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Curbing Gang Violence
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- The real issues are systemic and much broader than can ... - justmycents
- Good point, but it would just change the problem from ... - wilderness1
- Yes exactly - wilderness1
In eight years as pastor of Emmanuel Temple Church in Portland, Bishop C.T. Wells estimates he has eulogized "dozens" of young victims of gang violence.
But he says the most recent funeral he led, for 18-year-old Borisshell Washington, was "particularly bad."
Borisshell was a senior at Jefferson High School who was killed by gang gunfire in late May.
Wells says a pervasive gang culture "expressed in music, the drug trade and in the manipulation of women" has gotten a foothold in Oregon's most populous city. Last year, according to police, gang violence spiked by nearly 70 percent in Portland.
Gangs are not a problem exclusive to the City of Roses. In recent months, Northwest towns including Salem, Corvallis and Vancouver, Washington, have reported rising gang activity.
TOL looked at the issue just over a year ago. But the problem has shown little sign of abating since then. Why? As violent crime declines overall, what causes spikes in gang activity? How much violence is preventable?
Are you in a gang? Do you do outreach to gangs in Oregon and the Northwest? What's the best way to combat gang violence? Have gangs affected your life in some way?
Tagged as: gangs · police · violence · youth
Photo credit: Kierduros / Flickr / Creative Commons
COMMENTS: (27 total)
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The U.S. Justice Department’s comprehensive gang and youth violence reduction strategy calls for combination of three main approaches: suppress the violence, intervene in young people lives to help them leave gang life behind them, and support for community-based prevention to help kids avoid gangs all-together.
Research from the Los Angeles-based Advancement Project and the Harvard Civil Rights project have found that, the 2/3rds of funds going to reduce gang crime in LA and in federal gang reduction initiaves have gone solely to support ways of arresting, detaining and incarcerating people.
If there is a consensus that, “we cannot arrest our way out of this problem,” how do we engage elected officials, law enforcement and the broader community to support strategies to increase investments in intervening in young people’s lives to get them out of gangs, and to support strategies to prevent young people from engaging in serious gang crime?
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If we would follow the OJJDP Comprehensive Gang Model we might be able to make some headway. It's been proven effective, and is used by many other agencies across the nation. I don't understand what the issue is about implementing it here in Multnomah County.
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I work directly with male Latino gang affected youth in Multnomah County. Most youth are on probation for felony offenses. The key in my opinion to combating gang violence and gangs in general is PREVENTION. Most youth I work with have been involved in gangs for over 2 years. They have been influenced at an early age by friends and/or family members. Youth join gangs for one major reason, BELONGING. Some want to belong because they don't find success through traditional means such as school, sports, and clubs. Some feel the need to belong because their immediate family are involved and to not be in a gang would mean not belonging to their own family. Youth prevention dollars are often the first cut in tough economic times, and without this early intervention youth will be left to make choices without some sort of guidance and support.
In terms of the system we need to work together on the issues of gang violence. We can not arrest our way out of the problem. I often read posts to questions asked like those on TOL and many of the responses are "lock 'em up" "put them in jail" "deport them". However this is only a quick bandaid. Sooner or later most people get out of detention, jail, prison and many who are deported return. Without providing proper skills and support they WILL return to what is easy for them, crime and gangs. I agree there are people that need to be removed from the community for public safety purposes. However, if agencies could work together before major incidents happen, such as a homicide, we could perhaps prevent and intervene when tensions are high. Instead when there is an incident such as the one that took the life of Ms. Borishell, all of us in the system are running around chasing our tails to get out there and prevent something from happening, after the fact. I feel we tend to be a reactive system instead of a proactive system.
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This could have been a great discussion about real issues, except you had to bring this guy on with his superstitious mumbo-jumbo. Wells himself believes and lives a lie, the lie of religion.
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wilderness1, is there a specific question you would like us to ask Pastor Wells? What are the real issues we should make sure to discuss?
Sarah Jane Rothenfluch — Mon June 15th 9:25a.m.
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The real issues I feel contribute to gang activity are:
Lack of education
The teaching of hatred by older gang members
Teenage popular culture, specifically the attitude that education isn’t necessary or worse something to be scorned
I’m sure you covered these, it’s just too bad your guest had to be someone who follows the same “logic” that the Worthingtons of Oregon City followed to help their sick child.
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Our gang problem is currently being driven by illegal drug money just as the gang problem was driven by illegal drugs (alchohol) during prohibition. Eliminating prohibiton eliminated the gang problem. Why don't we decriminalize drugs in the same manner as they have in Portgual; Portugal's decriminaliztion has led to lower crime rates, lower rates of drug usage, and allowed focus on those to whom drug usage creates problems?
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Some gang life is economic, about drug distribution. But a lot is not. So much sorrow is made by boys responding so much like all boys, everywhere. Boys needing to be men. But boys from families, in communities, deeply wounded in America.
These boys, especially if armed to kill, are acting out ethnic minority betrayal and rage, acting on white guilt and resentment. Ensuring some more of the same. Kids are leading us, leading adults inside our ethnic enclaves, and leading the relationship between Portland's mainstream and ethnic streams.
Ronaut LS (Polo) Catalani, community activist/awyer
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I would really like to hear what these men think the role of families is in this issue. They have talked about religion, about law enforcement, etc. But they have not mentioned parents. Aren't parents the one who are supposed to offer the hope that they say is missing?
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Why so much religous talk? This is an issue of poverty. Religion cannot fix that.
Gang violence is only one of many reasons why we need to raise the standard of living for the lower class even if it means slightly reducing the purchasing power of the middle and upper classes. Everyone wins in the long run.
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Yes exactly
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I believe it all starts at home where there isn't enough parent maturity, parent involvement, parent support, parent protection along with often not enough money. Being as there is no way to prevent people from having kids they are not prepared for the only solution has to come from where kids do interact with community.
Which is for most the school system. Kids need protection in school's that are too big, and have too few adults that really care and have it together enough to give anything useful to kids. And can we please not turn this into "oh there are so many good teachers in the schools, blah, blah", yes there are some and a lot are there for a paycheck.
A school system that worked with individuals and didn't abandon them to fend for themselves in hallways, lunch rooms and school grounds would provide the protection that gangs provide. Gangs provide a service, they do provide something that kids aren't getting somewhere else. Political correctness and the status quo, protecting the current school structure just provide the need for gangs to fill.
I am one of 11 kids raised in So Cal and I saw a lot growing up close up.
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Not to be flippant, but perhaps religion is the answer for the "gang" problem. Anyone who would wish to be a member of a gang is leading a conformist life centered around a ridiculous set of common interests which is essentially the same as religion. I can see how gang members would transfer easily from one to the other. And, religion in our country, is at least generally not as violent as gang activities. It is perhaps unrealistic to have higher expectations for many of these members.
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Many people blame violent video games for making kids violent. I think it works the other way. Violent video games provide an outlet for already violent children and actually prevent more violence. In other words, violent games do not create violent children, violent children are attracted to violent games.
So, from this perspective, I agree with you. Religion is a non-violent outlet for this type of personality.
However, I do not believe that you can solve the whole problem this way. Not everyone in a gang has that kind of personality and it ignores poverty as the root problem that leads to the violence.
People with something to lose seek outlets that are constructive and not risky. People with nothing to lose seek any outlet that can make them feel better about themselves...and the promise of power and quick money is far more powerful to an uneducated, impoverished person than anything religion or schools can offer.
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slakr007,
Of course, poverty is part of the problem. Perhaps, a big part. But it's not the whole problem. And, perhaps it is not poverty in general, but poverty in relation to this country, with these economics, and with this culture. People aren't exactly poor in this country in relation to others, so this poverty is relative to the society and culture. Fixing poverty would largely help and perhaps do the most good, but can it be done anytime soon? We should certainly try. But, I have a feeling poverty isn't going anywhere and neither is religion. I despise religion, but maybe it is a part of the short-term solution. It is certainly the cheapest form of prison around. But of course the long-term harm---is it worth it? Another lesser of two-too-many-evils.
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Good point, but it would just change the problem from violence to ignorance.
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Due to the economic situation and the stimulus package used to solidify our financial status, I sent this idea to the Obama website. I think if we were to send the city kids to the woods to perform work with the Forest Service and sent the country kids to the cities to perform the energy saving building upgrades, we could show the problem children that there is another world that they can be a part of and get them some money to help raise their self esteem.
Just a thought.
Eric in Redmond
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Gang activity is a symptom of a root problem. these kids lack a strong moral and ethical compass. We get this compass first from out parents. In America, 67% of Black families have one parent. How can a struggling single mother (which is usually the case) be expected to really give an adequate upbringing to her kids? We need to reach the young girls who are having kids, without a committed male partner in their lives. They are the touchstone for solving this problem.
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Right, because everything is black and white, straightforward and easy to understand.
Certainly, there is no moral ambiguity. Certainly, there are no gang members that started because they are uneducated, impoverished, and see gang crime as the only way to support their families.
This has nothing to do with lack of faith or morals or family. It has everything to do with poverty. 67% of black families only have one parent because they are impoverished.
Young, impoverished girls have kids without committed male partners because they have nothing else in their lives and either do not have access to, or do not know about, contraception.
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We are always referring to ‘young people’ as we talk about gang violence. This strikes me as a way of avoiding the elephant in the room – these are young men, boys really, and no one, when looking at the causeses of gang violence seems to bring in this fact. There is a strong issue of machismo and male posturing, and what makes a 'man'.
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Because there are no female gangs, right? And when you put a group of girls or a group of women together, they will never separate into subgroups and act hostile toward each other?
It is hilarious to me that if I edited your post to change 'man' or 'male' to 'negro' or 'latino', your post would sound exactly like racist propaganda. Yet, it is now socially acceptable to use the same naive logic and talk about "fundamental problems" with males.
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Mainstream "male" culture is somewhat different from "female" mainstream culture isn't it? I assume males do make up a large percentage of the perpetrators of gang violence. We shouldn't blame male-ness as the cause, anymore then we should blame being of a certain race as the cause. But clearly both contribute to the situation in one way or another. It would be silly to ignore the obvious statistics and say everything is poverty or everything is caused by something else. It is obviously a confluence of variables. Pointing out some of the variables doesn't indicate there is anything wrong (or right) with each variable by itself.
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One of the major roots is that children learn to use violence to get their way from their religion and from their parents who follow the King Solomon instruction "Spare the rod and spoil the child".
If their role models use violence on them from birth, the child learns from birth to use violence on others.
The system needs to change from trying to punish children into being good, to learning modern and scientifically well researched methods of parenting, of giving positive reinforcement to desired behaviors and not reinforcing undesired behaviors by giving attention to them in the form of punishment.
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Bishop Wells and Rob Ingram know their families, know their communities. Of course a thousand ideas from a thousand very smart people are out here. But much more can be understood well, and so much more can be done well if we would listen carefully to what these two men know, what they live.
Let's let them lead. So much love and money and time we lose for all the noise.
And two of their foundational foci are: faith and family. About religion: our mainstream must get behind what their ethnic stream believes.
About familia: white America and ethnic minority America must come to terms with of our reciprocating bitterness, our subordination and resentment, rage and guilt. Kids get this. They get it in their bones. Especially boys. Setting off another generation of wounding each other.
Ronault LS (Polo) Catalani
Community lawyer/activist
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There is no evidence to suggest that two parents (male+female) are the answer. Because if we accept this we must also accept that a single parent can't do the job. Additionally that gay couples can't do the job. It may just be the quality of the parents that is at issue---one or two, straight or gay. Or that the statistical odds are in favor of two individuals handling the task with more ease---in the same way it easier to carry a sofa with two people. It doesn't mean there is anything inherently correct or right about the traditional family.
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The real issues are systemic and much broader than can be dealt with in a single discussion. Suffice to say that the community knows what is needed to effectively deal with the issues and they have done incredibly well with the resources they have been given. Perhaps we might consider supporting them in those efforts rather than reinventing the wheel in the interest of "..... Knows Best".
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Most law enforcement officials will say that the biggest challenge posed by gangs is, "we cannot arrest our way out of this problem." The comprehensive approaches to reducing gang crime held up by the U.S. Justice Department calls for supression of the violence, interventions to help young people in gangs leave them, and prevention services to keep kids out of gangs.
Research shows that bulk of the resources going to reduce gang and youth violence have been invested in ways to arrest, detain and incarcerate people. Reports from Harvard University and the Los Angeles-based Advancement project have shown that, nationally and in LA, 2/3rds of all the funds spent to reduce gang crime have been spent on supression strategies.
If "we can't arrest our way out of this problem," how do we engage law enforcement, elected officials, community leaders and the various systems that deal with young people to support prevention and intervention services at the level needed to impact this problem in the long-term?