Zero tolerance and Hispanic gangs

Tony Allen-Mills:

THE sergeant from the Union County sheriff’s office was in sombre mood. “The Aztec Thugs have moved into Lake Park,” he said. “We’ve also got the Latin Kings and the 42nd Street gang.”

The sergeant said that one of the gang leaders lived four doors from his home. “He likes to slow down as he drives past my house. Like he’s just toying with me,” he said.

Around the packed conference room in the central police station in Charlotte, North Carolina, almost 50 uniformed officers, federal officials and undercover agents grimaced or shook their heads.

They had just watched a video seized from a home in the quiet dormitory town of Salisbury, where a group of mostly black and Hispanic gang members held a recent weekend party. As the beer flowed and revellers gyrated to thumping rap music, someone produced a gun.

Soon the room was filled with America’s new breed of suburban gangsters flaunting their pieces to the camera. Silver-barrelled revolvers and black snub-nosed pistols were waved around the room.

“Do you see her?” said an officer from Salisbury as a woman caressed a wood- handled pistol. “She’s dead now. Shot with an AK-47.”

They never imagined in Charlotte that the gangland violence associated for so long with the urban wastelands of Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami would wash up in North Carolina. But America is paying an ominous price for the success of its past crackdowns on crime in big cities.

The falling crime rates associated with the introduction almost a decade ago of “zero tolerance” policies have come with an unpleasant side effect. The gangs are migrating from cities that got tough on street thuggery to new areas where law enforcement agencies are still struggling to adapt to the fast-growing threat.

“There appears to be a straight route from Los Angeles to Charlotte,” said Detective Tim Jolly of the city’s new anti-gang taskforce.

The gangs are also becoming more violent. Despite continuing falls in overall murder rates in most cities, the number of gang-related homicides has surged in the past three years.

In the Washington suburbs, central American immigrant youths affiliated with the notorious Mara Salvatrucha gang — known by its MS-13 graffiti — are turning to the machete as their weapon of choice. A 16-year-old youth lost four of his fingers in a machete attack last year. A Honduran was arrested in a police raid last week with a 3ft machete under his bed.

In Baltimore, Martin O’Malley, the city’s mayor, had given a pledge to reduce the city’s murder rate to 175 a year by 2002. But in the past two years the emergence of ultra-violent Hispanic gangs had pushed the rate to 278 last year.

Both police officers and criminologists put the blame for the increasing gang activity at least in part on a failure to anticipate the long-term consequences of zero tolerance. During the mid and late 1990s cities such as Los Angeles cracked down hard on Latino gangs, deporting hardcore gangsters and throwing thousands in jail.

Those who were deported formed new gangs at home in central America and have since smuggled themselves back to the United States with money and weapons. Police have discovered that gangster ranks are now swelling with ex-convicts who have served their original sentences and emerged from jail as proud members of ultra-violent prison-based gangs.

Of course the best way to deal with Hispanic gangs is not just to have tough policies for dealing with the gangs themselves but to also have tough policies for the illegal immigration that allows these gangs to form in the first place. As long as the authorities turn a blind eye to illegal immigration then Hispanic gangs will be inevitable.