Suburban Gangs: Overreported or Misunderstood?

Are suburban gangs on the rise in the U.S.?

It depends how you look at it, and how you define a gang. The FBI's annual National Gang Threat Assessment recently found more than 20,000 active gangs in the U.S. with over one million total members. But Time magazine wondered in a recent piece whether we might be defining 'gang-related' too broadly.

David Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told Time that crimes being attributed to gangs are really part of a "formless street scene."

"People think they are organized and [part of] making money on the streets, but for the most part, all of that is wrong. What you usually find are groups that fit none of the above descriptions." He adds, "What you find out doesn't fit people's preconceptions, and it's still very real."

A recent article in Miller-McClune however, took the opposite view, arguing that thousands of gang-related crimes are not being labeled as such because police chiefs and town councils don't want to be known as gang towns.

"If you're always looking for the features of a stereotypical street gang in the suburbs, you're not going to see it," gang expert Dan Korem said. "There are a lot of misconceptions. You say 'gangs in the suburbs' and people have this picture of Crips and Bloods hanging out on the corner. It's more complicated than that."

So which is right? It's a semantic difference and it doesn't really matter. Either way we need to address violent crime before it happens and provide alternatives to help young people avoid violence.

Both sides of this conversation agree that while crime is down in the U.S., there are too many incidents of groups committing violence - in the city and the suburbs. I've written about the success of organizations like CeaseFire and Aim4Peace - these are the best models developed to intervene in gang culture and get people out before it's too late, and we need these to be replicated across the country, in both urban and suburban environments.

But we need solutions to prevent gang membership, or violence in a "formless street scene," in cities and  the suburbs -- before it happens. The answer is providing real opportunity, but it doesn't happen overnight. We've heard about afterschool programs as the gang-killer for years; they've made some progress but they haven't stopped the violence. Groups like the Council for Unity provide a community for kids to join, offering an alternative to violence and gangs. But the culture needs to change. As long as violence is cool, kids will be hurting one another.

We need new opportunities for kids in cities and suburbs to come together without committing violence, but it must be coupled by a sea change in how we view violence.

Photo by lkhenderson