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Youth violence found to spring from gangs
Sunday, September 05, 1999 Jack Kelly and Torsten Ove, Post-Gazette Staff Writers
Young people are much more likely to commit crimes, especially violent crimes, if they belong to gangs.
More than 23,000 gangs are active in the United States, with nearly 665,000 members who commit more than 600,000 crimes a year, according to latest National Youth Gang Survey conducted in 1995 for the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. More than 80 percent of district attorneys say gangs are a problem in their jurisdictions.
C. Ronald Huff of Ohio State University analyzed two detailed Justice Department studies and found that gang members are much more likely than other "at-risk" youths to own guns, and that the guns they owned were of larger caliber.
"More than 90 percent of gang members in both studies reported that their peers carried concealed weapons; more than 80 percent reported that members of their gang had carried guns to school," Huff said. Half of "at-risk" youths unaffiliated with gangs reported having friends who carried concealed weapons, and a third of their friends took guns to school.
The Rochester Youth Development Study examined 1,000 boys and girls in Rochester, N.Y., public schools, and followed them from seventh grade through high school. About 30 percent belonged to gangs, but gang members accounted for 86 percent of serious delinquent acts, 63 percent of alcohol use and 61 percent of other drug use.
Some gangs recruit members as young as 8, but most are no longer juveniles. The age of members has been creeping upward in part because many gangs have become full-fledged crime families, heavily involved in marketing illegal drugs. The average age of gang members in Los Angeles is 25.
A 1995 National Institute of Justice report, "Prosecuting Gangs: A National Assessment," found that once youth become gang members, intervention programs are less likely to turn them around.
Gang violence reached a peak in Pittsburgh, particularly in the East End, in the early 1990s, leading to a record number of homicides in 1993 as gangs battled over turf. Federal authorities eventually prosecuted dozens of members of one of the most violent gangs, the Larimer-Avenue Wilkinsburg gang, or LAW, using racketeering statutes. Since the mid-1990s, shootings and gang-related homicides have declined.
Some Pittsburgh police officers say gang violence in Homewood may be on the rise again. The recent drive-by shooting at the Squirrel Hill police station, for example, appears to be the work of gang members who wrote anti-police messages on the inside of the Jeep they used and later ditched.
But detectives who monitor gangs closely say they never left in the first place. They've just become less violent and more intelligent and sophisticated. Police won't comment on the specifics of how many gangs are operating in Pittsburgh or how many members they have.
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