three general
categories of groups. The first I'd call a law
violating youth group, the second I would call a
criminal gain group or moving on towards organized
crime, and the last I would call the gang category
variations. There is overlapping among those
categories however.

McBride (LASD): ...LA would have a real problem
with excluding the smaller more formalized
cliques, because we have a large number of small
cliques of Crips and Bloods, they are 15-20 people
maximum, but are very violent ...very much
involved in gang activity, and some of them are
even target gangs for the Sheriff's Department
because of their level of violence.

VINCENT (CPD): ...I was looking over the
California definition that Ray Gott just kicked
out. It's something that I could personally live
with and subscribe to.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...How does New York feel about
that definition?

GALEA (NYPD): ...Are you talking about the
California definition? It was very difficult to
visualize it because it was such a long statement.
Can we xerox it and put it on the board so we can
all take a look at it? Then we can have some
productive discussion. 

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...While we are waiting for some
xerox copies, let me discuss what we are going to
do...this afternoon. We will look at what
constitutes a street gang related event for
reporting purposes. We are also going to discuss
how we can share gang information or at least put
it in a common pool so that individual law
enforcement agencies can access it. I don't know
whether any of our agencies have the resources to
do that. Perhaps the Department of Justice can
pick up the ball in the future if not immediately.
Lastly what we want to do is have the policy
people from each department participate in a
little strategic discussion as to how their own
individual operations are run and what they look
like, how they are structured. Perhaps each policy
person can learn from the other and modify his
operation. That will pretty much close and
accomplish everything that we set out to
accomplish today.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...What about the New York
reaction to the L.A. County definition?

GALEA (NYPD): ...Well, I'll tell you the truth.
That definition is so broad that probably every
one of our street groups involved in drugs would
fall under that definition. They all have a
particular block controlled by some kid 18-19 year
olds who has got a group working for him. They are
all armed. Anybody who would try to sell drugs on
the group's block [would be blown] away. Under
that definition, all those groups would be a gang.
We wouldn't consider them gangs.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...You wouldn't be dealing with
those groups?

GALEA (NYPD): ...Well, as far as we are concerned
that's an organized crime problem. That's a drug
problem. But if you look at it at the street
level, it has all the things in your definition.
It's controlling a particular block, their block.
You don't come on their block and sell drugs. If
you do, you get blown away. Most of the them are
16, 18, 19 years old. One guy is the ringleader
until he gets taken down. Others in the drug
operation are 12, 14, 15 years old. As far as we
are concerned that's an organized crime problem,
it's not a gang problem.

We distinguish it by the fact that this
organization is a business, and everybody in that
business is an employee, then that's not what we
consider a street gang.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...Well, can you draw the line
at the point where organized crime hooks into the
structure of the gang just for drug distribution.

VINCENT (CPD): ...The structure of these groups
makes them amenable to exploitation by organized
crime. We have found [that] as individuals some of
our gang members are employed by drug
organizations. 

SPERGEL (U of C): ...But, in Chicago you can make
a distinction between the gang organization and
organized crime though, right?

VINCENT (CPD): ...We do. We maintain that people
operating strictly as a drug organization are not
"street gangs" or "youth gangs" or "teen gangs".
They are an organized crime group.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...In adopting a common
definition between the four jurisdictions here
today, we are going to have to admit that there is
going to be a degree of discretion when we apply
the definition. And if you're willing to exercise
that discretionary option, I don't see where you
are going to have a problem with it.

GALEA (NYPD): ...I don't know, we're not going to
include drug gangs, though,...

MULRYAN (NYPD): ...I don't really have any great
problem with the definition, how we are going to
use it is another story.

MILLER (Harvard): ...Can I ask a question about
your drug gangs? Are they involved in incivility.
Are they intimidating people on the streets?

GALEA (NYPD): ...Usually not, because they want to
sell on a particular block and they want good
relations. They are good neighbors. They don't
want anybody that's in that area to come down on
them.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...So what you are saying, in
fact, is that they are different from street
gangs.

GALEA (NYPD): ...Yeah, its a business. Simple as
that, and if you cross them, they will uncivilly
disrupt your way of life. But they in no way care
about their surroundings. They don't care who
walks down the block. That doesn't bother them.
But, the same characteristics of a street gang are
involved in this particular business.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...The only turf concern is as
far as sales area.

GALEA (NYPD): ...Exactly.

GENELIN (D/A,LA): ...I would tend to agree with
what you are saying if they are not involved in
street crime, street robberies, intimidation, the
extortion and all that.

GALEA (NYPD): ...Our street gangs don't control
drugs in New York City and that's a big
distinction compared to other places.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...That is one of the things we
are going to hit on this afternoon when we talk
about a street gang related event. There are two
types of crimes that we categorically include in
the domain of street gang crime and they are the
unlawful use of weapons and narcotics. I will tell
you why.

We get a known street gang member who is adorned
with all sorts of icons and tatoos and wears all
the outward trappings of colors... and he's
peacefully riding down the street with a bent
license plate and a gun on his hip. We put a stop
on the car, go through it, and we find the gun. It
becomes a gang related event. There is no
particular victim, so to speak. The people of the
State of Illinois are the victim in that case. We
classify that as gang related on it's face.

We feel that even though this person didn't commit
a crime other than the possession of that weapon
unlawfully, we're going to call it gang related
because its important to law enforcement for a
tactical purpose to know the extent to which
street gang members arm themselves. That's an
important statistic for us. And it ties in
directly with drive-by shootings.

The other thing is, we consider categorically all
incidents involving narcotics, their possession
and sale by gang members, to be gang related,
because we have no way of putting a handle on it
other than that.

We want to know the extent to which gangs are
involving themselves in narcotics activity. But
here we plead uncertainty. We do it just to
capture the statistic. We don't want to lose the
information, although we are not quite sure
whether a person who has one marijuana joint is,
in fact, involved in a gang related narcotic
activity. When he is selling on turf and he's got
members of his group performing a look-out
function, or we can establish that there is
networking between gangs or among gang members in
the distribution of narcotics, we're pretty
comfortable calling that a gang related narcotic
event.

But with possession we are not so sure. Is it the
idea of a person being an entrepreneur, trying to
sell a nickel bag to make a little money on his
own, or is he acting as a functionary of the gang?

McBRIDE (LASD): ...If he has homeboys to keep
everybody else out and kill the competition...

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...It's for that reason that we
don't want to lose the information and we do
categorize it [as gang related].

McBRIDE (LASD): ...we do the same thing...

CASEY (CPD): ...I need a clarification going back
to your first example. The guy who has the tatoos
and all the trappings of a gang member whose
driving down the street with a bent license plate
and you stopped him. He's got the gun and that's a
gang incident. Let him go five minutes farther
down the road and he walks in with that gun to a
7-11 store and commits an armed robbery. I have
some concern about whether that's gang related,
I've got some confusion in my mind. Larry, I don't
personally have any investment in this definition,
because I didn't work on it.

There are a couple of words, minor changes based
on some of the discussion that I heard that seem
to make it more palatable to some other folks. For
example, why is public health in there? Public
health to me means AIDS, contagious diseases and
so on.

KRAMER (LAPD): ...The term actually came out of
some conspiracy law. You have much broader powers
when you enter into the realm of public health.
The FDA is the only agency I know that can remove
all the drugs out of a store without a warrant or
anything. So its much better for the police in
terms of our powers.

CASEY (CPD): ...So what did you end up changing in
the definition?

GOTT (LASD): ...So far it reads a gang is an
identifiable group of people who form an
allegiance and recurrently engage in acts
injurious to public health and public morals.

CASEY (CPD): ...A group of people, and since we
agreed this morning that street gangs can have
people of any age up to 80 or 90, that stays. It's
just people, it's not just young people or youths
or that kind of a thing. The other criteria which
are frequently used are identifiable leadership.
Some degree of internal organization or some kind
of formalization.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...The reason we don't want
leadership or structure is that for most of our
street gangs, you can't go to them and say this is
the leader, this is the pres or vice-pres or
whatever... It may change by the hour.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...It could change by the hour,
but its still there and in fact could change by
the circumstance. It might be one leader for drug
deals, another for something else and so on. But
that leadership is still there.

GALEA (NYPD): ...Those four or five guys I spoke
about before who were robbers in essence. It seems
like they would fall right in here.

CASEY (CPD): ...And they shouldn't. I couldn't
live with this. It's too broad.

CASEY (CPD): ...I think you have to state that
more clearly. I don't think this definition should
suffer from the vice of vagueness. It has to be as
concrete as possible because ultimately you are
going to end up making your decisions of what a
gang crime incident is by looking at the
definition of a gang. I agree with John Galea from
New York. Three guys that walk in to rob a place
are not a gang, although they have a common
purpose and they are hurting the public health or
public morals and are engaged in criminal
activity. I don't see that as a gang and that's
what I want to avoid. It has to be to me clear,
more concrete. It's too broad.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Chief Casey, is this
definition less clear than the one that Chicago
currently employs? Maybe the definition we are
currently using to classify crime is not that
clear either?

CASEY (CPD): ...Obviously the definition we are
presently using is workable. We haven't had any
problems. Nobody says we are deviating from our
definition to describe gang crime as [anything
else]. What I am worried about is this one is
broader and it would be too vague. [Our
definition] is something we are comfortable with
and I'm very leery of making a change right now. I
do not want to shoot from the hip. I'd have to sit
down, do some real thinking on my own to determine
what effect it would have in statistical terms.
Are we going to skew them one way or the other,
are we suddenly going to have a 2% drop in gang
activity or a 2% increase? And why? It's a real
sensitive area for us and it's one that I would
find very hard to make a policy judgment about at
this time.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...I suspect that this problem
exists in the other jurisdictions too. 

MULRYAN (NYPD): ...Everybody here comes from some
place else, and we perceive our own individual
problems a little differently. Now we all, I
think, agree on what a street gang is and what a
street gang isn't. But there is a degree of
difference in each of our cities as to what we see
out there in the street.  And I think we all sort
of like to defend what we do in our own particular
areas of law enforcement. And now what you are
asking us to do is come together and make policy,
in a way, for the rest of the country. It's kind
of difficult.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...I don't know that's our
objective really. First of all this is not for any
funding purposes. This is just to agree on a
common definition...

MULRYAN (NYPD): ...If we agree on a common
definition, what is that going to mean?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Well its going to mean that we
have comparability, longitudinally, within and
across jurisdictions as to the degree of success
that we have or lack of it when we do our law
enforcement work.

KRAMER (LAPD): ...I have an idea that is probably
completely unworkable, but two sets of purposes
are being served here. I don't think you are going
to get, at least in this context, individual
police from these four jurisdictions here today,
(and another 40 or 50 in the United States who are
not represented), to agree on a definition which
they will then adopt as an official policy in
their department. I think you have a very small
chance of doing that. And I think that the
definitions that have worked out well for the
individual cities should be maintained by those
cities. Because "If it ain't broke don't fix it". 

On the other hand as far as possible there could
be a second definition, recognized by the
department which is used for purposes of national
comparability. Now, the reason why I say it's
feasible is that you'd be taking the same base
data and analyzing it in two different ways. For
purposes of the local law enforcement group this
is what we call a gang, this is what we call a
gang incident, this is what we call a gang member
and this is what we will continue to use for
statistics. 

Given the not inconsiderable problem, suppose
everyone really did adopt a common definition,
you'd have radical shifts in the numbers of the
gangs. They'd say, "Hey, what's going on?  You're
trying to cook the books!"

But if somebody, maybe a research person in the
police department said, "Here is a more universal
definition, for the purposes of cross-city
comparability [and] for all those other purposes
that you mentioned", [then] our data could be
analyzed in both of these ways, [and] you might
have a resolution to the problem.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...May I ask John a question.

GALEA (NYPD): ...Yeah.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...In your analogy or your use of
the robbers, did they have a common identifying
sign or symbol?

GALEA (NYPD): ...Yeah, guns...

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...No, what I mean is to identify
themselves, to identify the group. Did they have a
group identification? ... And the reason I bring
that up, I'm sure is quite apparent, is that one
of the criteria that separates your group, the
robbers, from our group the street gang is that
our group wants to be identified by a sign or
symbol or common name or common identification.
Your robbers don't. And so if we add that to the
definition, would it satisfy your objection?

GALEA (NYPD): ...Well, it gets a little hairy. It
really gets a little hairy because if it's a
street gang and they go out and rob somebody, we
don't care if it's one guy or a hundred guys --
it's still a street gang. I have no problem with
that. If a street gang member is caught with a
weapon no matter what he is doing with that
weapon, robbing somebody, walking down the street
with it, standing next to it, he's going to be
locked up and that's going to be a gang related
incident. So we have no problem with that. We do
have a problem when you are talking about three
guys or five guys who come together, a robbery
team in effect, and go out and all they do is rob
people. That is not a street gang.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...If they have a common name, or
a common symbol or sign...?

GALEA (NYPD): ...We have guys that go into banks
and rob banks and they wear the same clothing. Now
that's identifiable, I mean we can identify those
five guys.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...But it's not symbolic! That's
the point. What I'm saying is if there is an
identifying process in what street gangs do, that
names them, then does not that distinguish it from
your example...

GALEA (NYPD): ...I'll agree with that...

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Okay, and so if we add that to
the definition at some level, it seems to me at
that point we may have it licked.

GALEA (NYPD): ...Okay, if we can work in some way
the idea of symbolic identification...

SPERGEL (U of C): ...What does that do to
California? Does it reduce the number of gang
incidents [you would report]...?

GOTT (LASD): ...Doesn't reduce us at all.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...That's what we count now
anyway.

GENELIN (D/A,LA): ...The other possible solution
to this, if there is only some minor concerns
about this definition or something like it, we
could, specifically list some exclusions. We could
exclude specifically prison gangs...

VINCENT (CPD): ...motorcycle gangs...

LEROY (DEA): ...organized crime, terrorists
gangs...

SPERGEL (U of C): ...How would you phrase that
additional change?

CASEY (CPD): ...This is a rough area, this is an
area of high emotional problem for the community.
It's a hot press item. This is not an easy thing
that we can roll off and say well we've done a
great job here today and that's it. I think that
we are not looking into the future to see what the
ramifications are, and that's what my concern is.

If it's going to increase or decrease or skew the
statistics by one iota, I want to walk away from
it. I don't want to be involved. I don't want to
do that, because I know the abuse that we are
going to take if we do that. We have to be very
careful what we are going to do here. It's not a
thing that anybody should take lightly...

GALEA (NYPD): ...I have to agree with him and I
tell you, some of the other police departments
around the country are really counting on what's
going to happen in this room, because you are the
legends of having dealt with gangs. A lot of them,
as you know, come to see you guys all the time,
Wes. And they take what you say as law. They may
not go by it right down to the point, but when
they get back to their communities, the stats that
come out of what they perceive [to be] your
policies have all kinds of ramifications:
liability, labelling, what is a gang member, who
is an associate, and all of that stuff. So I think
you have to be very, very clear here in terms of
what you come up with.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...I think that if we come to an
agreement that's consonant with what we do already
[autonomously], but perhaps couched in terms that
we can all live with, then we have accomplished
something here today...

GALEA (NYPD): ...But you've got to do it, because
they're depending on it. This is a life and blood
thing to some of them out there...

DURAN (LA Prob): ...I think too, that the amount
of diversity, cultural diversity, between
different cities will necessitate some degree of
flexibility on the part of the people who are
assessing what is a gang related event.

CASEY (CPD): ...We don't want that, at least I
don't. I'm saying it has to be concrete. There
cannot be room for deviations. It has to be the
same, because that is where you fall into the trap
of later somebody coming back and saying, "Look
what they did in Chicago to 'kill' crime". You
know we've lived through that. I'm not interested
in getting myself in a box that's not concrete. It
has to be something that we can say is the
definition of a gang and if a person does this
it's a gang crime incident. So when you start with
a definition I think you have to include within it
what a gang incident is, otherwise it's just
something I feel real uncomfortable with, real
uncomfortable.

KRAMER (LAPD): ...Let me just say something, that
is my own personal opinion. This is not the
opinion of the Los Angeles Police Department and I
want to make that real clear, because there are
other people -- and probably even within this room
-- that don't agree with me.

...One of the things I tell police agencies
throughout the nation that are starting to
experience an emerging gang problem is that one of
the most important things they have to do is what
we are doing in this room. That's to come up with
a definition. Because when they come up with that
definition, they're going to end up getting stuck
with that definition. 

I'm not sure whether our definition in Southern
California isn't too broad. This is a point on
which many people may not agree with me. That was
a trap that we established for ourselves when we
first got into the gang business. We made our
definition extremely broad. Part of that was
designed to justify more personnel, the existence
of gang units, budgets, etc. etc. Now I know
that's heresy, but I believe that to be true. And
it wasn't anybody's fault by design. I think it
was a trap that we established for ourselves.
Consequently, both the Sheriff's Department and
ourselves have an extremely broad definition. I
don't know if Bob Jackson's got the stats with
him, but one of the things that our chief became
very concerned about was how much of the total
amount of gang crime out there is gang motivated,
and how much of it is rather gang related --
involving a gang member, either individually or
collectively...

JACKSON (LAPD): ...44%

KRAMER (LAPD): ...That's right. What we found is
well over 40% of the total gang crime in the city
of Los Angeles has been gang related. You know
well over 40% of it has been not gang motivated.
Now that's a substantial figure over the past 10
years. If you were to take collectively 40% of our
gang stats and just wipe them off, we would have a
substantial decrease in our gang crimes. 

But theoretically or philosophically, we made a
decision a long time ago that because a gang
member has more of a propensity towards violence,
because he happens to be in the gang environment
he is more inclined to commit a crime, a violent
crime particularly, we classify those crimes as
being gang related.

Now it does give our gang investigators some
discretion, that if in fact they are looking at
the domestic violence incident, for instance, he
may or may not tabulate that as being gang
related. It gives them a little discretion at
looking at the case itself, but there is no clear
science. I don't think that the individuals that
are involved in this robbery group are street gang
members. I don't think [that] even in our
definition they would be.

MAXSON (USC): ...I don't think the individual
burglar who's a gang member and is stealing for
himself is a gang crime thing. And I would want
that to be clear. I can't agree with this
gentleman more. And I am an old Californian... a
Berkeley graduate. I know that researchers like to
make things nice and broad. 

SPERGEL (U of C): ...I would prefer a limited
definition. I could take the Chicago definition.

KRAMER (LAPD): ...Where this thing gets all real
fuzzy... and it has [become so over] the last few
years... and the Bloods and the Crips are a
classic example... [is that] we have individuals
who have been long time gang members or affiliated
with gangs; [but] they have percolated up to a
level where they have become multi-kilo dealers of
narcotics. They have become organized dope
dealers, they are no longer street gang members.

When the crack phenomena hit Los Angeles and
Houston and New York, one of the natural vehicles
present was the gang. These individuals very
quickly became major dope dealers. They ceased
being street gang members, but they used the gang
as a reservoir for recruiting people to deal
drugs.

A gang member may not be in our files as a Blood
or a Crip, but if he is an organized and
sophisticated drug dealer he is "involved in the
street gang environment." He employs a couple of
Crypts to go out and do a paid hit for him, and
they happen to get apprehended, that is a
homicide. But in fact if we apprehended them for
committing a murder and they are in our files as
gang members, that would be a gang homicide.

I think that we have gone way beyond any ability
to scientifically look at some nice little package
and say this is gang related and that isn't.
Things have changed dramatically over the last few
years. These gang members who are going to other
cities are the Bloods and Crips, [but they] are
not going there representing their clique or their
set. They are going there representing drug
dealers that are expanding their operations in
other cities. Now, what happens in these other
cities? The pattern is that, since they are still
gang members, whether they are traffickers,
runners, whatever, they will in fact reach out and
recruit younger people and bring them in. They
will take on the symbolism of their gang in many
cases. It's happened in Denver, it's happened in
the South, its happened all over.

I think that we get into a real fuzzy area,
whether or not they are, in fact, reaching out as
L.A. based street gangs or whether that's a
convenient way for them to recruit younger people
into their operation. And it works very well.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Okay. Let's adjourn for lunch.

------------------------------

AFTERNOON SESSION

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...One of things that we stated
earlier in the day is that ultimately we might be
able to develop some sort of a centralized
reporting apparatus to which we could send our
numbers. I think that some sort of central
collection agency is very important. I don't know
how far we are going to get with that today. I
don't think any of the agencies here have the
resources to volunteer that sort of service. But
Dave Leroy from DEA, has some insight into that
problem and some avenues that we might eventually
pursue. I would ask him to make just a brief
statement to summarize and perhaps give us some
reason for hope in this.

LEROY (DEA): ...Thanks Larry, I will just take a
moment, but I would like to leave you with these
thoughts. Some time back John Lawn, administrator
of the DEA, and Darryl Gates from L.A., got
together at one of those IACP meetings and
suggested that there be a national street gang
database. Of course we are talking drugs here
basically, street drug gangs.

We cooked up a system that was for varying
reasons, both political and otherwise,
unacceptable to the Attorney General so it went
down the drain. But it's still on the agenda. John
Lawn wants it and apparently (I forget the name of
the new boss of IACP), they have been talking back
and forth. And what we are trying to do is get a
system up again.

How are we going to do it? One of the things
that's in the drug czar's, Dr. Bennett's, strategy
-- and he doesn't know about this yet -- is to
have an intelligence center. Call it what you
want, but it's national in scope, a strategic
intelligence center, national drug center, and
he's got $50 million.

They've been over to our house very, very often.
The plan changes day to day. A new line here, a
new box there, a new task here. It's really not
ironed out, but in the strategy that he sent out
he's committed to do something by February of
1990. So probably by that time, some of these
plans will be worked out. And by plans I mean
between DEA, FBI, and Customs there are a lot of
different agencies involved.

The intelligence community and Department of
Defense have a big piece in this. Everybody is
into drugs now, something like 36 federal
agencies, it's unbelievable. If you think it's
difficult to talk about a definition of "street
gang", you ought to see some of these meetings
with the Generals and Admirals. It's just
unbelievable. They are all going in different
directions. They want to do the right thing, but
they don't want to wait. The bottom line is we
hope to have some sort of a system eventually,
even if it evolves through this new intelligence
center.

I'll keep in touch with you folks and we'll see
what happens down the way. I'm sure we can come up
with some type of system that we can use and take
advantage of the good work that you guys have done
in LA and Chicago.

We are not looking to change the world, but we are
looking for some sort of national system so that
we can put a few analysts on this full time. Let
them track which way the wind is blowing as long
as it's an issue. I just wanted to leave you with
that. It's a little out of context here but I've
got to catch a flight early so, if you have any
comments, fire...

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...You said street drug gangs,
have they done any thinking about what that means?

LEROY (DEA): ...Well, we were going to. Some of
these departments may agree, others may not agree
with what we have done here today. We were going
to try to go through the IACP. We figured it was
broader in scope. We'd cover the nation. That was
one thing we were thinking about. The idea would
be to start with the street drug gangs, because
they seemed to be the biggest issue and then as
time went on we could expand into things like
motorcycle [gangs], etc.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...In other words, they would
have to be street gangs for whom drug dealing is
an activity, a major activity...

LEROY (DEA): ...A major activity, right. They
might be involved in other things but it would be
a major activity. Now, at one time I did have
$450,000 in my hand from BJA for the system, but
that got swept off the table for a task force in
D.C. They scooped up a lot of money for that. We
were going to buy a few computers with that and
start the system up. But maybe we can get OJJDP to
somehow get involved in this. But right now, it's
a little nebulous exactly how this is going to
work out.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Are you trying to hold the
possibility that you'd do the uniform crime
reporting for gang crimes?

LEROY (DEA): ...No, we don't want to get involved
in statistics. What we were doing was tracking
where the violators are going. If a police agency
for example, in the East, sees gang members,
people that they have identified as gang members,
or want to check names thinking that they may be
from the Coast for example, they could run it
through a system, something like EPIC, the El Paso
Intelligence Center, on a line. Out of that would
come trends and I suppose, if you are looking for
statistics, yeah. But not who's doing what in each
city.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...You wouldn't limit yourself to
gangs that are trafficking drugs, would you not
also include individuals who are trafficking?

LEROY (DEA): ...Well individuals are already
plugged into the major system. There are a lot of
individuals there, for example, with vehicles and
aircraft. But you don't find many of these gang
members with aircraft, but all that is at EPIC
already. You've got eleven different agencies
there. So that's the broad idea which might or
might not ever come to pass. It's got a good
chance because the interest is there. It's just
that the money isn't. I am telling you, the money
in DC is just not around, we are broke.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...David, you do have an interest
in hearing about different programs that we might
have...

LEROY (DEA): ...Oh, yeah, that's why I stopped
here, and I thank Dr. Spergel for the invitation.
We are going to keep in touch until we know it
can't happen anymore. If that's the way it's to
be, but we are trying for a national system.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Okay, running behind as we
are, we have got to get moving on this
definitional thing, but it seems like we have
reached an impasse on exactly what we are going to
call a [street] gang.

We might be able to shed some light on the topic,
if we put the cart in front of the horse and
discuss what a gang related event is. Once we get
a feel for the beast that we are dealing with
...perhaps after we have seen what it does, then
we can define it a little better.

Let me tell you what we do in Chicago. We look at
case reports on an individual basis and review
narratives and any supplementary reports that we
get as a result of the follow-up investigative
process. We search reports for any information
which would lead one to reasonably conclude that
the incident grew out of a gang function. I
suppose we could change that this afternoon to
street gang function.

The gang membership of either party to the event
is not particularly important. Certainly there has
to be something in the event that tells us this is
a gang related crime, but, for example there have
been instances where an irate homeowner will come
out of his house and falsely identify a group of
kids as belonging to a local gang. He takes action
independently and commits a crime doing so by
battering one of them. It's a case of mistaken
identity. There was no "gang" involved. We would
look at that real closely, but its possible that
we might call that a gang related event because of
the conditions in the neighborhood and what
motivated this man to take action on his own. 

We started the process about seven years ago as an
empirical process in which we took all the types
of crime that were reported as gang related and
classified them. In essence what we did was pigeon
hole each case report and say these cases are
instances of representing or symbolic behavior
where people would signify their identity with a
gang. Some cases ended up being retaliatory in
nature, whether they were directed internally
toward the gang members for the purpose of
discipline, internal or external against rival
gang members, or victims who wished to cooperate
with prosecution.

Other cases were clear instances of street
fighting, gang recruitment, turf violations,
testing other gangs' resolve, defending their
turf, expansion of turf... Still others were vice
related incidents. A robbery could be a vice
related incident. It didn't have to be possession
of narcotics. 

Then there were four other categories that I just
sort of compressed for the purposes of
presentation. They are all so numerically small:
extortion of legitimate and illegitimate
enterprises operating in the gang's turf, [or] an
incident that emerged as a result of a personal
conflict. And then prestige, personal prestige I
guess you'd say, is the last category that
emerged.

We didn't try to develop these categories
artificially. We let the data tell us what
categories existed, and on occasion we didn't have
a trait that we could ascribe to a particular
incident. [As happens in the case of unlawful
possession of weapons.]

This emerged as an empirical exercise and what it
helped us do was discover that while people may
belong to a gang, it may just be one element of a
general pattern of their delinquent behavior. We
recognized that not always will somebody who
commits a theft do so in the interest of the gang.
He may steal a car because he has to get home.
It's got nothing to do with his being a gang
member. As a result, we were able to back up and
take kind of a global look at what the gangs were
doing. 

We have the UCR categories. We understand that
very well for reporting purposes, and it helps to
discover how many homicides we have to deal with,
strong arm robberies, arson, etc. It also helps to
form missions based on particular crimes and
people with the expertise to handle them.

However, the gang members don't know anything
about UCR reporting. So, we [took] a particular
crime like simple battery and saw that this
happened as a result of a turf violation. We
inverted the process [of UCR reporting] and took a
look at all turf violations and the crimes which
were committed in the interest of [turf], and we
get a whole new opinion of what constitutes a
street gang related event. Because any crime could
be committed in the interest of a turf violation
or a street fight or recruitment effort...

And lastly, the way this all broke out was that we
were overwhelmed by opportunities in the area of
vice enforcement, but representing and street
fighting seemed to be the predominant activities
here in Chicago. Of Chicago street gangs, at least
during the time frame of January '87 through the
end of July '88, there was not a great deal of
recruitment reported. This is based on reported
crimes not a crime victimization survey.

The other interesting aspect is that most of the
street fighting involved index crimes. That may be
artificial because people are less likely to
report an injury that is not serious...

MAXSON (USC): ...Larry, what's a recruitment
crime?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...A recruitment crime is gang
recruitment, compelling organizational membership,
for lack of a better term.

MAXSON (USC): ...Intimidation?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...That would include
intimidation, but it could be distinct from, say,
witness intimidation -- which could be
retaliation. Chapter 38 of the Illinois Criminal
Code...states:

A person who expressly or by implication threatens
to do bodily harm, or does bodily harm to an
individual's family, or uses any other criminally
unlawful means to solicit or to cause any person
to join any organization or association,
regardless of the nature of such organization or
association, is guilty of a Class III felony.

MAXSON (USC): ...You include narcotics under vice
too, don't you?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Yes, yes, but the vice
category includes liquor law violations among the
juveniles ...and there is prostitution, but it's
not big. Gambling is not real big either. It's way
under a half percent of all the reported street
gang crime. 

Well that gives you an idea of where we are coming
from when we say that something is street gang
related. But let me just summarize again. When we
read a case report, what we are looking for is any
information which would lead one to reasonably
conclude that the incident grew out of a gang
function. It's got nothing to do with whether he
belongs to a gang or not. And if he does belong to
a gang we would first view what he did as just one
of a series of possible delinquencies that this
person engages in.

MAXSON (USC): ...I noticed that you used the word
delinquency rather than crime. Are we still
talking about juveniles?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...No, we are talking about the
incivilities here too. We are talking about
proscribed behavior. Maybe I should have used that
term.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Can you clarify the term gang
function a little bit for me?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Yeah, let's take
"representing" as a good example. That's symbolic
identification with a gang, an interesting
phenomenon in Chicago. That represents a major
category for reporting purposes. So many crimes
here are classified as "representing". One of the
primary purposes of the gang, or results of gang
activity, is that gangs promote themselves above
every other thing. One of the common things we
read in case reports is that "So and so came up to
me, yelled the name of the gang or signified the
name of a gang with hand signs and struck me for
no apparent reason". I underscore those last three
words. The only hook that we have to that gang is
his "representing" activity and that is extremely
common.

GENELIN (D/A,LA): ...Is there a statutory
prohibition against representing?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...No.

GENELIN (D/A,LA): ...So representing in and of
itself is not a crime?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...No, it just a characteristic
of what we have found. The other thing is that the
members of street gangs will often represent their
gang identity prior to committing a crime, such as
robbery. And we don't quite know why they're doing
it except perhaps to develop a reputation for the
gang's meanness in this area, or to instill some
sort of a fear response in the victim, or maybe
they are doing it because they do deeply identify
with the gang. It's a matter of prestige with
them.

GALEA (NYPD): ...I got a problem with that gang
function too. If a gang had a party, would that be
a gang function?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Well, no. These misbehaviors
are in some way animated by the person's
identification or membership in that gang, or that
some benefit to the gang grows out of the actions
they have taken. If it's clear to us that the
person belongs to a gang but he's committed some
offense in his own interest, we won't call that
gang related.

Here's the example, and we get flooded with this.
We get thousands, literally thousands of cases
involving batteries where a women has been
battered by her husband or her live-in mate and we
consider this to be a domestic disturbance.
However, she will say, "...And oh yes! He belongs
to the Black Disciples", [or] the so and so gang 
-- perhaps to vilify the man and elicit a more
energetic police response.

What do we do with that information? Well it does
have investigative value. A lot of times when
investigators see this information in the case
report, they will call a gang crimes specialist
and ask, "Do you know Bo-Bo from the so and so
gang who just battered his wife. She is in the
hospital and we'd like to arrest him." And the
gang crimes specialist will check the files and
see [what can be done] to help the investigation.
Now that's a valuable tool and we don't discard
the case, but we don't consider it as a gang
related event. There is just nothing [about it to
suggest gang motivation]. This guy's gang
affiliates really don't care what his domestic
problems are. [With robbery] we have to be very
careful as to what we consider gang related or
not.

GENELIN (D/A,LA): ...If he used a gang tool in the
battery of his wife...

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Tool?

GENELIN (D/A,LA): ...Tool, a gun, knife or
something that belonged to the organization, to
the group?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...No, that's just an instrument
that he used.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...What if you had a group of
juvenile members of the street gang, who were
standing around the street corner just talking,
laughing, drinking beer. Is that a gang function?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Yeah, but you see, [under UCR]
it's not going to show up in these statistics.
They may get arrested. If they get arrested it
would be a vice related offense, cause they are
drinking beer in your example. Let's just say they
were being rowdy, and they were asked to move and
they wouldn't, they might be locked up for a
disorderly conduct offense. That's not reportable
under the index, non-index system, and it would
never hit the stats.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...What about Blacks, who just
hang on the corner cause they just don't have
anything else to do, and are neighborhood kids who
eventually kind of go into the drug stuff. 

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Well, if the community doesn't
complain about it, the police don't really have a
proper function there. An individual beat officer
may take the initiative to do something like that,
I don't, I couldn't speak to that.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Let me take that a little
further, for instance Blacks here like in K-town
on the [West] side. You see them hanging with
their colors. You know what their identification
is, what their affiliation is. Do you just
consider that loitering or...

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...I'll let Commander Vincent or
Captain Alexander address that. 

VINCENT (CPD): ...If there is a group of kids
standing on the corner, and they happen to be gang
members and they are not doing a damn thing, we
have got a hell of a lot of better things, and
more important things to do than lock them up. If
we get complaints relative to them, like
disturbing or intimidating people, the individual
officer may go up and say, "Get the hell off the
corner". If they don't move then they will get
locked up. But, just because they happen to be, as
you put it, Black kids who have nothing else to
do, but you went further and went into drugs; now
we are in a different thing all together.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...I saw an incident with your
officers last night that was handled very well.
They were doing area checks, and they stopped.
They saw a group of young Black youths and they
obviously knew them. They were very well connected
to the community. They got out, spoke to them, and
they both went over and started to feel them out a
little bit, talking to them very kindly. And they
didn't find anything, so they stood around for a
few minutes and moved on. I thought that was an
excellent contact, because at least they talked to
them. They know who they are and the next time
around, wham, if something is going down.

VINCENT (CPD): ...Yeah, they are playing a little
game, though they want the rapport with these
kids...

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Sure...

K.ALEXANDER (CPD): ...Where are you going to get
information? None of us are geniuses. We get
information by asking questions, and if you can
form a rapport with them, that's all we can do.

JACKSON (LAPD): ...Captain Alexander, if you did
have to take enforcement action against that
group, would you consider that gang related even
though it doesn't hit paper...

K. ALEXANDER (CPD): ...If they were all members of
the Black Gangster Disciples and there had been
incidents of people complaining, neighbors
complaining of them hanging on the corner and
acting in a rowdy manner, yes I would consider it
a gang related incident.

JACKSON (LAPD): ...Okay,

MAXSON (USC): ...Do you count that somewhere?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...We capture and report on all
categories of crime, index and non-index, that are
reportable under the Illinois Uniform Crime
reporting which is like a super-set of the FBI's
uniform crime reporting code.

Well, I didn't want to get into that kind of depth
just yet because I'm real interested in what Dr.
Maxson's work has produced. I think you will be
too. I just wanted to state that perhaps we are
beating this definitional issue to death, and we
shouldn't belabor it that much. When we start to
consider what we have for gang related events,
that will sort of filter out where we are going
with the definition. And when we come to the
understanding that not everything that goes down
has to be considered gang related, maybe we can
relax on this definition issue.

Before I turn it over to Dr. Maxson, Wes
[McBride], do you want to talk for a minute about
the differences between the Los Angeles definition
and the Chicago definition? Are people clear on
definition?

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Well, I don't see any major
conflicts. The conflict really comes with a
section under gang activity reporting that we have
in Los Angeles County wherein suspects are
identified as gang members, or in those events
where a subject becomes a victim due to his gang
affiliation, including burglary and drinking. We
capture all those different crimes where the gang
member is involved. That's really what our stats
are: criminal activity of gang members. We capture
and we count that.

Again we go back to our feelings that if it
weren't for their gang involvement, most of these
crimes probably wouldn't be committed. Certainly,
a drunk gang member in a group is potentially a
murderer waiting for a place to happen. We spend a
significant amount of our patrol time messing with
these misdemeanor type crimes. I think Los Angeles
city does it a tad different, but it's basically
along the same lines.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...There is a little bit of a
difference here in nomenclature. I don't want
anybody to be confused by it. L.A. has now moved,
if I interpret the newspapers right, from gang
related reporting only, to [additionally employ]
something called gang motivated. We in Chicago are
perfectly content with using the term "gang
motivated".

JACKSON (LAPD): ...Being motivated would fit your
definitions a lot more than the gang type crimes
that also use...

VINCENT (CPD): ...Your use, your employment of the
two terms, related and motivated, are probably
better than ours, which is either related or not
related.

JACKSON (LAPD): Well, O.K.

MILLER (Harvard): I don't like "motivated" at all.
I think it's a terrible term and should not be
considered!

MAXSON (USC): ...Okay, before we get into that
discussion, Dr. Klein and I, for a period of
years, have been looking mainly at the differences
between gang and non-gang violent offenses, mostly
homicide. We have looked at data from both the
LAPD and LA Sheriff's Department. The data I am
going to talk about today actually are taken from
all the LASD gang designated homicides between
1978 and 1982; and in LAPD, all gang designated
homicides in the three high gang stations between
1979 and 1981.

There are comparable numbers of non-gang homicides
that we randomly selected in order to make a
comparison of the differences and the
characteristics between homicides that have been
designated as gang versus those that have not. The
issue that I am going to talk about is what the LA
gang homicide statistics look like when you apply
the Chicago definition to them; and also what that
has to say about the differences between gang and
non-gang crime. In going from one jurisdiction to
the other, there are issues of prevalence, how
much gang crime is out there and also what the
nature of that gang crime is. How different it is
or how similar to non-gang crime. What we have
found in comparing LAPD [and] LASD homicide and
non-homicide cases, and in comparing those
characteristics to five other smaller cities in
California with emerging gang problems, are that
the differences between gang and non-gang crime
are fairly stable. I mean there are no dramatic
differences. What I want to talk about is what
happens when you apply the Chicago definition to
LA as to what [is] the nature of the differences
between gang and non-gang crime.

The first step that we took was to purify the LA
gang cases according to the Chicago definition.
What we used were indicators that we had collected
from all the gang homicides I described to you
before, using two features. One was the appearance
of a gang on gang situation. At least one member
on either the suspect's side or the victim's side
had to be an identified gang member. The second
thing we used was any clear indication of a gang
related motive. What we are missing here, from
what you presented today, is the whole issue of
"representing". Actually we have those data but I
just didn't realize that was part of your
definition.

As it turns out, the correlation between gang on
gang and a clear gang motive is very high, so we
selected our cases if they had either a gang on
gang quality or if there was a clear gang motive.
But it wouldn't have made any difference if we had
selected one or the other [because the correlation
was so high]. You see very little differences in
the cases.

When we purified the LA gang cases, we found that
44% of the LAPD gang homicides and 57% of the LASD
cases met the Chicago definition. And that
resulted in an overall assessment of about half of
the LA reported gang homicides would actually meet
the Chicago definition according to how we
operationalized it. 

One of the first things we did then, was to
compare the gang cases that met the Chicago
criteria with the gang cases that would drop out.
The differences seem largely to be associated with
the characteristics of the participants -- which
is almost redundant. I mean, you still have gang
members on both sides three-fourths of the time.
On the motivation side, you see a higher rate of
affiliation on the victim's side. Basically when
you apply the "motive definition" you see a lot
more gang on gang: an ADW [assault with a deadly
weapon] on one side, a homicide on the other.
Robbery of course goes way down, because you don't
have a gang victim nearly as often.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): We're not talking about a great
change then, in accommodating another description
of what constitutes a gang related offense -- at
least in the domain of homicides.

JACKSON (LAPD): ...You are dropping 50%,

McBRIDE (LASD): ...You are dropping 50%

GOTT (LASD): ...Simply in terms of volume its a
major difference.

MAXSON (USC): ...Absolutely. There is a major
difference in prevalence, but not so much in
[terms of] character, [which addresses] the issue
of this controversy. The kinds of violent offenses
that come out of gang function in Chicago also
come out in Los Angeles.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Dr. Maxson, you applied our
Chicago definition to the cases in Los Angeles...

MAXSON (USC): ...Right.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...and you find that the cases
would be reduced by 44%?

MAXSON (USC): ...44% of the cases in LAPD do fit
the Chicago definition and 58% almost 60% in the
Sheriff's Department.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...If you were to reverse that,
take LA's definition and apply it to Chicago, you
would probably double the [Chicago] homicide rate.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...We still wouldn't be close to
you. That's what I can't figure. How many gang
related homicides did you have last year? We had
60.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...I got 450-something, but that's
in the County. Now you are talking about a 7000
square mile area. What about the city?

JACKSON (LAPD): ...We counted 255. We had 96
square miles.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Couldn't you state that in
another manner, by saying that some 40% don't fit
in Chicago?

MAXSON (USC): ...Yeah, in LAPD it would be 56% of
what is currently called gang homicides would not
be called gang homicides in Chicago, and in LASD
its closer to 42% would drop out.

VINCENT (CPD): ...What would be meaningful to me
is if I knew why they weren't. What would be an
example of what they counted there, [that we]
wouldn't count here.

MAXSON (USC): ...Robberies is a clear one. Another
example is basically anytime the affiliation of
the victim is not clear, unless you happen to have
the information that there is a clear gang related
motive.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...In Chicago, if you have a drive
by, and a non-gang victim was hit you don't know
the perpetrators but your witnesses state that
they appear to be gang members, would you count
that?

VINCENT (CPD): ...Well in many instances one of
the indicators is representing. Most of guys in
the drive-bys use arm and hand signals. There are
words or actions indicating that a gang is
representing -- which would make it a gang related
event. However in [the case of] homicides the Gang
Section defers the matter to the Detective
Division for classification.

GALEA (NYPD): ...We are just the opposite when it
comes to the gang unit. We don't investigate the
case. We work with homicide. But our department,
the gang unit, makes the determination whether it
will be counted as gang or not. We would count
that if all indicators were that gang members that
did it. We may never solve that case.

JACKSON (LAPD): ...Even if there were no hand
signals or hand signs.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...We wouldn't make an
assumption.

JACKSON (LAPD): The bottom line is that if you
make a mistake and count it [as gang motivated]
and later determine it wasn't, you would adjust.
We had 257 last year, and [later] determined two
of them were not, and shouldn't be counted, and we
subtracted them.

MAXSON (USC): ...I should mention that 1980 was a
peak year in gang homicides in LA before the
current crunch. We purposely picked those early
years so that we could look at the rise and then
the decline of gang homicides to see whether
police recording practices influence the rate of
reported homicide. In both the Sheriff's
Department and LAPD we found absolutely no
evidence that designation of cases, gang or not
varied over time. They were very consistent and
reliable on the application of their definition.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...Is there another way of
looking at this? At one point we looked at four
districts of Chicago for juvenile offenses, 14-16
yrs., in gang cases, and looked at total police
records. We found that approximately 50% of all
the crimes for which they had records were non-
gang. This is just for juveniles, but it suggests
that you have the same pattern here. In other
words a gang member, based on the Chicago
definition, will commit half of his crime in such
a way that it's not labelled gang crime here. You
are saying the same thing.

MAXSON (USC): ...that's exactly what we are
saying...

SPERGEL (U of C): ...the number of crimes may be
the same, except we are classifying them
differently in the two cities.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Well homicides aren't close.
How many homicides do you have?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...60.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...On gang related homicides you
had 60; [but] what was the total homicide for
Chicago?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): 660, last year. It was a light
year, though. In Chicago, just as a rule of thumb,
it runs about 10% of all homicide. 

SPERGEL (U of C): ...It runs about 20-30% in LA
County.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...[The 10% figure refers to]
gang homicide as a percent of all homicide in the
city of Chicago over a 19 month period, and its
never been more than 18% of all the homicides.
This is the historical experience as far back as I
can find it. This year through the end of August
we have tallied 38 gang related homicides. So it
looks like we are going to run under the 1988
figure.

MAXSON (USC): ...So basically what you are saying
is that the rate of gang homicide in Chicago is
probably lower than what it is in LA given similar
numbers of gang members. 

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...How many identified gang
members do you have in LA city.

KRAMER (LAPD): ...a little over 30,000.

JACKSON (LAPD): ...30,000 identified.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...that's about a little over
twice what we have.

MAXSON (USC): ...Wow.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Well, yeah, we've got about
12,000, the last figure that I saw, identified
[gang members]. There are quite a few that are
hanging that we haven't identified, I'm sure.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...We have 70,000 in the whole
county, including LA city. The three big producers
of gang homicides are LA city, total Sheriff's
area, and Compton. 

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...How does all of this fit in
with the gang related versus gang motivated issue?

MAXSON (USC): ...I should have mentioned that when
we purified the gang cases we took the drop-out
gang cases and sampled from them, and then put
them in the non-gang pool. So now we have "gang
member suspects cases" in the non-gang pool. It
almost makes no difference at all in LASD when you
are comparing a restrictive definition versus a
broad definition [of] gang cases [and] non-gang
cases. In LAPD it makes a little bit more of a
difference, but basically the pattern of
difference between gang and non-gang homicides is
very similar.

My opinion also is that when you go for a pure
definition you reduce the number of gang cases,
but you don't gain much in terms of the
distinctiveness between gang and non-gang crimes.
Over time, when you are trying to chart gang crime
which is a public concern, you lose data.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...So then we have to know what
you mean by gang crime?

MAXSON (USC): ...Crimes committed by gang members,
the LA definition. ...Or with a gang member
victim.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...But that is tautology. In
other words you could probably take a kid from LA
and take a kid of Chicago, each commits twelve
crimes except there you are saying that all twelve
are gang related and in Chicago you are saying
that six are gang related and the other six are
non-gang related. The total amount of crime is the
same.

MAXSON (USC): ...But when you do research, you
can't look at the 80% of homicides that are non-
gang and pick out of them those which would have
been gang under this other definition. That's a
loss of information.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...But which is gang and which
is not gang, again is a matter of definition. I
mean if the kids are just as criminal in each
case, only we are saying that they are more gang
related in LA, and in Chicago we are saying just
half of them are gang related, we can create any
kind of definition we want.

MAXSON (USC): ...But I think we are missing
something here because I'm not arguing the
research. But you can report twelve ADW's in some
city, but if you report them as twelve gang
related in the media you create a whole fallout in
your community, as opposed to a definition that
distinguishes what is and is not gang related.
What you publish is immensely important as a
matter of social policy in that community.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...I agree with you completely.
That's why I am for a more restrictive definition.
Because you can scare people, and you label people
excessively. In other words, you are defining a
gang based on the fact that you have established
this kid as a gang member regardless of what crime
he commits. And this may interfere with the
process of rehabilitation, or with assigning him a
particular status in the community.

WADE (Miami): ...racial equality.

VINCENT (CPD): ...If you are inferring that we are
not reporting properly that's not correct, because
we're just requiring hard facts, that's all. If a
car drives by, a car full of kids, and they shoot
and they kill somebody, we're not going to say
it's gang related unless there's more facts to
tell us that it is.

MAXSON (USC): ...I'm certainly not saying Chicago
is not reporting properly. I mean you report
reliably. As far as I am concerned its proper. My
concern is mostly with the degree to which you
have the information available to you that you
reliably apply your criteria. And to that degree
your criteria are based on motive. I mean it is a
lot easier to assign a designation on the basis of
a gang file that comes from hours and hours of an
investigation that's involved in gathering the
information about the motive for the crime. In
homicide cases you have a much better shot at it.
We could have used the criteria of motivation only
with homicides in LA.

BLOCK (ICJIA): ...We did do just that in 75% of
all cases, and we ended up knowing what the facts
were.

MAXSON (USC): ...Yeah, in homicides you have a
much better shot at it, but when you look at ADW's
or robberies you don't have it...

BLOCK (ICJIA): ...Speaking of reliable data, I
just have a couple of questions. One is I don't
know if it is true that relying on a listing in a
gang membership file would be easier to code and
more reliable than gang motivation based on our
work with 17 years worth of Chicago Police
Department data. We are now adding 6 more years to
the homicide data file. There are strict
definitions that CPD uses in the investigation of
gang motivation. You have just heard some of them.
Its not enough that it's a drive by shooting but
somebody has to represent, or there has to be
clear evidence.

On the other hand in Chicago, it's not real clear
whether the victim or the offenders or people
standing around are members or not members from
the data available on investigation. It seems to
me it might be hard to get that data unless you
have a list as they do in Los Angeles.

But looking at the LA list, it's kind of
interesting that this list has relatively older
people. There must be some criteria for getting on
this list. It's not people who have been in a gang
for just a couple of weeks. What are the criteria?
Now if you have a certain criteria for getting on
that list, you know that's going to color the
definition too.

And getting back to reliability, I couldn't quite
figure out how you were assigning the Chicago
definition.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): You were confused too, oh good!

MAXSON (USC): ...What we used ... we got [from]
some of Spergel's work, as well as some of your
[Block's] work, and it might be dated. And I think
it could be expanded by some of the things that
Larry was pointing out. As I mentioned there is a
problem with the analysis that we did. I mean, we
will have to go back and look at the data on
representation, which is the only thing we left
out.

BLOCK (ICJIA): ...But on the other hand, two gang
members that kill each other over a girl?...

MAXSON (USC): ...Yes, a gang crime in Los Angeles
but not in Chicago.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...I would like to clear up some
of this confusion, if in fact there is some
confusion. Years ago in LA, mainly because of the
same problem we see here, nobody [could] agree on
what the hell "gang related" is. It's different.
Nobody here can actually agree, I don't agree with
my partner, Jackson.

What we did at that time, when we wrote the book,
was to say that because of the inherent violence
that follows gang activity, and the violent crimes
that gangs members are involved in, we ended up
measuring nothing more than violent crimes
committed by gang members, period. Now I think in
retrospect we ended up doing the city and overall
the county somewhat of a disservice by counting
the number of crimes that violent gang members
were involved in. Because now we have 5000 violent
crimes yearly for the last few years, and
everybody [views L.A. as the gang capital of the
world]. 

JACKSON (LAPD): ...Now that doesn't bother the
police department. but in reality, its the
violence that we are concerned with. It's
identifying the gang members, not to put them in a
file on their own, or for the press. It's to
identify cases. It's to arrest suspects. Take a
gang crime -- it's going to occur anyway. We are
saying because a gang member did it, let's move it
over here so we can solve the case and put them
away.

KRAMER (LAPD): ...But the difference lies now,
unfortunately with our 5000 violent crimes
committed by gang members, not gang related. A
year or so ago we were asked to try and determine
how many of the crimes that we have traditionally
monitored were gang motivated. All of the violent
crimes committed by gang members are in fact
motivated to one degree or another by the
membership of the suspect or of the victim.

So what we have done is glean out of the crimes
that we have always monitored and reported, those
crimes where there are additional factors that
would indicate that the membership of the
individual had something to do with the incident.
They drive by and yell out their gang name; they
ask where are you from; what set are you with
before they shoot somebody. We look for some overt
activity by the suspects or even by the victims on
some occasion that might have caused the incident.
We were going to count it anyway, because a gang
member is involved. But now we are saying that out
of the X-number of crimes, a certain number are in
fact motivated to the best of our ability by the
membership in the gang, which seems to be more in
line with what you gentlemen are already
reporting.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Yes.

KRAMER (LAPD): ...But we are reporting both.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...This suggests there is an
area of common definition here, I mean, my
perspective is, if LA wants to talk about gang
member related crime, fine let em do it, I hope
Chicago doesn't do it. But we can still agree on
the fact that we are talking about gang motivated
crime and compare statistics that way.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Okay, where does New York
stand, apparently Chicago and LA are in agreement.

GALEA (NYPD): ...Oh, you guys are so far out in
front of us that you know... You know our
definition is very restrictive, so, let me just
read to you what we have in terms of what we
consider a gang incident. It's fights between
members of opposing youth gangs or between members
of the same gang or any other person; arrest of
three gang members or preparation of three
juvenile reports for unlawful activity;
confrontation between youth gangs where weapons
are seized; gang related crimes or violations
committed by or upon gang members whether or not
arrests are made; gang demonstrations such as
protest marches; roving gangs causing
disturbances; attempts to fire-bomb or otherwise
damage or property; and confiscation of weapons
belonging to youth gangs.

Now we would count as gang related [the incident
where] two members [were] fighting over a girl;
also taking a gun away from a gang member who
probably used it somewhere else would be included.

MILLER (Harvard): ...What if its just a fist
fight, garden variety, they were just duking it
out...

GALEA (NYPD): ...Well it says right here, fights
between members of opposing youth gangs or between
members of the same gang. That would be gang
related. If we had numbers like you had then maybe
we would have to reconsider what we are doing,
(which is what we are doing anyway). We are
reconsidering the whole definition of a youth
gang. But right now our numbers are very, very
small and I don't even want to tell you what the
homicide rates are.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Tell us.

GALEA (NYPD): ...No.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Come on, we'll call the New
York Times.

GALEA (NYPD): ...If I told you 30 for the last 10
years, would you go along with that?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Each year or sum total?

GALEA (NYPD): We have about 1400 homicides in the
city of New York.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...30 in 10 years.

GALEA (NYPD): ...And you got to remember even if
our figures are wrong and you double that, which
you probably won't be able to do, don't you think
that the media would be on our case? Don't you
think that you would be reading about it in the
papers? And if the media can't find anything, its
just not there.

MILLER (Harvard): ...The media gets all of its
information from law enforcement, doesn't it?

GALEA (NYPD): ...No they don't -- given that if
they are, they are getting misinformation. I am
just saying that fortunately for us we just don't
have this particular problem. Now I don't know
what's going to happen next year or the year
after. We just picked up some Asian gangs that we
were not counting in our stats, and picked up 5
homicides from July. I don't know how many we
picked up in August yet, because we are starting
to count the Vietnamese groups that don't have any
affiliation with organized crime. So we are
starting to pick up those groups now. Now once we
pick up those groups our homicide rates will
probably go up. We have eight already this year.

KRAMER (LAPD): Would drug related homicides be
included?

GALEA (NYPD): We had one gang drug related
homicide which was in the Bronx.

MAXSON (USC): ...What about nongang related ...
for the same category?

GALEA (NYPD): ...When crack first hit the city it
was completely disorganized. Any guy with a frying
pan, a little cocaine, a little baking soda,
became a crack merchant. What has happened is that
people are attempting to seize control over these
operations. Some people are hitting the sidewalks,
but it has nothing to do with youth gangs. Its
just organized crime activity where people are
attempting to ...

SPERGEL (U of C): What about a gang or a non-gang?

GALEA (NYPD): If you were to take the business
oriented drug organizations you are going to find
a higher homicide rate, no question about that.
And some of them have names such as the Wild
Bunch; and we got a lot of posses' running around,
a lot of that. But they are not street gangs and
they don't fall within our definition of what a
street gang is.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...Suppose a gang member shoots
and kills a non-gang member or vis-a-versa. Is
that a gang incident?

GALEA (NYPD): ...If we find a gang member standing
next to the gun, that's a gang related incident.
Okay? If we lock him up for that gun, that's a
gang related incident.

We just haven't done much about the gang
motivation or gang related distinction, because we
don't have that kind of problem where it is
necessary. We lock up everybody, we don't care if
its gang related or non gang related. You commit a
crime you get locked up. Some of the things that
you are talking about now are fine and great
because you are trying to filter out certain
things. You got so much in the barrel now you are
trying to filter them out. We don't have that much
in the barrel yet. So it doesn't matter to us that
much.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Well John, have you guys done
a gang survey of any kind in terms of counting
noses? How many gang members do you have?

GALEA (NYPD): ...Right now, we're about 2000.
We've got a 1000 that we know of, whose names we
have in our office. We have about another 1000
that are under investigation.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...You know, considering all the
graffiti that you guys got.

GALEA (NYPD): Somebody puts something on the wall
in LA, it's called gang graffiti, vandalism. We
don't have that. 

McBRIDE (LASD): My experience in Los Angeles is
that invariably it is a process of staking turf
out. Once you stake turf out, it becomes an area
of contention between rival groups. I can see
Austin shaking his head. Apparently he is saying
that is not the case in New York city. Is that
right?

GALEA (NYPD): ...Okay here, there is emerging in
Queens a number of groups that have been engaging
in graffiti especially along the Long Island
Expressway, if you know where that is. Most of
these groups have confined their activity to
vandalism which is graffiti, and are not in
conflict with other groups. However there are some
active gangs engaging in vandalism graffiti
notably the TMR which is The Master Race. Although
this group has engaged in altercations with other
groups there is no indication that graffiti was
the reason. Graffiti has not been reported yet as
the cause for any group retaliation. I wrote that
before you asked the question.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...I accept that ... You wouldn't
say it otherwise.

GOTT (LASD): ...We ought to ship some of our gangs
there.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Can you take about 10-15,000 of
our guys?

MILLER (Harvard): ...Now we are talking about
different areas of the country and different
things happen in different areas. You remember in
late 1960's and early 70's the big gang wars were
in New York and Philadelphia. Those were the big
two cities. In the 1980's and 90's the big two are
Chicago and Los Angeles. And you have very radical
differences.

CURRY (UWVa): ...What New York is telling us is
the same thing I read in reports on Cleveland and
Boston recently. They report small groups --
disorganized by LA and Chicago standards. It's
something that we ought to start referring to as
the East Coast model.

MILLER (Harvard): ...Well Boston has gangs.

CURRY (UWVa): ...Boston has gangs, but they are
describing them as New York is. They are very
small, sometimes with or without names,
associations, crews, posses...

MILLER (Harvard): ...Boston does have named gangs,
30-40 members apiece. They had about 10-15 gang
related homicides last year. Using a very
conservative figure they are running about the
same level this year. They are highly identified.
There are real gangs in the Boston area. They are
not amorphous. They have leadership. They have
names. They are involved in inter-gang robbery and
so on.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...I think we have age related
data problems in Philadelphia. As in New York, I
am not sure they are collecting much gang data on
young adults. It is also difficult for them to
separate out gang related and non-gang related.
What about Miami. You've been going up and down.

WADE (Miami): ...I don't know, it's really strange
in Miami. Miami is having difficulty separating
gang associates from gang members.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...And the number of gangs, gang
members and homicides is going down this year,
compared to last year.

WADE (Miami): ...Oh, yeah. We're having trouble
distinguishing between gang related and non-gang
related incidents. They are having the same
problem. When one person goes out and does
something for his own interests, is that a gang
related incident? Miami classifies it as gang
related and I think that's going to come back to
haunt them. Miami, like all the other cities, is
kind of wavering. Their units are just trying to
find out what they should do and what path they
should follow.

The associate gang member thing really bothers me
because I see a lot of kids being labelled, like
you said Dr. Spergel. I see kids' futures really
in a lot of jeopardy. There are kids who tell me
all the time, "I was riding with so-in-so, I was
walking in the grove, and here I am getting my
picture taken, and now my picture is in the files
and I'm considered a gang member", and, " I was
involved in a gang related incident because they
started fighting and I was trying to get my friend
out of it." That's crazy!

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Actually, Barbara, from what we
have seen as far as the problem of associates, I
agree with you in part. It would be a terribly
relevant issue if once in file, always in file. As
long as it is only a one time event. Even if it
just happened to be with a relative, he should be
purged as soon as the statutes permit. Ours is
unfortunately longer than I like [five years], but
as soon as that time comes up the person is purged
if he never shows up in the file.

The other aspect is that whenever we put a
juvenile in file, we notify the parents. If the
parents can convince us or show a great deal of
concern over the fact that little Johnnie is now
going to be in our gang file, we will take a good
close look at it. And if in fact he was merely an
associate or just happened by [at] the wrong time,
we won't put him in the file. And I think that's
the way it's got to be. We don't need garbage in
any of our files.

WADE (Miami): ...Bob, I witnessed an incident.
They were former gang members, like in '84. They
were just talking and pretty soon they were on the
wall having their pictures taken. They were also
saying, "Look, I am no longer a gang member. I am
not involved in that. I am doing some other
things; I was just here." But their pictures are
still in the file.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Yeah, but that's assuming that
they are telling you the truth.

WADE (Miami): ...I'm just saying that could cause
problems. If the smart parent decides to file suit
and it comes out true ...and then you got class
action suits coming up... I don't want to get into
that kind of stuff.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Bob, can I ask one question?
When you say you purge the files what do you mean,
you purge the files, do you mean that those files
no longer exist or do they go from an active file
to an inactive file.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Purge means exactly, purge.
It's gone. We do that with our juvenile records.
But I keep my inactive file. I have an active file
and an inactive file.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Basically you haven't done
anything.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Well, in a way we haven't, but
we know whose active and who is inactive. I know
if you or this guy from Chicago were to call me
and [inquire about] a guy who is 30-35 years old,
and he calls himself Chuck-o-stick, I could go
back and look, [and say] he was in such-and-such a
gang. I could go back and look and see if that
existed or not.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...That's true. Under an
investigative file, it is an outstanding tool. I
couldn't agree with you more. But weighing the
benefits of an investigative tool against a
certain amount of protection of individuals who no
longer should be put in the file, we had to make a
trade off. And the trade off was once a individual
was no longer active in a gang we would then
sacrifice the information on him and remove it
from our files. I think we are all detectives
enough that if we find we needed the information
on one of our previous gang members, it wouldn't
be that difficult to get.

MILLER (Harvard): ...Do you expunge criminal
records in Los Angeles?

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Court order, it's always by a
court order. That's seldom done. With an adult
that's locked up for battery and found not guilty
and he comes back and gets an order to give
everything back to him, his fingerprints... that
seldom happens. Maybe a half a dozen times in 20
years in law enforcement.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...How about in New York?

GALEA (NYPD): ...It would virtually have to be
shown to be an illegal arrest. For juveniles, we
do that obviously.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...We do it here, even if we have
probable cause. But if the guy beats it, we then
get a court order.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...But if during that period of
time you have identified this guy as a gang
member, he is found not guilty of the crime, a
battery, and gets his record expunged do you also
have to pull him out of the gang file?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...No. You'd have to expunge the
part that says he was locked up for battery.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...You've got a gang member killed
in a drive by, but you don't know who did the
drive by. You wouldn't count that?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...No, we would have to have some
facts.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Now we would count that.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...At the same time, in those
particular incidents where you weren't able to
clear it up and find who the perpetrator was,
there is an investigation of the circumstances. If
it indicated that there was "representing" or some
other gang-style characteristic involved, then
normally it would be classified a gang motivated
incident. And as a result, it would be classified
as an open, uncleared gang motivated case.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Your investigation in other
words, indicated that it was in fact gangs that
did it, you just couldn't prove it. You would
count it.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Sure.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...Do we have to go back to
looking at the revised definition of a gang? Could
it be we are fairly close on that, and that we are
fairly close on [a] "gang incident" as based on a
"motivated" definition? Is that right?

MAXSON (USC): ...Los Angeles City has moved to
making a distinction between two types; gang
related, which is [essentially] membership based;
and gang motivated, where lots of circumstances or
other things are involved. So there are two
parallel sets of statistics. One group is much
smaller than the other. But Chicago on the other
hand, collects gang motivated, but not [incidents
solely on the basis of] gang membership.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...Right, but is the gang
motivated definition of Chicago similar enough to
that of the gang motivated definition of LA?

McBRIDE (LASD): ...Keep in mind that there is a
difference here in LA County. We don't have the
motivated.

JACKSON (LAPD): ...We only report the gang related
in the city. They carry two different sets of
standards. The sheriffs do it wrong.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...We put it to the committee that
we formed, and originally the city had the related
one, then the city came up with too many gang
crimes and said, "Ouch! Gang motivated now. Let's
get motivated". But then we go back to the
committee and say the city wants to change this,
and everybody pooh-poohed it. So nobody else
adopted that.

I have to say I'm not totally against adding that
second thing. I think the boss is, I think the
sheriff said at that meeting that he wasn't going
to do that.

GOTT (LASD): ...I rarely speak for the sheriff,
nor do I make policy decisions for him. I'm not
sure where he would stand on this.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...As Dr. Curry, just observed on
the side here, in Chicago we do have the capacity
to recover information as to gang membership even
though the case has been classified as not gang
motivated -- a fact which Dr. Block will no doubt
discover as she goes through the file. So I don't
think we are in big trouble as far as the research
is concerned on that issue.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...Do you want to go back to
your modified definition of gang?

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...Yeah, at the lunch, Bob
Jackson said we may be stroking ourselves a little
here by not analyzing what our purpose was when we
set about to develop a definition of a gang. We
have to keep in focus the reason that gang units
exist in police departments. Do you want to expand
on that a little bit?

JACKSON (LAPD): ...Well basically, the only reason
we care if somebody is a gang member is to be able
to monitor his activity, and to stop his activity
and to keep everybody in society safe. If they
were not a violent entity, whether we define it
narrowly or expand to include the Boy Scouts, if
it weren't violent, and if it weren't committing
crimes and problems in society, we would just pat
them on the head and say its mildly interesting
and let it go. None of us has the resources to
monitor non-violent groups. I don't think we have
that luxury. So basically as far as the definition
goes, I am not concerned that it really matters.

The bottom line is we have a group of criminals
involved in violent crimes and we want to be able
to identify them to gather enough information to
have our detectives take them off the street, to
be able to rehabilitate those that can be
rehabilitated and lock up the rest.

BOBROWSKI (CPD): ...I think there are really two
practical reasons to really define the terms aside
from the sheer statistical pleasure of keeping
numbers or for sociological purposes. One is to
develop a law enforcement modality which is geared
to suppressing that particular problem which is
reflected in the statistics.

And I think there is another reason that is
outside of law enforcement. We are the only ones
who are keeping the statistics, right? One of the
things that I am convinced of, is that we also
have to deal with the stuff in a non-law
enforcement modality. By the statistics we
illustrate the problem -- which may result in a
civil solution rather than a law enforcement
solution.

We are running out of time rapidly here and I'm
not convinced that we can come up with a clearly
framed definition of a street gang that we can all
sign on to as "formal". However, I think that we
have come to an understanding of each other's
positions. It's certainly cleared the air in a
number of instances and I think it gives a greater
appreciation for the difficulty that New York is
facing, especially since they are dealing with the
phenomena that can't quite be defined as a gang.
I'm still not sure whether Wilding thing is
evolving from a formal gang or into a formal gang
situation. But it certainly is a different animal
that we may have to face in the future.

VINCENT (CPD): ...This is in reference to Bob
Jackson's statement. I appreciate where he is
coming from, being [in] law enforcement too. But I
had an experience where certain legislators were
attempting to enact legislation in [a] particular
mob action case related to street gang members. In
the legislation they had to define "gang member".
When I looked at how they had written the
proposal, how they had defined the term street
gang member, and street gang, the language was
such that the state's attorney [would have great
difficulty proving] that a particular individual
was in fact a member of a street gang. So in the
light of the secondary usages of the definitions,
to the best of our ability, we should tend to
narrowly and accurately define certain kinds of
terms.

JACKSON (LAPD): ...I don't disagree with that at
all. I think what I mean to convey is that we know
what a gang member is. We all do. And I think the
definitions are pretty much consistent across the
United States as to when law enforcement agencies
are going to identify an individual as a gang
member. You know we want him to admit to it;
tatoos; associates; and this whole variety of
information that we gather to make the
determination. But as far as trying to verbalize
to N-th degree what a gang is, I am not sure how
much benefit each agency would gain trying to
reinvent the wheel.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...I agree. One of the things that
I think we are all facing, speaking for LA
Sheriff's Department, we have 11 years of
statistical data related to street gangs and
Chicago has a whole series of years of statistics
that you have gathered, and I think regardless
what the definitions are the one thing that we
have, and Cheryl [Maxson] pointed it out, is we
have consistency. We have been reporting the same
way for a number of years; you have been reporting
the same way for a number of years; LAPD has, I
think, regardless how we manipulate that
definition, we have a measure of gang activity
over time, and we can see whether it is going up
or whatever.

As the chief pointed out earlier, for us to make
some change mid-stream, to some common definition
that is going to change our statistical reporting
significantly, may create more problems than it is
worth. It's certainly going to create problems for
us from the standpoint of the media, with the
public, with the politicians and so on. If all of
a sudden our numbers go down, then we have got to
start to build a new base of consistent statistics
to see what's going on.

CASEY (CPD): ...Yeah, it makes little sense to me
in retrospect to say that we've got 38 bodies
laying in the morgue today in Chicago and by LA's
definition it could be some other number. The 38
bodies aren't going to go away.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...In our recent survey the
differences in definition, at least gang incident
definition, were not so great between Chicago, LA,
and even New York. The major differences were
between the large cities and some of the emerging
problem cities where often the definition was
simply a bunch of guys hanging together or a bunch
of car thieves. The definition was much simpler,
less clear or consistent in the emerging problem
cities. As Cheryl Maxson demonstrated that it may
not be all that hard from a research point of view
to compare the cities. So I'm not discouraged. I
think there are areas of common definition based
on experience. I don't think the kids differ that
much in each city, even New York. New York may be
more of a problem, however.

In our study we obtained different definitions
[from] different types of personnel, from
probation officers, prosecutors, the police... on
what's a gang, and that's also a problem. I would
have liked to have had some reaction to the notion
of gang from Mike Duran in these discussions.

DURAN (LA Prob): ...We don't classify one group as
a gang that you guys wouldn't, and you don't count
a group that we wouldn't. No matter what the
wording is, we're still talking about the same
thing.

McBRIDE (LASD): ...The same bunch, you are
absolutely right.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...Well, does that mean that the
LA definition is the same as the Chicago
definition?

McBRIDE (LASD): ...The semantics may be different.

JACKSON (LAPD): ...Listen, like he said, bring it
in front of me and I will tell you what the hell
it is.

SPERGEL (U of C): ...So maybe there is a way of
reconciling these things, not so much for your
purposes but for purposes of the federal
government's research and development initiative
and what other cities are going through and
planning to do.

We seem to be close in our definitions. Maybe when
OJJDP is ready to distribute funds for
demonstration projects, we can get some of you
guys together again to work out the remaining
differences. We may not be that far apart. Anyway
I think this has been extremely valuable. We have
recorded this and we will get the results back to
you for comments, corrections, and whatever. I
think the conference has been a contribution. It's
a major first step. Thank you very much for coming
to our city, and I hope you have both enjoyed the
city and profited from the conference.

------------------------------

SUMMARY

Present at the "definitional" conference were
police department representatives with extensive
experience in street gang related law enforcement.
They included senior operational and policy
officials from the police departments of Los
Angeles, Chicago, New York, the Los Angeles County
Sheriff's Department and the Drug Enforcement
Administration. Supporting this group were
advisory board members of the National Youth Gang
Suppression and Intervention Program,
representatives of the Illinois Criminal Justice
Information Authority, and senior gang researchers
from Harvard Law School, the University of
Southern California, and the University of
Chicago. The hosts of the conference were the
University of Chicago and the Chicago Police
Department, supported by the Office of Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Justice
Department.

The aim of the conference was to move toward a
uniform set of definitions applicable to street
gang phenomena across the various jurisdictions
represented. A successful outcome of this process
was seen as crucial in facilitating local and
national assessments of the street gang problem by
law enforcement practitioners, criminologists, and
ultimately, in the development of effective social
policy.

The immediate purpose of the meeting was to
achieve an understanding and clarification of
local applications of terms as they were developed
within, or were influenced by the operational
experiences of the participating agencies. The
academic contingent present was utilized to aid in
this process, especially to assimilate background
information useful in future research.

Three discussion objectives were identified: to
define the gang as an object of law enforcement;
to determine what a gang related event is, as it
grows out of the definition of a gang; and to
develop a uniform method of reporting which would
be meaningful to the community, useful to
academia, and functional for law enforcement.

The session started with recognition that the
terms youth gang, gang member and gang related
incident vary in meaning across different law
enforcement jurisdictions. Different conceptual
and operational definitions also exist across
settings, such as schools, youth agencies, and
correctional institutions even within the same
jurisdiction.

Our major premise is that a common definition of a
gang or gang incident, if it existed, would enable
a test of the same or similar strategy across
jurisdictions or institutional settings; and at
worst would do no harm. There is some evidence,
based on the results of the project's recent
national survey of youth gang programs, that
recognition of the existence of a gang problem in
common terms may be a significant step toward
resolving the problem. The essential policy or
research consideration is that a particular
strategy cannot be validated until a standard
definition of the problem is established.

Dr. Miller, the first presenter, noted that
several terms were being used to identify the
"subject of concern": youth gang, teen age gang,
juvenile gang, delinquent gang, violent gang, and
street gang. Dr. Miller noted that the criminal
justice system distinguishes the categories of
"juvenile" and "adult." However, in many cases
juveniles and adults are members of the same
group. He suggested that the two terms most useful
were "street gang" and "youth gang" -- the latter
term being preferable in consideration of the
interests of both the project and OJJDP.

However, the term "street gang" was preferred by
representatives from the Chicago and Los Angeles
Police Departments and the Los Angeles Sheriff's
Department. The two terms were considered
essentially equivalent by the New York City
representatives.

One value of the term "street gang" was its
distinction from the term organized crime. Another
is that it captures a wide age range of offenders.
There was also recognition of the gang members'
potential for transition to, or association with,
organized criminal enterprises. It was generally
accepted by law enforcement that the structure,
purpose, and location of the gang seemed to be
more important as labelling criteria than is age.
The issue of whether non street-based groups (i.e.
motorcycle groups, racial hate groups, satanic
cults, etc.) would be included as a "subject of
concern" was not resolved. Nevertheless, the term
"street gang" was finally acceptable to all law
enforcement officers from the four cities or
jurisdictions present.

One of the conference participants pointed out
that the media seemed to prefer the use of the
term "gang" -- unmodified. There was considerable
objection to the term "juvenile" gang as used to
some extent by New York City, particularly from
Los Angeles County since that could reduce the
problem by as much as 80 percent and such a sudden
reduction would be questioned by the media. The
issue was raised as to what extent the practice of
expunging names from gang lists at five year
intervals artificially aged gang members, whether
active or inactive, on these lists. The New York
City definition, however, reflects a problem that
is mainly confined to teenagers. There is a strong
effort to avoid overlap with the idea of organized
crime.

Officer Bobrowski argued for a distinction between
"organized crime" and the street gang on practical
grounds. Although street gangs may be
organizationally structured, the criminal
activities in which they engage do not appear to
be. By comparison, "traditional" organized
criminal enterprises develop with the intent to
commit substantive crimes over extended periods of
time, seek a high degree of economic or political
security as primary motivations, and tend to
support the preservation of societal institutions
in their present form. Nevertheless, there can be
a transition from street gangs to organized crime
or some intersection of activity. Therefore it is
also important to deal with street or gang
phenomena from the perspective of concern with
organized crime.

Officer Bobrowski offered what the Chicago Police
Department regards as the key characteristics of
the street gang. It is a collection of persons
that exists as an identifiable group with some
sort of structure: either horizontally (hard core,
fringe, associate, etc.), and connected to groups
in other areas (factions and close allies); or
vertically organized with different age groups in
the same area (seniors, juniors, pee-wees, "wanna-
be's"), and the appearance of some type of
internal power echelon.

Most of the gangs in Chicago, except perhaps Asian
groups, exhibit some sense of territoriality,
usually marking and defending boundaries by
graffiti or "icons". However, turf boundaries are
recognized even among Asian gangs by virtue of
residential settlement patterns.

In the Chicago definition, the gang finds itself
in conflict with the surrounding community due to
its failure to use acceptable means of achieving
recognition and influence -- a situation which
captures the interests of the police by manifest
incivilities and criminal behavior.

California legally defines a gang as "an ongoing
association or group of three or more persons,
whether formal or informal," having as its primary
activities the commission of one of the following
seven crimes: assault with a deadly weapon,
robbery, homicide or manslaughter, sale or
possession for sale of narcotics, shooting into
inhabited dwellings or a car, arson, or witness
intimidation. McBride thought the list was too
restrictive.

In response to a question about gang structure,
Sergeant McBride of the Los Angeles Sheriff`s
Department also observed that the state of
California has recently established a definition
that appears to be somewhat unsatisfactory. The
term "associate" which originally suggested
someone who is "not quite a gang member" (more of
a friend or associate) now signifies "a gang
member" but to a lesser degree.

There was some discussion and then agreement among
representatives from New York (NYPD), Chicago
(CPD), and Los Angeles County (LASD) and City
(LAPD) that a group of three or more engaged in
stick-ups would not be classified as a gang
except, if they were all wearing the same colors,
i.e., dressed the same and acted in concert for a
period of time. Bobrowski, however, favored the
exclusion of group size as a criterion for
identifying activity as "gang related". In a
Chicago incident, one youth, acting alone, tried
to form a new gang by painting graffiti all over
his school in an attempt to represent his new gang
as an established organization.

Captain Gott of the Los Angeles Sheriff's
Department presented a current definition
developed by the Peace Officers Association of Los
Angeles County and in use in the County:

A gang is a group of people who form an allegiance
for a common purpose to engage in acts injurious
to public health and public morals, who pervert or
obstruct justice or the administration of laws, or
engage in or have engaged in criminal activity
either individually or collectively and create an
atmosphere of fear and intimidation within the
community.

Bobrowski pointed out that a critical component of
Gott's definition was essential to any definition
of the concept gang -- conflict of the group's
norms with those of the community. Thus criminal
activity must be accepted as a group norm in
addition to the group's use of signs or symbols to
identify the group as a gang. Dr. Maxson added
that it is not simply the acceptability of
criminal activity by the group that defines it as
a gang but the dynamics of the group or its group
process (i.e., the structure of gang membership
and the influence of members on each other) that
defines the activity as gang activity. Further
discussion questioned whether criminal behavior
might necessarily be acceptable to all members of
a gang. The degree of acceptance of criminal
behavior in a group might be a critical element in
a definition of it as a gang.

Sergeant Galea offered his view of the New York
City Police Department definition of a youth gang
(not a street gang):

A youth gang is supposed to be an organized
structured group with identifiable leadership and
membership which has engaged in, is suspected of
engaging in, or is considered likely to engage in
unlawful or anti-social activity which may be
verified by police records or other reliable
sources.

Sergeant Galea added that this definition may no
longer be relevant since delinquent youth groups
in New York City tend to operate "part-time," are
"random collectives," come together for "selective
and non-selective delinquent and criminal acts."
They no longer operate as local families in
camaraderie and community kinship. The current
generation reflects the phenomena of the broken
home and single parentship. Nearly all interest is
directed to what youth perceive as economic or
income enhancement [activity]. Nevertheless,
traditional gangs do exist in New York City, but
they are not the norm.

Officer Bobrowski suggested that gangs could be
classified along a continuum, from spontaneous
groups that come together to commit a crime to
traditional "family" or communal type gangs to
highly structured and sophisticated criminal
gangs. Sergeant Galea suggested that these
structures can change in different directions,
e.g., from structured to less structured or vice
versa.

The notion of incivility as part of gang behavior
was discussed. Gangs create an atmosphere of fear
and intimidation that should be a part of a
definition of what a gang is or does in a
community. It is not that gangs are responsible
for a great deal of Part 1 crime in a community --
in fact they are usually responsible for a small
percentage. Rather gangs create fear in the
citizens of a community and contribute to the
degradation of the quality of community life.
Commander Kramer of the Los Angeles Police
Department indicated that is was the graffiti, the
intimidation, the hard looks that cause citizens
to feel fear.

Dr. Maxson raised the issue of Los Angeles
County's broad definition of a gang incident in
which a gang member involved in criminal acts not
"in furtherance of the gang" would be charged with
a gang incident. Sergeant McBride responded that
domestic disturbance is not classified as a gang
incident even if it involves a gang member.
However, more important is the basic proposition
or belief of the Los Angeles Sheriff's department
that "being a member of a gang generally fosters
criminality, anti-social behavior, and that gang
members are more prone to commit crimes."
Commander Kramer of the Los Angeles Police
Department did not agree and considered such an
approach to be "an extension of the reality of the
situation." McBride and Genelin of the Los Angeles
County District Attorney's office emphasized the
notion of "allegiance" of the member to the gang
as determining general crime purpose.

Bobrowski noted the complexity of determining
whether a crime was gang-related (although not
necessarily gang motivated or in the interests of
the gang per se). A crime could be committed in
the interest of the gang or "[one] could use
...gang identification for [one's] own purposes in
intimidating the potential victim." Sergeant Galea
expressed concern that New York City's gang crime
rate would "sky rocket" if a broader definition of
"gang" was used.

Dr. Miller recalled his distinction between a gang
and a law violating youth group which is a durable
association of three or more youths whose members
engage in illegal activities. Gangs or types of
gangs are categories of law violating youth
groups. Spergel suggested a three fold
classification of delinquent youth groups: law
violating youth group, criminal gain group, moving
on to organized crime, and finally various gang
categories. McBride indicated that it was
important to include smaller formalized criminal
groups that are heavily engaged in violence as
part of the gang definition.

Sergeant Galea observed that the L.A. County
definition of street group was so broad that it
would include "every one of our street groups
involved in drugs. They all have a particular
block controlled by an 18-19 year old who has got
a group working for him. They are all armed.
Anybody who would try to sell drugs on the group's
block [would be blown] away." Galea said those
groups would be considered "an organized crime"
and not a "street gang" problem. In Chicago there
is an effort to distinguish between a gang
organization and organized crime, excluding
"people operating strictly as a drug
organization." But there is overlap, and a degree
of discretion would be required in application of
a general definition adapted from Los Angeles.

Genelin indicated that he would agree that a
street group engaged strictly in drug operations,
but not in "street crime, street robberies,
intimidation and extortion," probably should not
be identified as a street gang.

Bobrowski identified two types of crimes which are
categorically included in the domain of street
gang crime by the Chicago Police Department:
unlawful use of a weapon and involvement with
narcotics, including possession by a street gang
member. No particular victim need be involved. The
unlawful use (or possession) of a weapon can be
tied to drive-by shootings. Narcotics activity by
gang members is regarded as a way of capturing "a
statistic," especially when it is on gang turf and
gang members are involved in distribution of
narcotics.

The notion of public health in the Los Angeles
definition was used because it provided a broader
base of power to the police. An amended Los
Angeles definition was proposed: "A gang is an
identifiable group of people who form an
allegiance and recurrently engage in acts
injurious to public health and public morals". But
this was objected to by representatives of Chicago
and New York as being too broad to facilitate a
keen focus on street gangs alone.

Commander Kramer suggested that police departments
are not likely to accept a change in definitions
that have worked well in particular jurisdictions,
however, a second definition for purposes of
national comparability could be acceptable, if it
meant simply taking the same data base and
analyzing it in two different ways.

Some further discussion between Sergeant Galea and
Officer Bobrowski lead to agreement on the
importance of symbolic identification of members
with each other as a component of a gang
definition. Suggestions for a common definition
were made with specific exclusions of prison
gangs, motorcycle gangs, organized crime and
terrorist gangs. Several of the police
administrators present, however, were concerned
about the implications of a change in definition,
especially as it might affect change in statistics
and public reaction to pattern change.

Commander Kramer emphasized the importance of
police departments, particularly in emerging gang
crime cities, carefully considering or planning
the elements of a definition of a gang, because a
definition has consequences down the line. A
"trap" established in southern California was to
initially make the definition "too broad."
Commander Kramer speculated that a broad
definition originally was "designed to justify
more personnel, the existence of gang units,
budgets." Over 40 percent of gang-related crime in
the city is in fact not strictly gang-motivated
based on current Los Angeles Police Department
estimates.

Commander Kramer noted that in recent years Bloods
and Crips who had been long time gang members or
affiliated with gangs became multi-kilo dealers of
narcotics, but they were no longer street gang
members. When the crack phenomena hit Los Angeles,
Houston and New York, the gang became a natural
vehicle for drug distribution. Those individuals
who became major "dope" dealers "ceased being
street gang members." At the same time the gang
was used as a reservoir for recruiting people to
deal drugs.

When these drug dealers who were gang members go
to other cities to set up drug operations, they do
not represent their particular gangs. They
represent drug dealers expanding their operations.
But they still reach out to younger people and
bring them in. The gang symbolism is useful
apparently in such recruitment for drug dealing.
The distinction between a drug dealing
organization [or organized crime] and a gang
becomes blurred.

There was an expression of interest in the
development of a centralized reporting apparatus
at the national level. While the Drug Enforcement
Administration has some interest in the
development of a national data base on street
gangs, it is mainly interested in street drug
gangs and possible motorcycle gangs. The major
activity of the gang would have to be narcotics
selling. According to David Leroy of DEA, the key
objective of the system would not be uniform crime
reporting or collection of statistics, but
tracking where the violators are going. National
trends and movements would be tracked, but not
what's occurring in a particular city.

The discussion turned to criteria for identifying
a gang-related event. In Chicago, reports are
examined in the course of an investigatory process
to determine whether the incident grows out of
gang function. Gang membership of either party may
not be "particularly important." Events are gang-
related, if they fall empirically into the
following categories: representing or symbolic
behavior; retaliation, whether directed internally
to the gang's own members or externally to rival
gangs, or to victims for cooperating with
prosecution; street fighting; gang recruitment;
turf violations; vice-related incidents, including
mainly robbery, narcotics, but also liquor law
violations among juveniles, prostitution, and
gambling; extortion; and prestige.

In the analysis of gang-related events in Chicago,
representing and street fighting seemed to be the
predominant activities. Most of the street
fighting involved index crime. Representing refers
to symbolic identification with a gang; gang
members often promote their gang name. Gang
representing per se is not a crime. It is a gang
characteristic; thus, an offense must be committed
in association with such representing.

Dr. Maxson then presented the results of research
by Dr. Klein and herself on reported gang homicide
events in Los Angeles County and City and their
use of classifications based on both Chicago and
Los Angeles definitional criteria. Using the
Chicago criteria of a gang-related homicide --
apparently not all of the criteria were used - she
and Klein conclude that 44% of LAPD and 57% of
LASD gang homicides met the narrower definition
used by Chicago. The two definitions resulted in a
major difference in prevalence but not in
character of gang offenses. The kinds of violent
offenses that come out of gang function in Chicago
also came out in Los Angeles. Officer Bobrowski
observed that regardless of what criteria are
used, the rates of gang homicide in Chicago would
still be lower than in Los Angeles. Dr. Maxson
added also that regardless of whether Chicago's
narrower criteria or Los Angeles' broader criteria
were used, the distinctiveness between gang and
non-gang homicides clearly remained.

The values of a restrictive versus a broader
definition for purposes of research and social
policy were briefly discussed. While there is some
likelihood of a loss of data in a restrictive
definition, there is a likelihood of excessive
labelling and the generation of community alarm by
using a broader definition. The process of
rehabilitation of gang youth might also be
impeded. The representatives from Los Angeles,
however, emphasized their interest in all violent
crimes committed by gang members and their concern
about impeding such activity. This was at the
heart of their effort to develop lists of gang
members.

Sergeant Galea suggested criteria for identifying
a gang-related event that essentially were
dependent on a very narrow definition of a gang.
Criteria included fights between opposing youth
gang or members of the same gang, weapons
possession, protest marches, and damage to
property. However, the numbers of such events are
very small in New York City at the present time.
Sergeant Galea stated that a total of 50 gang
homicides were recorded in New York City in the
past ten years. This of course is considerably
lower than the 60 cases recorded in Chicago and
255 cases in Los Angeles City for the year 1988
alone.

Galea insisted that while a great deal of homicide
was related to drug operations in New York City,
this could not be classified as youth gang
activity. It was "just organized crime activity."
He stated that while some of the "business
oriented drug organizations" were associated with
high rates of homicides and had names such as "The
Wild Bunch" and "Posses," they "didn't fall within
our definition of...street gang."

There was again a reference to issues of
labelling. A youth who is not a gang member may be
labeled a gang member if he is associating with a
relative who is a gang member, for example. If it
is a one time event, his name is removed according
to Los Angeles representatives although that may
take a long time -- five years. However, if a
juvenile is involved and the parents can convince
the police that the youth is not a gang member --
that he was merely an associate, his name would
not be placed in the Los Angeles gang file.

In response to a question, Sergeant McBride noted
that two files are kept on juvenile records,
active and inactive. Thus, the individual is
purged from the active but not the inactive file.
This practice is not followed in Chicago where
file purges are complete.

A further distinction on data collection was noted
between Los Angeles City and Los Angeles County.
Gang-motivated and gang-related data are
maintained in the city. Only gang-related data are
maintained in the county at the present time.
Officer Bobrowski also noted that the Chicago data
system, despite its focus on gang-motivated
incidents, has the capacity to "recover
information as to gang membership even though the
case has been classified as non-gang motivated."
Thus research on gang motivated and gang-related
crime can be conducted in Los Angeles City and
Chicago, and probably Los Angeles County as well.

Finally, there was reference to basic rationales
for determining whether a group should be regarded
as a gang and an incident gang-related. Sergeant
Jackson, LAPD, stated it was important to identify
a group of criminals involved in violent crimes
and to gather enough information so that "our
detectives could take them off the street,
rehabilitate those that can be rehabilitated and
lock up the rest."

Officer Bobrowski observed there were two
practical reasons for good definitions of gang
crime. One is for purposes of effective
suppression of a particular (valid) problem. The
other is to describe a serious social problem
accurately so that a civil solution could be
found.

------------------------------

Discussion of Conference Findings

The conference produced a great deal of open and
fruitful discussion. The deliberations suggested
important conclusions and implications for
research and evaluation, criminological theory,
and public policy. It was clear that different
definitions of the term gang and gang incident
existed in the four local law enforcement
jurisdictions represented at the meetings. The
definitions represented to some extent differences
in the nature and prevalence of youth street gang
phenomena in each locality as well as in the
perceived meaning of these phenomena. The
perception of the phenomena was obviously
influenced by certain political, policy,
bureaucratic, and philosophical considerations.

Research.

At the level of potential research across sites,
the differences in definition seemed to be readily
resolvable, at least across three of the four
jurisdictions. Local definitions would be retained
and a secondary definition could be developed.
Data systems existed in the three jurisdictions,
Los Angeles County, Los Angeles City, and Chicago
whereby information could be provided based on
both a gang-related and a gang-motivated
definition of a criminal incident. A common
definition of street gang was also probably
achievable in those three cities.

There seemed to be considerable reluctance on the
part of the New York City law enforcement
representatives to consider a cross-site common
definition of the concept gang or gang-
related/motivated incident. This could have been
due as suggested above to differences in the
nature and prevalence of youth gang or street gang
phenomena as well as to local policy and political
considerations.

Theory. The different definitions, emphases, or
preferences could represent accurate perceptions
of a significantly different reality of the
development of street gangs, particularly in
relation to organized crime in each jurisdiction.
The differences conceivably were sharpest in a
comparison of the gang reality in New York versus
the other two or three jurisdictions.

There is little doubt that, however defined, the
very same type of youth gang or street gang could
be found in each of the four jurisdictions, but
prevalence differed. There could be in fact more
generically or consensually defined youth/street
gangs in Los Angeles compared to Chicago compared
to New York City. This is suggested by the sharply
different gang homicide rates in Chicago and Los
Angeles which cannot be reconciled by definitional
adjustment. Although each law enforcement group
was very concerned with organized crime, the
reference to, or distinctive concern with,
organized crime was greatest in New York City and
seemed of less distinctive concern, moving east to
west. Organized crime involving youth was regarded
as most distinctive or separate from the gang
phenomena in New York City and most closely
connected to the notion of gang in Los Angeles.

It is possible to argue that in the older, more
established cities, with relatively fewer
transient low income populations, for example, New
York, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, better routes
to organized crime had developed in part through
the narcotics trade. There may be less need for
the development of long term youth/street gang
socialization structures in these cities. Youth
gangs may serve as a fertile recruiting ground in
these particular cities, but may be less viable or
meaningful since better opportunities are
available directly through organized criminal or
racket-oriented groups. This may represent a New
York City or eastern city model at this time, with
some exceptions.

The Los Angeles or west coast model may represent
a situation where organized criminal opportunity
systems are in an earlier stage of development.
Youth gangs may be just now transitioning to this
stage. Youth gangs could be the base on which some
limited forms of criminal organization are being
constructed, mainly through distribution of crack
cocaine. Again, in all cities we refer to a mainly
minority male, low income population in the
process of adolescent development who must learn
how to survive socially and economically,
particularly as they get a little older, in an
increasingly complex, competitive, urban society.
These youth do not have sufficient conventional
means or legitimate opportunities to achieve
culturally desirable status in our society.

Chicago may represent an in-between case. Gangs
have evolved better routes to organized crime than
on the west coast. The youth/street gangs have had
a longer period to develop certain stable crime
patterns. Youth gangs may be better integrated
into low income communities than in Los Angeles,
but not as well as in New York City where a
multitude of crews or organized youth crime groups
exist. Such groups tend to be integrated and much
better accepted in low income communities than
traditional gangs fighting over turf or social
status.

Furthermore, while it is clear that youth/street
gangs contribute to a high level of violence and
homicide in a city, it is not at all clear that
the cities with the more prevalent youth/street
gangs necessarily have higher general violence
rates than those without such gangs. Other factors
may contribute to generally increasing rates of
urban violence, including escalating unemployment
rates and highly competitive and uncontrolled
narcotics markets.

Implications for Policy. If youth/street gangs and
organized crime are part of the same long term
social and economic process affecting low income
youth, we may expect a growth and spread of both
the gang and the organized crime problem in the
years ahead, unless drastic shifts occur in the
economy and national social and economic policy.
But such shifts are not likely to occur in the
short term.

If this analysis proves correct, our society
should pay considerably more attention to issues
of youth or street gang prevention, social
intervention, and suppression to minimize a long
term threat to social order in the country. The
youth/street gang may not only be an important
source of recruits for organized crime, but may
also be a structure in critical transition to
organized crime.