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Examiner Editorial - Gang prevention is key to long-term success
23Nov'05

Published: Tuesday, November 22, 2005 7:43 PM EST
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After long ignoring clear signs of increasing gang activity, politicians and law enforcement officials in the Washington region are finally waking up and taking this threat seriously. But with more than 60 street gangs now operating in the wider metropolitan area, they're playing a catch-up game at best.

Virginia Congressman Frank Wolf, R-10th, sounded the alarm years ago, but like Chicken Little, nobody heeded his warnings. That started to change only when members of the violent Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, started hacking people's fingers off with machetes in Fairfax County last year.

Montgomery County downplayed its own gang problem until it, too, could no longer be denied. On Aug. 5, Silver Spring residents were shocked to learn that two students were stabbed by alleged gang members in a Springbrook High School parking lot and, just four hours later, four more were brazenly attacked inside the Target store at Wheaton Mall.

The FBI has declared gang violence a priority second only to national terrorism. It is inevitably accompanied by drug trafficking, auto theft, prostitution, alien smuggling and extortion. Operation Community Shield, a program run by the Department of Homeland Security specifically to disrupt MS-13, has already made 582 arrests nationwide. But with an estimated 21 cliques and as many as 1,500 MS-13 members in the D.C. area alone, that's a mere drop in the bucket.

In the past two years, Wolf has used his House committee chairmanship to secure more than $10 million to fund gang prevention programs and establish the Northern Virginia Regional Gang Task Force, which will get $2.5 million in his current bill, with another $2.3 million for Maryland's Regional Gang Initiative. Federal funds will also pay for a cooperative Joint Gang Suppression and Prevention Initiative - a tad late, but obviously better than never.

The bill contains $40 million for a nationwide anti-gang program run by the Department of Justice to coordinate federal, state and law enforcement efforts to combat this form of domestic terrorism. But Justice will have to do a much better job than Homeland Security, which handed out billions of dollars to localities to combat foreign terrorism with an appalling lack of oversight over how the money was spent.

Law enforcement can and should be mobilized to get violent gangsters off the streets, but keeping kids from joining gangs in the first place is critical to long-term success. Wolf's bill acknowledges that by giving $85 million to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America to provide safe after-school havens.

But here's the problem: Most gang recruiting takes place before school, on the way home or during the weekends. Inside school, menacing stares and intentional bumping in the hallways gradually escalate to pushing and threats. Well-meaning school administrators ban known gang signs such as bandanas or do-rags, but often miss the hand signals, colored Band-Aids or rubber bracelets - even shoelaces - that soon replace them.



Even though most new gang recruits are targeted in the volatile middle school years, many parents and school officials have no clue that intimidation is going on right under their noses. Or sometimes they do, but find it easier to look the other way. The Daily Press reported that one teacher in a gang-infested middle school in Newport News was too afraid to tell administrators one of her students brought a gun to class. "I've never seen a child being bullied here," the assistant principal for discipline in the same school insisted. "It must be another school." Yeah, right.

In an effort to thwart recruitment of children as young as 7, gang prevention efforts must address these under-the-radar tactics, and be strictly monitored by federal authorities to make sure gang members aren't gaming the system - as one suspect in the Springbrook stabbing, who was a paid chaperone for an after-school gang-prevention program meant to keep younger kids away from people exactly like him - apparently had been doing.

The District, Virginia and Maryland have more often been adversaries rather than partners, but are now discovering that it's possible to cooperate on gang prevention for their mutual benefit. Maybe there's hope for future collaboration on other issues as well.