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Getting control of the gangs

Otros Titulares
Controlando las pandillas


About 30 young people were involved in a gang fight at Newtown High School in Elmhurst, Queens, two weeks ago, and when it was over two of them had been stabbed and seriously injured.
State Assemb. José Peralta, state Sen. John Sabini, local police, community leaders, neighborhood residents, parents, students and the Guardian Angels all say that gang activity is increasing in Queens. But Peralta and Sabini have not been able to get the New York Police Department to give them the most recent statistics on local gang activity, and neither has this newspaper. The NYPD says it is processing the request.

Parents and students at Newtown High School in Elmhurst, a school with 4,300 students and a 53 percent graduation rate, are worried. They fear that if a teenager innocently wears a gang color, or happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, he or she will become a victim of violence.

Students said the fight at Newtown on Oct. 17 was between the Latin Kings and ABK (Against Bloods and Kings), a local gang. But as El Diario La Prensa reported last month, federal investigators and gang experts say Mexican and Central American street gangs -- including the powerful Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, and M-18 -- have consolidated their power in New Jersey and are flourishing in Queens.

Federal authorities and local police in New York and New Jersey have taken an aggressive stance, but more must be done. Money and training are needed for a strategy that has worked in other cities: suppression, which is heavy police work; intervention, which includes helping gang members who want to leave; and prevention, which means keeping young people away from gangs.

But first we must know the scope of the problem. It is crucial that the NYPD share the statistics on gang activity, and work with the local community to rid the area of this frightening problem.