The constant flux of the typical gang's membership and leadership make the street gang hard to define. Street gang members engage in a wide range of activities, from the legal to the illegal, the mundane to the extraordinary. Life in the street gang most commonly involves hours and hours of boredom and languor. When street gang members offend, they do so with great variation and with greater frequency than their non-gang counterparts. Very few gangs, taken as a whole, specialize in a particular kind of criminal or delinquent offending.
Some individual members have expertise doing a certain kind of offense, such as motor vehicle theft.
Joseph Saunders, a former gang affiliate, talks about why kids get involved in gangs. An organization's definition of gang usually says more about the organization's mission or agenda than it does about the reality of the problem it's claiming to define and remedy. This entire strategy, while depressing the number of gang incidents in the school's records, may well be geared toward allowing the school enough time to address the problem in its own way. The local police agency's executive officials, who command the overlapping jurisdiction, may use a broader definition in the belief that their charge is to ensure public safety through intensive policing. In this particular example the police agency's leadership might choose to define the street gang much more broadly than does the school, because a broader definition allows for more sweeping, larger-scale police intervention.