White Gangs

The relatively free flow of drugs, particularly fentanyl and medically prescribed (or abused) opioids, have certainly made the problem worse. The ready availability of guns, from popular and very portable Glocks to the 15 million AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifles scattered about the country, hasn’t helped either. That the United States incarcerates a quarter of the world’s convicted prisoners, even though we only account for 5% of the global population, into race-segregated prisons where survival often depends on joining and supporting a gang, has spread violent malevolence like no other. Prisons are highly effective crime schools and gang recruitment centers, where initiation often requires a particularly violent act. And once a member, it is a bitch, often a life-threatening bitch, to leave. Gangs!

With the exception of some infamous standouts, like the Aryan Brotherhood, our focus seems to be on Latino and African American gangs. Names such as MS 13, Norteños, Mexican Mafia, Bloods, Crips, etc. have become pretty much part of our daily lexicon. Prisons are their strongholds, and they sell protection in the ultra-violence of our failed criminal justice system.

If you listen to fear-monger, spreader of “fake facts” and self-admitted exaggerator, Donald Trump, our southern border is simply a gateway to Central American and Mexican gangs (cartels) and drugs, solidly ignoring the fact that those criminal enterprises are powerful because of all those guns smuggled the other way. Border crossings have halved, beginning during the Obama administration, but creating a class of people to blame for just about everything Trump thinks is wrong with America is core to maintaining his base.

So Hispanics are bad. White folks, even some of those obvious purveyors of violence and hate in Charlottesville, are good. Cops are OK shooting unarmed people of color if they harbor the slightest thought they the victim-to-be might, I repeat might, have a weapon of some kind. So if white folks are good, statistics that contradict that assumption tend either to be down-played or non-existent. Misreporting these numbers antedates the Trump era.

These days, you really don’t hear that much about white gangs, cartel equivalents, because in Trumpland, white is good. I am thus not surprised that it took a British newspaper – the Guardian UK (April 5th) – to tell us Americans about our white gang problem. “Surveys of young Americans have shown that 40% identifying as gang members are white, but police tend to undercount them at 10% to 14% and overcount black and Hispanic members, says Babe Howell, a criminal law professor at City University of New York who focuses on crime and race.

“‘Police see groups of young white people as individuals, each responsible for his or her own conduct, and hold young people of color in street gangs criminally liable for the conduct of their peers,’ she says.

“How law enforcement labels specific gangs may also obscure white membership, a 2012 study published in the Michigan Journal of Race and Law posited…  Jordan Blair Woods researched how the feds had applied the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (Rico) to various gangs. Congress passed Rico in 1970 to target the mafia as organized “criminal enterprises”. In the early 1990s, the attorney general, Janet Reno, started using Rico to charge criminal street gangs.

“Woods explains that law enforcement typically splits gang activity into three groups: white supremacist prison gangs, outlaw biker clubs and criminal street gangs. He concluded that systemic racism often keeps white gangs categorized as prison and biker groups instead of street gangs – the category drawing the toughest charges and sentences.

“This means white gangs are not typically policed as stringently, he writes, and their members can miss interventions sometimes offered to more publicized gangs of color. That help can include job and life skills training, or interaction with trained 'violence interrupters,' who are often former gang members.

“Woods blames the media for underreporting white gangs. He backs up Ivey’s point about this lack of attention, writing that media may be more prone to cover black and Hispanic gangs ‘because of consumer demands for stories of sensationalized racial gang violence.’

“‘How can you help [with a problem] if you don’t recognize it’s there?’ Ivey says. ‘A lot of white kids, 15, 16 years old, look at white gangsters as rock stars.’” Indeed hip hop stars are often gang-sponsored and often folks with criminal records. They call it “street cred.” Gangs tend to grow where hope has faded, poverty dominates and drugs offer an easy escape from reality. You can see how opioid addiction has exploded in white communities where once easily-available high-paying resource extraction and manufacturing jobs have slowly disappeared. It is no surprise that white gangs have gained particular power in those regions of late.

There are no simple answers, but ad campaigns and increased criminal penalties – the Trump response to the opioid plague – might just make these issues so much worse. Privatized prisons (Trump’s fav), which statistically have much greater violence and disciplinary issues than do government-controlled counterparts, will pretty much guarantee an increased number of even angrier ex-cons lose on the streets.

This issue requires a top to bottom reassessment of everything from our budgetary priorities, our entire criminal justice system, exploring real treatment options, gun control, upgrading the quality of our public educational system to dealing with our increasingly institutionalized tendencies to be reactive, short term oriented, needing to kick the can down the road (even into coming generations), find someone to blame, slogan-driven (believing in simple quick solutions) and completely unwilling to look at the hard costs (dollars, lives and quality of life) of the problems we tend to minimalize. And since no one running the federal government is willing to address any of these questions realistically, I suspect we will simply sit back and watch stuff get so much worse.

I’m Peter Dekom, and when you are not willing to do what it takes to solve a problem, you can pretty much count on that problem getting a whole lot worse over time.