Street gangs move to 'burbs

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 6, 1998 | by Timothy W. Maier

Although many still are denying it, law-enforcement experts say street gangs are springing up in suburbs once considered safe havens from inner-city violence.

They promised her a gun and a tattoo. Tatia "Tia" Brennan followed them willingly to a secluded woods near her suburban school in Prince George's County, Md., on Nov. 27, 1995. She never got those things.

Fellow 15-year-old gang members Shawnte Perry and Vouthynor "Billy" Sovann stabbed her 42 times. They then picked up a discarded sink and crushed her skull. While she lay dying, she gasped, "I love you Bloods." Seconds later the 14-year-old died. Why had she been sentenced to death? Tia had warned another youth the Bloods were plotting to ambush him.

This sort of thing is happening nationwide, law-enforcement officials claim. Gangs no longer are just an urban problem among disadvantaged or undereducated youth. They have penetrated middle America while parents, educators and police have been asleep at the wheel.

"There is a serious problem with street gangs," says FBI agent Ken Neu, who oversees the nation's 152 antigang task forces established in 54 FBI field offices. "They are moving into the suburbs. The gangs have become more violent, using more [sophisticated] weapons and communicating through the Internet. Many gangs today have matured to the level of organized crime."

The FBI claims gangs recruit children as young as 10, and many members stay until well into their 40s. The National Youth Gang Center of the Office of Juvenile Justice reported 23,388 street gangs with 650,000 members in the United States, identifying gang activity in all 50 states in 1995. California had the most gangs at 5,000, while Texas, Illinois and Colorado followed with 1,000 gangs each. About 89 percent of juvenile crime is committed by gangs.

John Moore, senior researcher for the Institute for Intergovernmental Research, which gathers the Justice Department's gang data, says the numbers will increase because more police departments were contacted in the latest survey -- not yet available for release. But Moore says they still don't have an accurate picture because more than 40 percent of about 4,000 departments didn't respond.

That makes it difficult to combat gang terrorism because there is "an institutional denial" says Mike Knox, a retired 15-year veteran of the Houston Police Department and author of Gangsta in the House: Understanding Gang Culture. "If our schools say we have a gang problem, people will move -- lowering real-estate values and tax base," says Knox, who served on panels on youth crime under Texas Republican Gov. George W. Bush. "If you're a politician you don't want to say your community has a gang problem, because if you don't understand the problem, you can't form a solution. So you call it isolated incidents. The denial issue is prevalent all the way down to the parent who won't admit their child is in a gang because they think that means they are a bad parent."

Tia's grieving mother, Sandra Brennan, told reporters after the killers were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms that she had "no idea" of her daughter's secret gang life.

Former senior Maryland prosecutor James Papirmeister, who investigated Tia's murder and concluded her gang has about 70 members, was disturbed that prior to the bond hearing he was under strict orders from his supervisors not to use the word gang but instead to use set. "It is my understanding that the school board didn't want to cause a hysteria because her school -- Suitland High School -- was a magnet school." (Similarly, in Maryland courts judges have ordered attorneys not to use the word "gang" before a jury because of its negative connotation.)

Following Tia's murder the public demanded a gang count and police concluded there was no real gang threat. That flew in the face of an internal county report on school security in 1994 that indicated at least 70 gangs were operating, as well as a 1994 governor's task force indicating 100 gangs were active. At that time, police warned reporters to be careful tying social groups to gangs because some of these could be French clubs.

Jeff Wennar, former member of the Maryland Governors Advisory Council on Gangs tells Insight there must be "a lot of French clubs" in the nation. "These kids are not getting together to travel abroad to learn about someone else's culture," he says. "Their culture is violence and criminal activity."

Still, police assured parents the notorious Los Angeles Bloods and Crips gangs had not penetrated their suburbs. These were just "wanna-bes," although they were formed by a former L.A. Blood. Even Sovann, in a letter to the Washington Post, described his group as a "fake gang."

Knox warns that "the most devastating term you can use is wanna-bes. Because what you are saying is it's okay if you walk and talk the gangster language as long as you don't join. But where do you think gangs like the Bloods get their recruits? From the wanna-bes," who rule by intimidation, Neu says. "It's not the code of silence such as in La Cosa Nostra, but the silence is the fear of retribution." That makes it difficult to prosecute because witnesses are afraid to testify.