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Nashville home to infamous, deadly gangs
By Jared Allen, jallen@nashvillecitypaper
June 19, 2006

For the tourists popping in an out of the honkytonks on Lower Broadway and the motorists clogging the city’s interstates every weekday morning, gang activity barely registers as an afterthought.

But for entire neighborhoods in Nashville, gang violence is a painful reality.

As the 28th largest city in America, Music City is in many ways a far cry from metropolises like New York and Los Angeles.

But just like some of America’s biggest cities, Nashville has a gang problem. And, according to police, the problem is real.

Last month, the Metro Police Department unveiled a new anti-gang initiative – called Operation Safer Streets – designed to team up undercover anti-gang officers with precinct officers to snuff out gang activity wherever it arises.

“We want to make sure that everybody who chooses a gang lifestyle recognizes that this community, this police department, is not going to stand for it,” Police Chief Ronal Serpas said recently during the announcement of the anti-gang squad.

At the same time, members of the Police Department acknowledge they have their work cut out for them.

Aside from being more prone to committing violent acts, gangs are readily adaptable – eradicate them from one part of the city and they’ll pop up somewhere else.

Gangs also have proven difficult to break up, mainly because of their lack of centralization, police say.

And while Nashville is not a major city like, say, Philadelphia or Detroit, big-city gangs have found a home here.

Nashville’s most prominent and dangerous gangs consist of the two Los Angeles-based black gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, the Chicago-based black gang the Gangster Disciples, and the Salvadorian-gang, MS-13.

“Last year the Bloods were a little larger than the Crips. We saw recruiting going on last summer for the Bloods, so we’ve seen them get even bigger,” said Metro Police Sgt. Gary Kemper, who is the department’s day-to-day gang enforcement supervisor.

“But our black gangs are real unorganized,” Kemper said. “So if you’re a Blood who lives in Bordeaux, you might not have a clue about a Blood who lives in South Nashville.”

For that reason, police here have not seen the type of street versus street crime that exists among black or other gangs in larger cities.

“We don’t see, ‘Because I live on this street, then I’m a Blood, and you live on this street then you’re a Crip, and because this street divides us we’re going to fight,’” Kemper said. “Nashville’s not set up like that.”

At the same time, Kemper said the Hispanic gangs in Nashville are growing both in terms of organization and strength.

For example, MS-13 is actively on the rise, he said. (The MS designation is an abbreviated form of mara salvatruchas, the Spanish translation for which is “posse of street-tough Salvadorans.” The 13 is a gang number associated with Southern California.)

Recently, Newsweek magazine called MS-13 “the fastest-growing, most violent and least understood of the nation’s street gangs.”

MS-13, which was started in Los Angeles in the 1980s by violence-hardened Salvadorans fleeing a civil war, has an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 members in 33 states in the United States, including Tennessee.

Metro Police declined to give membership figures for MS-13 or any of Nashville’s other gangs, due to concerns about creating additional rivalries.

But they believe they have the tools necessary to keep all gang members on the run. At the same time, police are realistic about what they can accomplish.

“You’ll never eradicate it all. Gangs have been with us forever,” Kemper said. “The main thing is to let them know we’re there.”

That is where police say Operation Safer Streets is already making a difference.

Police are still processing how many gang members they interviewed and arrested during the three sweeps conducted since Operation Safer Streets began, Kemper and Police spokesman Don Aaron said last week.

“One big location we were hitting has gone dry,” Kemper said. “Back behind Hickory Hollow Mall, [gangs] were doing a lot of dope deals, but we’ve been hitting it so hard that the last time we went out there, there was nothing. Which is a good thing.”

“If we leave it alone for a week, will they come back? Maybe. We don’t know,” he added.

In the meantime, police are working with their contacts to find out where the gangs are likely to surface next, and they will be surveying those areas and conducting more weekend sweeps.

“Quite simply, the goal is to greatly disrupt their environment,” Aaron said.

“And maybe we don’t arrest anybody,” Kemper added. “But maybe we prevent their drive-by shooting.”