Five myths about street gangs

“West Side Story,” which premiered in 1961, directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, wasn’t the first gang movie, but it was the first big hit and the source of so many gang myths. Steven Spielberg’s new screen version puts gangs back in the spotlight — along with commonly held misperceptions about them. Here are five.

Myth No. 1

Gangs, guns and drugs go together.

It’s the criminal triumvirate. An anti-gang educational video produced by the state of New Jersey uses “Gangs, Guns & Drugs” as its title. It’s convenient shorthand in news headlines, too. Consider one on a local Georgia news site: “Gangs, guns and drugs: College Park, South Fulton police target violent crimes in their communities.” And “Drugs, gangs and guns” was the slight variant for a headline in the Hartford Courant. Last year, Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown said of recent violence in the city, “This cycle is fueled by street gangs, guns and drugs.”

While these things do intersect in unfortunate and tragic ways, they’re not the norm. There’s actually more talk of violence in gangs than actual violence, according to David Pyrooz, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Most of the research on gangs comes from interviews with gang members; some were described as “imaginative” when answering researchers’ questions about violence and guns. That is, they made things up. The proposition that gang life consists of planning violence and then committing it is mistaken. Gang life is pretty boring, according to the people who study it. And when they do commit crimes, gang members aren’t particularly original — they often get their ideas from movies, according to research by Christopher J. Przemieniecki published in the Journal of Gang Research.

While some street-gang members may engage in drug sales, groups at the street level don’t have the structure or the capital to run drugs effectively.

Myth No. 2

Gangs attract only wayward youth.

Gangs and young people seem to go together. Federal agencies almost exclusively target the young in their gang prevention efforts. The D.C. police advise parents to “Make sure your children are involved in healthy, supervised activities, especially after school” and “Find out where your children go in their free time” as gang prevention strategies.

But gangs aren’t limited to youth. A good number of members join when they’re adults. Approximately 401,000 people between the ages of 5 and 17 join gangs every year, yet there are about 1.4 million gang members in the United States, according to the FBI. Those could be members who joined as juveniles, but the annual turnover rate is about 36 percent; adults who were lured into the alleged protection and camaraderie of a gang as kids don’t account for the entire gang population.

Not everyone agrees on what constitutes a street gang, but expansive definitions may also account for older members. For example, there are persistent reports that distinct gangs of deputies operate within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, where the minimum age to apply for employment is 19½. Moreover, many members of alt-right gangs join as adults; the Proud Boys are a gang, even though law enforcement doesn’t recognize them as such.

Myth No. 3

Gruesome initiations are required.

Initiation techniques and their dangers are popular listicle fodder: “9 of the most insane gang initiation rituals,” “World’s 7 deadliest gang initiations” and “Top 10 Brutal Methods of Gang Initiation” are just a few examples. As an article on Ranker puts it: “These young recruits are willing to do whatever it takes to show their loyalty, which often means subjecting themselves to injury and humiliation. These gang rituals are frequently just as horrifying as the transgressions they commit against their rivals.”

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Some initiation rituals do exist — such as getting “jumped in,” or subjected to a beating — but there are gang members and gang affiliates who never undergo them. Gangs are much more fluid than most people realize, according to Christian Bolden, an associate professor of criminology and justice at Loyola University in New Orleans. Membership is based on a number of factors, only one of which is a ritual. For example, reputation, attendance at an important event, respect from a few leading members or even mere legacy (having a family member who’s already joined) can qualify would-be members.

Researchers have debunked many rumors about gang initiation rites — the gang member who drives without headlights to induce another motorist to flicker his lights and get killed; grabs women in Walmart parking lots; asks for directions and shoots the good Samaritan who helps. They’re urban legends.

Myth No. 4

Members can't leave their gangs.

Popular culture has embraced this myth particularly closely. The “blood in, blood out” stereotype that members leave only upon pain of violence, maybe even death, persists.

In 2005, then-Rep. J. Randy Forbes (R-Va.) introduced the Gang Deterrence and Community Protection Act, also known as the Gangbusters Bill. If the legislation had passed in the Senate, it would have tried gang members as adults, among other policies. Stumping for the bill, Forbes said during an interview with NPR, “Many of these individuals are signing their death warrants when they join a gang because the only way out of the gang, oftentimes for them, is death.”

The truth is that people leave gangs all the time without consequence. And the reasons aren’t that dramatic. In a survey of former gang members by Pyrooz, the preeminent gang scholar, 91 percent said they had “just left their gang and did not have to engage in any exceptional means to quit.” Many times, they simply outgrow the drama and artifice of gang life. Some move on to the military or even, sadly, prison (where they don’t necessarily remain in gangs; according to Pyrooz, there’s essentially no difference between prison gangs and street gangs, outside of location).

Gangs don’t always pull people back in.

Myth No. 5

Gang members are all people of color.

Hollywood exerts a powerful influence on how people perceive gangs, and, according to a 2016 Vox article, 62 percent of the actors portraying gang members are Black, despite the fact that less than 40 percent of real-life gangsters are. Even the 2005 Encyclopedia of African American Society says, “Reflecting a changing inner-city population, most gang members are minorities.”

While they are not a majority, the largest racial group among gang members is White; about 40 percent of gang members are non-Latino White, with the remainder divided among Black and Latino and other minorities, according to a report in the Guardian citing Babe Howell, a criminal law professor at the City University of New York.

Understanding the racial composition of gangs gets complicated. There are two data sets: numbers generated by law enforcement and those generated by self-report, to researchers. Police have been known to severely undercount White gang members, driven by systemic racial bias that ends up privileging White people, as their groups may not be labeled as gangs.

Self-report is likely to be more accurate. When researchers surveyed students, 58 percent of White respondents reported some gang involvement in their past, while only 20 percent of Latino respondents and 23 percent of Black respondents said the same. It’s possible that some overstated their experience, but there’s no evidence that one racial group exaggerates more than others. So if the numbers are inflated, they’re inflated across the board, underscoring the tale-telling that underpins so much of gang lore.

Twitter: @ChandraBozelko

Five myths is a weekly feature challenging everything you think you know. You can check out previous myths, read more from Outlook or follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.

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