What is the proper professional punishment for a mistake that results in a person's death? A physician's fatal error, for example, can result in the withdrawal of hospital privileges and sometimes the revocation of the medical license, though seldom is either punishment imposed for a first offense. Is medical malpractice a good analogy for police malpractice? What should the punishment be for a police officer's fatal error?
Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik recently announced that the four officers acquitted by an upstate jury of all criminal charges in the killing of Amadou Diallo would be confined to desk jobs, but not punished further. (The 22-year-old unarmed West African street vendor was killed on the night of Feb. 4, 1999, while standing in front of what turned out to be his Bronx home.)
New Yorkers, according to the New York Daily News, do not agree with Kerik.
In a Daily News/New York 1 poll, respondents were told that the police department "has decided not to discipline the four officers involved in the shooting death of Amadou Diallo." When asked whether they approved or disapproved of the decision, only 21 percent approved, and 64 percent disapproved.
These overall figures mask a huge racial disparity: 89 percent of black New Yorkers disapproved of Kerik's decision, and only 2 percent approved. White New Yorkers, however, showed a different pattern: only 43 percent disapproved, 39 percent approved, and 18 percent were not sure.
The public's distress with the police department's handling of the shooting remains very high even as crime in the city has hit a record low. The police department announced on April 30 that murder, which had already been at the lowest level in three decades, had plunged another 18 percent, from 237 to 194, during the first four months of 2001. Both robbery and burglary were also down more than 16 percent.
Commissioner Kerik, quoted in the New York Post, credited police department initiatives for the crime drop, citing the department's focus on gangs, its high priority on warrants for violent felons (warrant arrests are up 50 percent), and the fine-tuning of the department's assault on drugs. Kerik summarized his approach as "going after the bad people and taking them off the streets."
But, of course, the tragedy of Amadou Diallo was that he wasn't a bad guy. He was a good person, killed by the police searching for a vicious rapist. And while New Yorkers are very happy indeed with the drop in crime, they are chagrinned about the mild official punishment of the four officers, who were barely sanctioned for police malpractice.
Mickey Blum, president of Blum & Weprin, which conducts the polling for the Daily News and New York 1, says that New York opinion has stayed fairly consistent since the shooting. "Something dreadful happened," she says. "Something went very wrong. And most New Yorkers have pretty consistently felt that those cops and the department should be held responsible in some way." She adds that many New Yorkers think that if Diallo had been white he would not have been killed.
This reminds New Yorkers once again that a racial disparity exists on many issues of crime and justice. Much of that disparity is due to the reality that day in, day out, black Americans are more vulnerable than white Americans to being stopped by the police, fairly or unfairly.
As Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy points out in his book, "Race, Crime, and the Law" (Pantheon), cops stopping an African-American male for no apparent reason other than the color of his skin is not unlawful in most jurisdictions. The courts permit law-enforcement officials to use race as a "risk factor" that justifies a stop-and-search procedure.
Kennedy calls this strategic racial discrimination by police officers a "short cut," a helpful way for police to use their resources more efficiently. If 80 percent of drug-runners are young black men, what's wrong with taking race into account when investigating the crime, asks Kennedy, himself an African-American.
What's wrong, he answers, is that the police use of race as a proxy for suspiciousness creates enormous day-to-day distrust and alienation among black Americans. And that matters to all Americans for two reasons. First, opening the door to strategic, rational discrimination condoned by the courts (including the Supreme Court) also opens the door to invidious racial discrimination, the kind that all decent people would condemn.
Second, a black person's being stopped by the guardians of law and order comes back to haunt the community when those who have been detained become lawyers, judges, jurors, and bring with them the anger they feel over unwarranted harassment and humiliation by police and, by extension, the courts. Halting this practice will not solve all problems, but will go far toward draining the deep sense of injustice African-Americans feel, Kennedy argues.
In the May 2 Daily News, mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer applies a similar argument to New York, pointing out that what he calls the "tragically bad judgment" of the Diallo officers cost an innocent man his life. This should, argues Ferrer, cost them their badges and guns. The failure "to prosecute police misconduct vigorously," he writes, sends the message that the justice system is flawed, and that it protects others, not them. He concludes: "When you create pervasive doubt about the fairness of the system, it becomes that much more difficult for law enforcement to win convictions before juries, no matter how legitimate the case."
The tragedy of Diallo is so enormous that it overwhelms a more routine police-community problem -- and that's the problem of discretionary stops by police of people either acting suspiciously or committing minor offenses. There is no question but that a safe city requires smart, competent, decent police officers to patrol the streets and exercise careful judgment in stopping citizens. Yet the problem of discretionary stop-and-frisks has festered in New York for a long time, as has the problem of full arrests for minor offenses. Now the Supreme Court has weighed in with a 5-4 decision validating full arrest -- including handcuffs and jail -- for a petty offense. In the case before the Court, it was a suburban soccer mom in Texas not wearing a seat belt.
A cop stopped Gail Atwater, who said that she had been driving slowly (15 miles per hour) without a seat belt on an empty street to look for a lost toy. She had let her children unbuckle their belts to look out the windows.
Officer Turek had stopped her once before for not wearing a seat belt, a misdemeanor in Texas. Writing for the majority, Justice David Souter summarized what happened: "Respondent Turek, then a Lago Vista policeman, observed the seat-belt violations, pulled Atwater over, verbally berated her, handcuffed her, placed her in his squad car and drove her to the local police station, where she was made to remove her shoes, jewelry and eyeglasses, and empty her pockets. Officers took her 'mug shot' and placed her, alone, in a jail cell for about an hour, after which she was taken before a magistrate and released on bond. She was charged with, among other things, violating the seatbelt law. She pleaded no contest to the seat-belt misdemeanors and paid a $50 fine."
Thus the Supreme Court held Officer Turek's action to be reasonable under the Fourth Amendment, which begins: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated." Souter noted the humiliating character of the arrest over a "very minor criminal offense," but said he was comfortable relying on the "good sense" of local lawmakers and peace officers to keep such humiliating arrests from becoming excessive. He said there is a "dearth of horribles demanding redress."
A dissent, written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, pointed out the officer's intent to "threaten, frighten and humiliate" Atwater, and the completely unnecessary character of the arrest and jailing. The common law, argued O'Connor, would have barred the arrest because the traffic violation was not a breach of the peace, making the arrest unreasonable.
Most Americans probably thought that our majestic U.S. Constitution protected us from this kind of police excess. An arrest, of course, is the ultimate seizure of the person -- and an arrest over a patently trivial matter would seem on its face to be unreasonable.
In the last few years the Supreme Court has tended to affirm the authority of police officers to stop, detain, and search citizens in a wide variety of circumstances. It has substantially expanded the ability of cops to seize and search vehicles, including handbags found in vehicles, without warrants. It has okayed police stopping someone who has fled on sight of a cop in a high-crime area. On the other hand, the court also held that a cop could not search a vehicle that had been stopped for a traffic violation and only a traffic violation. Thus there's some irony that it was a seat-belt violation -- a truly low-level offense -- that has provoked this assertion of a cop's authority for full arrest for any offense.
Newspaper editorials across the country have expressed a great deal of anger and outrage about the decision. But here's the shocking thing: The Supreme Court is right, or at least "right" in the sense that legislatures and courts have been approving the practice of what they call "warrantless" arrests for misdemeanors for 200 years. So why are many of us shocked? Perhaps because it has not happened to most of us personally.
Criminal defense lawyer Robert E. Levy points out that in New York a police officer can arrest anyone for any offense, including a petty offense, that is committed in his or her presence. A cop can arrest you for a speeding ticket. Cops generally don't, because they are guided by internal police memoranda on what is "arrestable." For a while, says Levy, petty offenses were arrestable in New York. A public uproar resulted in the police pulling back from this. The public didn't want arrests for jay-walking, littering, or dogs off the leash, however annoying some of these habits might be.
Levy also notes that an arrest is not supposed to be a punishment. Its purpose is to gain the appearance of the offender before a magistrate for adjudication. The cop is simply a conduit. If the offender has identification or is known personally to the cop -- as was Mrs. Atwater in the Texas seatbelt case -- and if there is no other reason requiring an arrest, such as hidden drugs or a weapon, then a desk appearance ticket is the usual and proper procedure.
But here is the importance for New York and other big cities: Misdemeanors or less have provoked some of the worst police incidents. Rodney King's driving while intoxicated in Los Angeles, Anthony Baez in the Bronx tossing a football that hit a police car, or the young man with several misdemeanors outstanding killed by a police officer in Cincinnati, precipitating the recent riots. They were all minor offenses with grave consequences.
And the New York Police Department's policy of regularly strip searching people arrested on misdemeanor charges cost the city $50 million four months ago to settle a class action law suit involving 63,000 people illegally searched in Manhattan and Queens. You cannot do a strip search if you know who the person is, says Levy, and have no reason to think drugs or weapons or anything dangerous is involved beyond the petty offense: "The key word in the Fourth Amendment is 'unreasonable.' The public was outraged, the city agreed to the settlements, and the strip searches stopped." (The strip searches apparently continued in Brooklyn Central Booking, according to a suit filed May 2 in federal court. Newsday says that the owner of a manufacturing company, a teacher, a high school student and four other Brooklyn residents have sued the city claiming they were improperly strip searched after arrests on misdemeanor charges. Their lawyers said thousands of other people arrested on misdemeanor charges may also have been improperly searched over the past three years.)
If the Supreme Court is right that a full arrest can follow an offense, no matter how petty, then we need legislation to tighten arrest standards to ensure that spiteful officers, like Officer Turek in Texas, do no further harm. Better yet, we need legislation limiting arrests for trivial offenses.
Says Levy: "In this modern age, the cop is in constant radio communication, and can always find out whether a person is wanted or not. People these days are generally carrying enough identification that it would be unreasonable to seize them when all you want them to do is appear in order to pay a fine. Certainly statutes should forbid an arrest with jail when the offence is one that is either highly unlikely to lead to jail--or when jail is even statutorily forbidden."
The day the Supreme Court decision was handed down affirming the reasonableness of the arrest, the Texas legislature passed a bill outlawing such arrests. The New York State legislature should consider the same. Texans are no longer vulnerable. But New Yorkers are.
Julia Vitullo-Martin, a long-time editor and writer on urban affairs, is the former director of the Citizens Jury Project at the Vera Institute of Justice. She is now writing a book entitled The Conscience of the American Jury.
From the founding of the country forward, executive pardons by presidents and governors have been a regular means of mercifully correcting overly harsh laws or easing overly punitive sentencing in individual cases. As former pardon attorney Margaret Colgate Love (Department of Justice, 1990-1997) pointed out in the June 2000 Fordham Urban Law Journal, Americans incorrectly tend to associate pardons with politics and controversy. (I would add celebrity and notoriety to the list.) Few realize that for most of American history the pardon power was exercised routinely and quietly to give relief to ordinary people convicted of what Love calls "garden-variety" crimes.
Writing several months before the Clinton exit pardons erupted onto the American scene, Love deplored the disuse and disrepute into which she feared the federal pardon power had fallen. Pardons are a necessary tool for correcting what she called the "harsh inflexibility" of the criminal justice system: in so many cases the legally mandated punishment seems morally wrong. Just as serious, she wrote, the "growing crime control infrastructure . . . reflects poorly on our national humanity."
Up until the Reagan administration, every administration from Franklin Roosevelt's to Jimmy Carter's had acted favorably on 30 percent or more of pardon petitions, says Love. Under Reagan, the percentage of favorable pardons dropped by a third to 20 percent. President Reagan also reversed course over his predecessors in absolute numbers. He pardoned 393 individuals in his two terms, compared to the 534 pardoned by President Carter in one term, says Love.
President Bush went even further. He granted only 68 pardons in his one term, or 7 percent of pardon petitions--perhaps in part because the Willie Horton clemency scandal in Massachusetts had helped him defeat Gov. Dukakis for the presidency.
Love attributes the decline in pardons to the politics of crime control, in which both Republicans and Democrats have competed for advantage in a "race to incarcerate," producing what Love calls "a prison industrial complex with a powerful institutional constituency."
And now we have the Clinton exit mess, a controversy which is not about to go away in New York, home or former home to many of those pardoned. Since some of the pardons are thought to have been helpful to the successful campaign of our new junior U.S. Senator, Hillary Clinton, the specter of unseemly politics floats in the background.
This is not the first round of pardon controversy in New York. In August 1999 Clinton granted clemency to 16 members of a Puerto Rican nationalist group serving lengthy prison sentences for terrorism. Republicans charged that clemency was an attempt to strengthen Mrs. Clinton's Senate bid. The White House denied she had played any role. (The allegations were examined in the Findings of the Committee on Government Reform, available online)
Thus the pardon cauldron already held a volatile mix before the early February announcement from the Bush administration that Mary Jo White, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, would be the prosecutor in charge of investigating the pardons. The Chicago Sun-Times called her "the most feared and respected prosecutor in the United States." (Even without White, the Southern District, which includes Manhattan, is considered to be the highest profile prosecutor's office in the nation.)
Although Clinton appointed White in 1993, they quickly became non-friends. Their aloof relationship cooled even further when she looked into charges that the Teamsters Union funneled cash to the Democratic Party during the 1996 election. President Clinton failed to consult her or her office when he pardoned New Yorkers or former New Yorkers, including fugitive financier Marc Rich and his partner Pincus Green.
Now White has opened a criminal investigation about whether Rich contributed to the Democratic Party in exchange for the pardons. (Rich's former wife gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the party and to Clinton's presidential library.) Or, for that matter, did Rich or Green commit any other violations of federal law? In grand prosecutorial tradition, White is embarking upon a wide-open investigation. She is authorized by the Bush administration to investigate or delegate the investigation of any of the 177 pardons granted by Clinton during his last days in office.
On one historical fact, every historian agrees: The Founders of this nation did not want a king. But because most of them did want a powerful executive, they looked to the model of the English monarchy for guidance. They discarded some kingly powers (such as unlimited control of appointments), and chose the ones they thought most suitable--including the unlimited power to pardon.
They were confident they had constructed the office well. Indeed, Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers predicted the presidency would be "filled by characters preeminent for ability and virtue." This assumption, though quickly proved false, makes the pardoning power seem less reckless.
More important to them, however, were the troubled times of the 18th century, riddled with class warfare, particularly in England. Not accidentally, it was also a time of brutal criminal law, in which nearly every offense--theft, forgery, poaching--was a capital crime. While juries regularly tempered the law's cruelty by refusing to convict, huge numbers of English subjects were routinely sentenced to be hanged. The king's pardon, supported even by conservative Parliamentarians like Edmund Burke, moderated the law when necessary, to retain popular support.
As historian Douglas Hay argued in his study of 18th century crime, "The law was important as gross coercion; it was equally important as ideology. Its majesty, justice and mercy helped to create the spirit of consent and submission" that maintained the loyalty of the English poor. Royal pardons, wrote Hay, "were presented as acts of grace rather than as favours to interests."
Or as William Blackstone wrote in his definitive commentaries on English law: "These repeated acts of goodness" had the effect of endearing "the sovereign to his subjects, and contribute(d) more than anything to root in their hearts that filial affection, and personal loyalty, which are the sure establishment of a prince." That's the theory, anyway.
In their search for a well-ordered government overseeing a stable society, the founders endowed the presidency with this unlimited kingly power to pardon citizens as an outlet to overly severe laws or courts. According to Hay, however, even in the king's hands the power was often suspect. The "grounds for mercy," he wrote, "were ostensibly that the offence was minor, or that the convict was of good character, or that the crime he had committed was not common enough in that county to require an exemplary hanging."
Under this analysis, we might put the president's pardon of his brother's cocaine conviction in the "minor" category--and therefore suitable. (Though many observers would quickly point out the thousands of unpardoned inmates, including mothers, whose cases are at least equally worthy.)
Applications that go through regular channels in the Department of Justice--which Clinton pretty much bypassed--nearly always put forward an argument of good character. The applicant is cited for family values, community and church service or generous philanthropic contributions--though often of ill-gotten gains.
Hay doubts that most kingly pardons were meritorious. On the contrary they "served to save a good many respectable villains." Then, as now, the pardon tended to go to the well-off criminal because "mercy was part of the currency of patronage. Petitions were most effective from great men, and the common course was for a plea to be passed up through increasingly higher levels of the social scale, between men bound together by the links of patronage and obligation." But there was a downside to all this.
The power had to be used judiciously or its effects could boomerang. Says Hay: "The aim above all was to avoid exposing the law and authority either to ridicule or to too close scrutiny." Ridicule of the law and close scrutiny of this once unquestioned presidential power are quickly becoming two more legacies of the Clinton years. The push is on to restrict the presidential pardoning power, which would entail an enormous political and constitutional fight.
Mercy must be an active part of a healthy justice system. In a March 6 article in the New York Law Journal, two former federal prosecutors, Elkan Abramowitz and Barry A. Bohrer, argue that whatever damage Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich did to Clinton's own reputation and legacy, the graver concern is with the damage he may have inflicted on the institution of executive clemency itself. That's because the possibility of obtaining mercy outside the rigid procedures that govern the criminal justice system is an important safeguard both to those seeking absolution, and to "a public committed to the notions of fairness and justice in the administration of its criminal laws."
In other words, the possibility of mercy and forgiveness functions as a protection for everyone. While many commentators have attacked unlimited presidential discretion in granting pardons as an anomaly that should now be corrected, these two former prosecutors see it as "the ultimate check on legislative or judicial injustice."
After all, we live in a time of harsh criminal laws that are often made even more severe by mandatory minimum sentences essentially eliminating judicial discretion. Alexander Hamilton could have been writing about our own time: "Humanity and good policy conspire to dictate that the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed. The criminal code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel."
Julia Vitullo-Martin, a long-time editor and writer on urban affairs, is the former director of the Citizens Jury Project at the Vera Institute of Justice. She is now writing a book entitled The Conscience of the American Jury.
At a recent public forum at City Council, police, school officials, politicians, and other experts offered their best guesses as to why the number of gang members in the city has risen over 30 percent in the last year.
"We live in a criminal environment," said one expert. "There are cops in our schools, the mayor is obsessed with crime, innocent people are being shot 41 times. It creates a mentality of crime in young people."
This particular expert has first-hand experience with the question. She is 19 years old and a member of the Latin Queens, complete with the tattoo of a crown on her ankle.
The city has spent increased amount of money and energy in recent years trying to crack down on gangs that recruit young people like her.
In 1997, the mayor stepped up his effort to combat gangs, focusing on them as criminal enterprises, not just as groups of juvenile delinquents. In 1998, the Board of Education agreed to give school security over to the police department with officers patrolling some hallways. And last year, a bill was introduced that would give police the power to arrest suspected gang members loitering on street corners.
Despite such efforts, gangs and their crimes are a routine part of news headlines. Recently 18 members of The Mexican Boys gang were arrested for carrying knives and guns on their way to a party of a rival gang in Brooklyn. The Albany County jail had the highest rate of violence in its history this year, with many of the incidents occurring between New York City and upstate gangs. And last month, three teenagers were arrested in connection with the shooting death of a man in Central Park, the first homicide there in two years. The teens claimed affiliation with both the Bloods and the Crips, though police later determined that they were lying. Clearly, gangs still hold some appeal.
The 19-year-old member of the Latin Queens, who asked that only her last name, Vargas, be used, suggested some reasons why.
"There are no jobs, no programs for youth, our schools are falling apart," Vargas said. "Our youth bond together for protection and opportunity."
While not everybody would agree with her - New York offers more cultural opportunities and youth programs, some say, than many other cities with gang problems -- Councilmember Ken Fisher, chair of the Youth Services Committee, seemed to Agree with Vargas at least in part. "I find it troubling that the same day we hear the police testify to an increase in gang members the mayor proposes a 20 million dollar cut in funding for youth services," said Fisher.
Youth gangs have been a part of New York City life as long as young people have been hanging out on the streets looking for something to do. Unlike adult crimes, most juvenile crime is committed in groups. And gangs offer a sense of identity, camaraderie, and financial payoff for their loyalty.
Notable New York City Gang MoviesWest Side Story (1961) The Cross and the Switchblade (1971) Mean Streets (1973) Lords of Flatbush (1974) Warriors (1979) Year of the Dragon (1985) New Jack City (1991) Gangs of New York (due out Fall 2001) |
The difference is that today's gangs are more widespread and more dangerous. It is estimated that 94 percent of medium and large-cities in the U.S. have gang activity. And with easy access to guns and the drugs market, gangs present a more substantial criminal force.
"These kids are not afraid of death or jail," said Robert DeSena who has worked with Brooklyn gangs since 1975. "Once a kid reaches that mindset, you've got a hard-core challenge."
Popular images of gang members range from Tony, who fell in love with a rival gang member's sister in West Side Story, to the violent gang-bangers who run the Los Angeles streets in the movie Boyz 'N the Hood. There are a wide range of perceptions, and misperceptions, of what youth gangs do and who is a part of them.
The New York Police Department defines a gang as a group that engages in criminal behavior and has a formal organizational structure, identifiable leadership, and territory. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that there are approximately 750,000 gang members in 28,000 gangs in the U.S., although no one really knows how many there are because accurate counts are nearly impossible to make. It is estimated that females make up approximately 20 percent of the national gang population. And while the average age of gang members is 17, nearly half of all gang members range in age from 18 to 25 year.
The New York Police Department recently reported that the known gang members in the city increased from 11,000 to 15,000 in the past year. However, many researchers doubt the validity of such numbers.
"I've stayed away from New York statistics for years," said Malcolm Klein from the Center for Research for Crime and Social Control, who has been studying gangs for over two decades. Prior to 1976, New York City's Youth Services Administration kept more dependable gang statistics in the city, but in the fiscal problems of the city, the administration was disbanded and tracking was handed over to police.
While the ethnic make-up of gangs, the streets they call "turf," and the names they give themselves have changed over time, the common factor is social class. Most gang members come from lower or working-class backgrounds, looking for a way to gain power in the social order.
Youth gangs have always been part of New York City life.
In 1807, members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in lower Manhattan complained to the city about the gangs of white, working class youths who harassed churchgoers, according to the book, "Gotham" by Edwin G. Burroughs and Mike Wallace. By the 1820's, the authors explain, young men "swaggered about the city after work and on Sundays, staking out territories, picking fights, defending the honor of their street and trade."
Until the mid-1900's, a majority of gangs in America were white, composed of boys from various European backgrounds.
The postwar gangs in the 1940's-1960's were primarily "turf" gangs who defended their areas against neighboring ethnic groups and new immigrants. In his recent book, "Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings," Eric Schneider presents Postwar gang life as a world of switchblades, zoot suits, slums, and bebop music. Young men took on brash names like Enchanters, Young Lords, Bishops, Greene Avenue Stompers, and the Latin Gents.
While youth gangs were often seen as "violent, short-lived, disorganized collections of misfits whose main purpose was thrill seeking and immediate gratification," says Schneider, they provided a social structure for working-class boys that provided a sense of identity, place, and masculinity.
By 1970, about four-fifths of gang members were either African-American or Hispanic. And the late 1980's and early 1990's saw the growth of West Coast gangs like the Crips and the Bloods, although most experts dispute the notion that the gangs actually migrated across the country. Instead they are local, non-centralized gangs that go by the same names and wear the same identifying colors.
Today in New York, the most prominent New York City gangs are Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings, Nietas, Five Prisoners, Silenciosos, Matatones, Rat Hunters, and Zulu Nation. They are groups that span ethnicity, race, and neighborhoods.
Two major changes in recent years have transformed the nature of youth gangs.
First, the influx of illegal drugs--first heroin, then cocaine, and then crack cocaine--changed street gangs from social groups to economic enterprises. Instead of fighting over the geography of turf, gangs began to wage war over corners used to sell drugs. The institution of the Rockefeller drug laws in 1973 and stiffer prison penalties for adults, had a bitterly ironic result: Drug dealers began to recruit minors to do much of their selling on the streets.
While gangs have become a significant part of the drug trade (a recent study that gangs are involved in about a quarter of the drug arrests), most researchers argue that youth gangs are not major drug traffickers.
"Drug gangs separate themselves from street gangs," said Klein. "Drugs requires tight corporate-like structure that youth do not have."
The second and perhaps the most devastating change is the availability of guns. It is estimated that gang related homicides increased nearly five times between 1987 and 1994.
"Violence has always been around, usually concentrated amongst the poor," said Geoffrey Canada, who runs the non-profit Rheedlin Center for Children and Families in Harlem. "The difference is that we never had so many guns in our inner cities. The nature of the violent act has changed from the fist, stick, and knife to the gun."
To visit the offices of the Gang Unit at Riker's Island is to visit a virtual museum of gang paraphernalia.
The walls are covered with photographs of gang member tattoos, red and blue bandanas from the Crips and the Bloods, and rosaries with black and yellow beads used by members of the Latin Kings. There is a display of home-made weaponry: knives made from pocket combs, razor blades fashioned from bottle caps, and even a small gun made from a toilet paper roll and rubber bands. And on the desk are computers used to enter the information into the city's gang database.
It is all part of the Corrections Department's "zero tolerance" policy on gangs and the city's attempt to enhance its gang intelligence.
At Riker's Island, gang members are stripped of any kind of identifying clothing or trinkets, forced to live in the same rooms with rival gangs, and any act of violence automatically adds time to their sentence. The Correction's Department says it is working. The incidence of violence in the city's jail is at the lowest in over a decade.
The School Safety and Prevention Service's division of the New York City operates under a similar notion. If any student exhibits gang behavior-wearing colors, using hand signals, graffiti, or any criminal activity-they are immediately removed from school.
Efforts to pass legislation to control gangs are generally more difficult. Most of the state legislation has to do with graffiti and tougher sentences for assault.
Last year in the city, Councilmembers John Sabini and Michel Abel introduced a bill that would give police the power to arrest suspected gang members loitering on street corners. The legislation drew criticism from civil rights groups and others who thought the law would lead to police abuse. Currently the proposed legislation is still sitting in committee.
While legislators and police often take the credit for drops in gang related crime, the ebb and flow of gangs are more susceptible to other less tangible factors.
There are several theories of why New York City has less of a problem with gangs than cities like Los Angeles and Chicago.
One is that today's gangs operate in an automobile culture that facilitates drive-by-shootings and drug dealing, and enables gangs to travel in greater anonymity. New York's mass transit system makes it more difficult for such activities. Another theory is that New York City has more opportunities for young people that fill the similar needs as a gang.
"In New York you can be part of a religious group, an arts club, a cultural group, you can even be part of a doo-wop group," said Councilmember Ken Fisher, who is Chair of the Youth Services Committee. "There are more opportunities for someone to belong to something."
There are also a host of non-profits that work with gang members on a one-to-one basis. The main challenge for these groups is to offer something that replaces the protection, identity, and money young people gain from being part of a gang.
Robert DeSena, a retired schoolteacher and founder of Council for Unity a group that works to bring rival gangs together says many of the gang members he meets are looking for a way out.
"Violence is exhausting and gangs realize they are unable to exterminate the opposition," said DeSena. DeSena works to build a network of protection and support that replaces gang life. The youth are responsible for running their own cultural events, support meetings, marketing the programs, soliciting members-using skills they had previously used on the street. The members are paired with alumni of the program who work as mentors, often hiring the youth to work at their companies.
"You get an ex-gang member who works for Price Waterhouse to take an interest in a kid," said DeSena, "and the kids will take notice."