No COLORS: 100 Ways To Stop Gangs From Taking Away Our Communities
"No community wants to admit it has a gang problem. Yet that denial and the unwillingness to address youth violence as a community problem will have tragic consequences."
"Nearly Every Community in America has Issues Related to Violence.
We have solutions."
No Colors Book Excerpts
Gangs don’t just show up in a community.
They are allowed to grow there.”
The Problem
On summer nights under the lights of the South Morrison field in Newport News, the sound of gunshots punctuated almost every adult league softball game.
From time to time, gang members as young as ten would race past the field, running from something, or someone, unseen. Later, an ambulance siren would cast a flashing blue light on the field as the EMTs worked expertly, but sometimes futilely, over another kid who took a bullet.
Both of us spent a quarter century living in the same town, watching gangs slowly take over our city ― a problem unacknowledged by the community for years.
It takes a while.
In consulting across the country, we continue to see a strong element of denial almost everywhere. The biggest struggle initially in communities is in countering the disbelief that gangs are a clear and present threat.
So two people who played softball, and who happened to be a seasoned cop and a public affairs specialist respectively, began collaborating, beginning with the compilation of the tactics, approaches and best practices being deployed to combat gangs and youth violence both at home and internationally.
Our hope is that the good and well-intended people who see this book will arrive at the conclusion that, yes, we must deal with the crisis in our community, and yes, in doing so we can be effective and creative and can even find the experience itself rewarding.
At first, creating anti-gang strategies seems intimidating, one of those things best left up to the police and other authorities. But few if any problems experienced in a community can be solved without a broader-based, as well as a personal, involvement. And the stakes are high. At its basis, this effort is focused on saving a generation of youth from the streets, for a nation that needs their involvement desperately. So make the decision to act an easy one. Make it about those kids. That’s our hope for them and we know it’s your hope, also.
And in the simplest of terms, hope is what this book is about. It’s about re-claiming and strengthening your community’s original legacy.
We offer a clear, well-lit pathway for making significant headway against the youth violence crisis in our communities. We also offer the reminder that while the loss of potential represented by young people in gangs is tragic, there are other critical issues to consider.
This is much more than a melancholy episode in the growth of your hometown. It’s all on the line here. The presence of gang activity affects the value of homes in a violence-plagued environment resulting in subsequent flight that affects everything from the diversity and viability of neighborhoods to who goes to public schools.
Similarly, violence and the threat of violence impacts businesses and can result in the loss of jobs. Gangs erode our school system, which feeds into the continuum of neighborhood dissolution.
Youth violence and gangs also add significantly to the unsustainable cost of incarcerating so many young people.
And of course, the direct relationship between gangs and drugs helps create an economy that yields no taxes. So beyond the loss of life and potential there is damage to our collective and individual quality of life. And returning full cycle, it’s increasingly clear that the local police can’t solve the problem alone.
We believe the “deer in headlights” reaction by most disinterested adults is closely related to the lack of community leadership with regard to acknowledging the problem, and then articulating clear strategies to deal with it.
We continue to be mystified by this phenomenon of why a responsible city leader or official would stick his or her head in the sand and allow the community to implode around them.
We were always taught to name our problem and to wrestle power from it. Give it a name and you begin to take away its power: Bullying, Global Warming, White Flight, the Achievement Gap, Racial Profiling, Youth Violence.
In the past, youth violence was perceived almost exclusively as an inner city problem. We called it a “gang problem” and limited to the projects. Not anymore. Ask any Californian. Just as California has historically proven to be bell weather for a wide range of cultural issues, the state began to recognize the problem two decades ago and many areas have made significant progress.
Now, it’s “youth violence” they are tackling and it has few if any geographic boundaries.
If you hold to the “misery loves company” school of thought there may be some comfort in noting that this phenomenon is happening all over the world - in Canada, South America, Central America, Mexico, Great Britain, in Europe, in Australia, in Asia. But, when it’s happening in your neighborhood, that’s small comfort, indeed.
Rising gang crime is threatening democratic development and slowing economic growth across Central America and Mexico. Increasingly sophisticated gang networks are taking over. Whereas gang activity used to be territorially confined to local neighborhoods, globalization, sophisticated communications technologies and travel patterns have facilitated the expansion of gang activity across neighborhoods, cities and countries.
The monikers of MS-13 and other international gangs now appear in communities throughout the United States, Central America and Mexico.
When we examine the common denominator of severe gang problems, it’s the big money in drugs. We would like to repeat that for emphasis. It’s the big money in drugs, especially as many gangs branch out from retail sales into the wholesale area.
One can look at de-criminalization efforts such as in Holland and conclude that taking the money out of the equation has definitely softened the gang problem in terms of violent behavior. But not completely, as the gangs still get their share, preying on those who produce the product.
It takes a while.
The Denial
If you think that “it can’t happen here” keep in mind that “here” is now almost every community in America. Shocked residents of previous havens of peaceful living are now being forced to admit that we have an issue with youth violence and gangs, while many law enforcement experts are describing the wave as growing larger than they can handle.
The National Gang Center reports approximately 27,900 gangs. Other surveys estimate that we have over 1,000,000 gang members in the United States.
While gang problems are most widespread in the largest cities in the United States, the National Gang Center also identifies the frightening growth of gangs in suburban and rural areas.
And in case the ongoing nature of the violence lulls us into a numb acceptance, the spikes of brutality continue to grab our attention:
In Chicago last year, according to NPR, almost 700 children were hit by gunfire. Recent reports place the gang membership in Chicago at over 100,000.
In Richmond, VA, an entire family was found murdered in their Richmond home on New Year's Day 2006. This violent and senseless event caused the entire community to wake up to the fact that Richmond had become one of America’s top five cities for murder per capita. A community-wide Strategic Plan was drawn up.
In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, shortly after taking office, summarized the violence crisis in his state.
“A growing number of Californians are living a nightmare. Trapped inside their homes, afraid to come out unless they absolutely have to. That’s because in many of our cities, whole neighborhoods are terrorized and intimidated by street gangs. Kids are scared to go to school and parents are terrified for their safety.”
Community-wide Strategic Plans became commonplace in municipalities throughout California.
In New London, CT, in late fall 2010, six bored teenage gang members stabbed a helpless 25-year-old citizen to death because, as they later claimed, they had nothing to do. A community-wide Strategic Plan resulted.
In Minneapolis, the business community moved into action when an article in the New York Times nicknamed their city Murderapolis. An effective Strategic Plan was put into place.
In Newport News, VA, we now have gang members whose parents and grandparents were members of the same gang. One gang members’ initiation requires the recruit to shoot someone. Another gang requires the prospect to have served time in jail. After three years slow community acceptance that there was a problem, or if it mattered, this Virginia city is finally developing a Strategic Plan to address the 188 identified gang sets and more than 2,400 gang members who are taking over their neighborhoods.
In Denver, diligent community leaders worked for four years to gather the united community consensus and strength to attract federal assistance and combat the 8,800 gang members in the city. A focused Strategic Plan evolved.
These and many other communities are crying out – emergency sessions, committees forming, proposals surfacing on what to do. What is the root cause of this? How can we fix this problem?
When this subject is discussed, it will be emotional. The discourse will reveal all the frailties and faults and flaws of the community. There will be consensus and there will be quarrels. This is very predictable as you begin to protect future generations from our mistakes.
You can deal with the youth violence that is now taking over your community now, or deal with it later ― after the coming tragedy gets your attention.
Finally we will awaken.
It takes a while.
Former Justice Department Official Robert Flores summed it up.
“Gangs are a sign of community dysfunction. Gang involvement to include crime and violence defines process and not an event. Gangs don’t just show up one day in a community. They are allowed to grow there.”
We are quickly becoming victim to a homegrown insurgency that shows no signs of stopping. Many have labeled the rapid growth of terrorism “a silent insurgency.”
The sad reality is that most gang-related crime and violence traditionally did not go beyond the boundaries of many of our inner cities. So when it first appears, we always assign it as a law enforcement issue.
We are being repetitive for the reason that it bears repeating: This is not a police problem. It’s not a City Council problem.
It is not a school problem. It is not a problem you can leave alone since it does not affect our neighborhood.
It’s a community problem and if we leave it unaddressed it will slowly collapse our community.
The traditional gang role of spray-painting buildings has evolved into spraying bullets into all parts of our communities.
More affluent neighborhoods all over the planet are now feeling the rapid movement of drug and gang-related crime and violence. We now have achieved the realization that gang wars have no boundaries. Many of the upscale neighborhoods have awakened as drive-by shootings, home invasions and other forms of gang-related crime and violence hit close to home. Exasperation has arrived.
Urban flight to avoid violent crime is no longer a sure bet to escape the rapid spread of senseless violence that follows the intense new level of gang involvement.
Why Now?
Many wonder why the gang insurgency has grown so rapidly. Others argue that gangs have always been a problem ― so why is there is so much attention to it now?
America is a nation where it is estimated that 7.3 million children have a parent in prison, jail, on probation or on parole.
Things do finally sink in.
It takes a while.
Sheriff Gabe Morgan, the outspoken elected Sheriff in Newport News, VA often testifies before Congressional panels. He said in a presentation to the Mayor’s Task Force on the Prevention of Youth Violence in early 2011 that most of the people he has in his jail ― will be coming home.
“And, most of the people in state penitentiaries will be coming home. Most of the people in federal prisons will be coming home. Only life sentences and death penalty felons will not be coming home. And the invisible penal system comes with them,” Morgan said.
“They get $25 and a bus ticket,” Morgan said.
He explained that because of their record, they cannot get a job. In most cases, they cannot vote. What can we expect them to do? And they are flowing back into our communities every day. Naturally, they will have little choice but to find their way back onto the streets – most likely in a predatory way.
Morgan explained his view on incarceration in terms everyone can understand.
“We have to decide as a society, once we find someone guilty of a societal offense, whether we’re “just mad at that person” or whether we’re “afraid of that person,” Morgan said.
Morgan noted that we should then provide an alternative to incarceration for those we are just mad at, and jail the ones we are afraid of. That sounds simple, but it’s the core direction we must take.
Youth violence is not occurring in just a few communities. It is an epidemic that is spreading across America, Canada and, in fact, the world. We are rapidly gaining speed, inexorably racing to an end that is both uncertain and frightening.
We have watched with apparent disinterest as three generations of youth grow up on the streets –kids from poverty with broken family structures and no positive alternative to the pull of drugs, gangs, guns and eventually, prison.
The mentors, the role models available to these kids are a steady flow of released professional criminals coming home from Gladiator School.
The criminal college we call the U.S. prison system continues to crank out professional gang members every day. With well over 2 million men currently incarcerated, America has the highest total prison and jail population in the world. And as we punish our offenders by sending them into this system, they inevitably return with “a record,” un-employability and renewed street life skills.
The level of denial and the glacial movement toward remedy is reminiscent of the 1940s and 1950’s, a time when our fighting forces in World War II received cigarettes in their C-rations, athletes endorsed cigarettes and doctors, who were often smokers themselves, recommended that their patients smoke as a way of relaxing.
Then, curiously, we spent a decade arguing whether or not smoking resulted in lung cancer. The Surgeon General had his say, the millions of premature deaths got the attention of the public and we figured it out.
It takes a while.
That is exactly where we are in America today – beginning to figure it out – as we experience a few million young people in gangs, gunshots ringing out in all parts of thousands of communities and the emergency rooms treating a steady flow of gunshot victims.
All this, and your kid is sitting next to a Blood in math class. So you begin to understand. The dictates of conscience will reveal your role in re-shaping this idea of community.
