Rogue City: additional context | Gang sociology at UMass

Bill Peters By Bill Peters
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on August 17, 2009 at 11:59 AM, updated August 18, 2009 at 3:18 PM

Is it more useful to chase gang leaders or liaisons?

"I wish it was like The Wire. I wish it was like The Sopranos."
-David Serrano

Years ago, the Springfield chapter of the Latin Kings reported to the regional office in New York. In the 80s, New York's gangs would hold huge meetings in Central Park, or in Connecticut, or New Jersey. The meetings were called universals. Thousands from rival and ally gangs would attend. They got away with it because they knew cops, lawyers, judges.

When asked if the gangs ever had deep connections to the law in Springfield, David Serrano, a former gang member who we interviewed for our Rogue City series, paused, took a breath, and mumbled: "Um. I don't know."

Then, he added: "You got the juice card somewhere in there -- you help me, I'll help you."

Gang prevention can be difficult for all the reasons cited in the 18,000 words we wrote prior to this post. But it's also difficult because the boundaries between lawbreakers, law enforcement, and community workers can be heavy with overlap. Sometimes all three grow up together, sometimes their lives take opposite directions, sometimes one arrests the other when the other gets caught selling drugs.

Sometimes, that overlap is a good thing. If a kid has been in trouble in the past, but is trying to get out of a gang, it might be better to run into an officer willing to help them out than someone who'll take them immediately to jail. But the more law enforcement and policymakers understand the particularities of gang culture and interpersonal relationships between gang members, the more likely they'll be able to dissolve a gang before it turns into a neighborhood problem.

Last week, the Republican ran an article about UMass Sociology Professor Andrew Papachristos, who was a community and gang outreach worker in Chicago through the 1990s, and has published or presented a variety of research on street gangs, gentrification, and crime prevention. In that Republican article, Papachristos argues, like we have, that a given city's gang problem is as much a social issue as it is a law enforcement one, as much about public safety as it is about public health.

What, exactly, do we mean when we say a "public health issue" in the context of crime prevention? Here's a useful passage from Papachristos's paper "Interpreting Inkblots: Deciphering and Doing Something About Modern Street Gangs" on the subject:

Public health models offer a useful direction. We know where gangs concentrate spatially and socially. If regarded as "epidemics," we could first try to understand its diffusion, mechanisms of contagion, area of infection, and so on--i.e., we can map such events and activities and then worry about whether they are "real" gang problems by academic or theoretic standards.

Which means that, beyond the usual bottomless poverty/drugs/education deathtrap, it's useful to look at what -- or who -- helps keep gangs together. More relevant to Springfield's gang population, then, is one of Papachristos's 2006 papers that looks at some 1960s research by Gerald Suttles on the social structure of a small Mexican crew called The Erls.

The Erls, like Eastern Ave or SYC, didn't have any formal structure or allegiance to one another, but their status depended on "each boy's frequency of interaction, type of relation to other members, commitment to 'hanging out,' fighting ability, and other interpersonal qualities." There were two rival segments within that gang -- and even friction within members of those segments -- and the gang itself was at its most cohesive, Suttles research indicated, when they were fighting other gangs.

However, Papachristos's paper argues, understanding a gang's social structure often requires focus on the lower-level members who might know a lot more people, and who act as liaisons or "brokers" (Papachristos's words) to bridge gaps and connect otherwise disparate groups within the gang:

If these members are removed from the network [...] the structural holes become apparent -- the Erls would cease to be anything resembling a cohesive group. In short, although these members are not the most "central" in terms of overall prominence, they are responsible for holding the gang together as a group. Very little gang research has focused on what types of members hold such groups together.

What's more, near the end of Papachristos's most recent research -- published in the July, 2009 issue of the American Journal of Sociology -- he suggests that anti-gang policy requires an understanding of the gang's politics and hierarchy:

The most obvious intervention entails data-guided enforcement and legal efforts that target the organizational structure of specific gangs (such as the Gangster Disciples and Latin Kings) rather than broad sweeping policies that generically target gang members.

Near the end of the Republican article, Papachristos says that the HBO series "The Wire", for the most part, offers an accurate portrayal of gang politics. For further reading: last year, gang sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh (who is cited in at least one of Papachristos's papers) wrote a series of Freakonomics blog posts for the New York Times titled "What Do Real Thugs Think of 'The Wire'?". In that series, Venkatesh watched "The Wire's" final season with a handful of high-level drug dealers in New York. One upper-level dealer's insights during that series seem to complement Papachristos's research:

"My uncle was a [police] commander in Florida," one upper-level drug dealer told Venkatesh during a discussion about the show. "Always told me that if you see the police go after the gangs, that means they're hiding the fact that they can't catch nobody else. They can't stop something else that's going on."

Maybe that's only true in bigger cities, which tend to rack up more homicides. Either way, unlike the blanket approach suggested by one MassLive commenter, the way a city deals with its gang population, most likely, needs to be as nuanced as the gangs themselves.