Nearly gone are the gang days of
the 1980s and '90s, when the Bloods wore head-to-toe red, the Crips
wore blue and Latin Kings wore black and gold.
Another impetus: laws passed in several states making it easier for police to target gangs.
While gangs are showing their colors less, they have given
police another way to identify them — their use of Facebook, Twitter and
other social media sites.
"Today they declare themselves gang members on the Internet," O'Hare said.
Still, he said, their detection-avoiding efforts on the street have made police officials' jobs a little harder. Hartford officers now have to get up close to identify gang members, he said. On a recent day, officers stopped a group of youths in commonplace T-shirts and shorts breaking a loitering law and made them all sit down.
O'Hare, interested in gathering information on gangs, got several of them to pull up their sleeves and pull down their shirt collars, revealing telltale tattoos of the Los Solidos gang — theater masks with the words "laugh now cry later" and the letters TSO for The Solid Ones, the English translation of their group's name. Officers then let the youths go — but kept their names and suspected gang affiliations in the event of future encounters.
The reputed leader, Donald Raynor, was arrested last year. Raynor, 29, is now on trial in state court in Hartford on a murder charge and awaits trial in five other cases involving attempted murder charges.
Gangs from
coast to coast have toned down their use of colors and are even removing
or altering tattoos to avoid being easily identified by police and
witnesses, law enforcement officials say.
Today,
the most you might see is part of a red handkerchief hanging out of a
back pocket or a gold and black baseball cap, said Johnmichael O'Hare, a
Hartford police sergeant who monitors gangs.
"Many
of them don't wear colors. They tell us they're not in gangs," O'Hare
said. "They're trying to avoid detection from law enforcement."
Gang
members also don't want to stand out because they are committing more
white-collar-type crimes, such as credit card and identity thefts,
authorities say.
"If you want
to go into Macys or Neiman Marcus and use a fraudulently obtained
credit card and you have all these tattoos, it's more difficult," said
William Dunn, a Los Angeles police detective and author of the 2007 book
"The Gangs of Los Angeles."
In
Connecticut, officials can use racketeering laws once reserved for the
mob to go after gangs. In Los Angeles, court injunctions allow police to
enforce nighttime curfews and arrest people for hanging out in public
and wearing gang colors.
"So we don't see so much wearing of the colors. We don't see so much of the tattooing," Dunn said.
When
it comes to going to prison, gang members also don't want to be
identified because they'll be placed in more restrictive conditions for
security reasons, officials say.
Wearing
colors has long been a way for gang members to show solidarity, but the
FBI says gang members are indeed shying away from displaying
identifiers. Often the only time colors and other identifiers are now
displayed is at gang functions and funerals, according to the FBI's 2013
National Gang report.
"Today they declare themselves gang members on the Internet," O'Hare said.
Still, he said, their detection-avoiding efforts on the street have made police officials' jobs a little harder. Hartford officers now have to get up close to identify gang members, he said. On a recent day, officers stopped a group of youths in commonplace T-shirts and shorts breaking a loitering law and made them all sit down.
O'Hare, interested in gathering information on gangs, got several of them to pull up their sleeves and pull down their shirt collars, revealing telltale tattoos of the Los Solidos gang — theater masks with the words "laugh now cry later" and the letters TSO for The Solid Ones, the English translation of their group's name. Officers then let the youths go — but kept their names and suspected gang affiliations in the event of future encounters.
In
addition to well-established gangs like the Bloods and Latin Kings,
police are dealing with smaller, neighborhood-based street gangs that
can be just as violent and often wear no colors or tattoos at all, law
enforcement officials say. The neighborhood gangs usually are friends
who grew up together and claim several blocks as their territory, O'Hare
said.
One such neighborhood gang in Hartford, Money Green/Bedroc,
often wore the kind of athletic jerseys popular among kids nationwide,
according to a state grand jury report issued in December.The reputed leader, Donald Raynor, was arrested last year. Raynor, 29, is now on trial in state court in Hartford on a murder charge and awaits trial in five other cases involving attempted murder charges.
Police
say he led the particularly violent gang, which sold drugs and had "hit
squad" enforcers who were involved in shootings of rivals in 2007 and
2008. Raynor has pleaded not guilty in all the cases.
Suource: Yahoo News
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