Word: ganged
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...South Side of Chicago, gangs like the Folks Nations, the Gangster Disciples and others have begun to erode. The power vacuum is being filled by gang subsets, wannabes and factions with weak leadership. "Now you have a lot of renegades, and 70% of the young men are on the defense," explains Tio Hardiman, gang mediation director for CeaseFire, an antiviolence organization that has been replicated in several cities. "So you have shooters all over the place...
...February, the National Gang Threat Assessment report, released by the Department of Justice, concluded that there are 20,000 street, prison and biker gangs in the country, with about 1 million members. In some communities, the report said, gangs account for as much as 80% of the crime. The report also said that 58% of law-enforcement agencies saw an increase of gang activity in 2008, up from 45% in 2004. (Read a brief history of the Hells Angels...
...simply labeling such crimes as "gang-related" does not explain what is happening on the streets. Criminal-justice experts are beginning to believe that a majority of the violence does not result from directives from any formal gang hierarchy, but rather that it is the result of beefs between smaller neighborhood groups that can be started by anything from a kidnapping, as in the Baltimore case, to a simple look of disrespect on a rival's face. A fistfight among young men can escalate into drive-by shootings that elicit identical retribution, finally leading to the slaying of people...
Kennedy calls the phenomenon a "formless street scene" with three tiers. The first is petty criminals who may or may not have gang affiliations. Then there are actual gangs such as Crips, Bloods and MS-13, whose members wear colors, use hand signs and tags and stake out turf. At the highest level is organized crime like the Mafia, which largely eschews violence (until deemed necessary) because it's bad for business...
Margaret T. Burns, spokeswoman for the Baltimore City State's Attorney's Office, says viewing incidents like the one at the cookout as just gang violence is an easy way to package and discard the trouble. "It's so easy to calm everyone down and say these are two feuding gangs," she says. "Calling it a gang is a response that calms public fears but may not be necessarily accurate...