NEW YORK -- As if New Yorkers do not have enough to fear. Now
it's fear itself.
The city has lived through the Son of Sam murders, Colin
Ferguson's killing spree on the Long Island railroad and the deaths
of innocent bystanders in the drug wars of the 1980s.
With a spate of slashings on subways, streets and schoolyards
and random shootings, many New Yorkers are afraid that gang
warfare, especially the brutal kind waged by the black gangs of Los
Angeles, is the newest crime wave.
New York joins other cities with similar fears: Milwaukee,
Cleveland and Seattle, among other cities, experienced gang
hysteria in the mid-1980s and early 1990s.
New York's latest incident involved the recent killing of a
50-year-old Latvian immigrant in Brooklyn by a member of a teen-age
gang calling itself the Bloods, after the notorious Los Angeles
group. The victim was robbed of $2 and shot, police said.
Last year, reacting to widespread rumors that the New York City
Bloods would be out randomly slashing people in a rite of
initiation, hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren stayed home on
Halloween.
But police officials, sociologists and gang experts say there is
no real gang presence in the city, nothing serious enough to keep a
child out of school or an adult from riding the subway. They say
that the recent crimes are those of gang wannabees, who are active
in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
J.D. LaRock, a spokesman for the Board of Education, said that
given all the news coverage of the perceived gang problem, "some
administrators felt that it might be growing within their
schools." But, he added, "Based on the evidence we have compiled,
that does not seem to be the case."
Perception Problems
So why the disproportionate reaction? Why are New Yorkers so
quick to embrace the notion of gangs despite statistics showing
that crime has dropped sharply in the '90s?
Part of the problem is sheer atmospherics. Teen-agers themselves
contribute to the perception of gangs. They call their cliques
"posses" and "crews" and wear clothes that reflect a prison
sensibility.
Another part of the problem is that New Yorkers have a fear of
random crime.
"The probability of being attacked randomly is very small,"
New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir said recently.
"Last year, 81 percent of the murders in the city were committed
by people who knew each other."
The Police Department has anti-gang intelligence officers and
suppression units operating in all five boroughs, the commissioner
said, adding that there were fewer than 3,000 gang members in the
city. The Latin Kings, a well-known gang, have been all but
immobilized, he said, and virtually all the members of the
Harlem-based Crips gang were arrested several months ago.
Several years ago, when urban gang unrest was at its height, the
National Institute of Justice studied the spread of groups outside
Los Angeles and Chicago and discovered that subsets extended only
about 60 miles from each city and died out quickly. The chances of
specific gangs leapfrogging to cities on the opposite coast is
unlikely.
Unorganized Crime
We in New York understand that the algorithm of this city
produces some very bizarre and dangerous people who have made it
into the pantheon of famous criminals," said Dr. N.G. Berrill, a
forensic psychologist at John J. College of Criminal Justice. "But
none of them have ever worked in concert. We haven't had to really
be concerned about the notion of kids organizing into larger gangs
whose initiation rites may include random acts of violence."
New Yorkers' fear, too, may be the result of disproportionate
media attention on crime at a time when it is at an all-time low,
said Malcolm Klein, a sociology professor who is the director of
the Social Science Research Institute of Southern California and
author of "The American Street Gang" (Oxford University Press,
1995).
If there has been any gang activity in the city, it originated
in prisons a few years ago. The New York City Bloods -- not related
to the Los Angeles group -- organized themselves as a result of the
racial tensions in prison, said Jeffrey Fagan, who directs Columbia
University's Center for Violence Research and Prevention. Outside
of prison, they continued to call themselves Bloods. Their numbers,
though, are negligible, the police say.
Thanks to gangster rap, the culture of the incarcerated from a
black perspective has spread throughout poor neighborhoods, shown
in the wearing of stocking caps and oversized pants or the carrying
of weapons like box cutters and razors.
But at the same time that Brooklyn's own Tupac Shakur and
Notorious B.I.G. became national icons for violence, the city's
crime rate -- and the nation's -- dropped. The crack epidemic, and
its concomitant shootings and deaths, also ebbed. The teen-agers
who grew up amid these very real dangers continue to arm
themselves.
"There's a vacuum in New York City with the shrinking of the
drug trade," Fagan said. "These frightened youths were raised
during the homicide epidemic when kids were shooting one another."
High Anxiety
Berrill, whose private practice treats the victims of violence
and criminals, said the reaction to the gang threat was a
conditioned response. "New Yorkers are no longer looking for the
mugger or the ambulatory killer," he said. "Now, they're looking
out for every kid who may have something to prove through some
deviant aggressive act. That's what makes people the most anxious
of all, when their normal routine is interrupted by new threats."
The reaction last Halloween recalled 1989, when a gang known as
the Decepticons terrorized teen-agers in the city. Though the
existence of the gang, which was named for menacing robots in a
television cartoon show, was never verified, the resulting hysteria
was real enough.
"The arrival of the Bloods and the Crips in New York City is
overplayed the same way the Decepticons were overplayed, the same
way the danger of comic books was overplayed and the same way that
the threat of gangster rap was overplayed," said the Rev. Michael
Eric Dyson, a Columbia University professor of African-American
studies and the author of "Race Rules" (Addison-Wesley, 1996),
which addresses the pathology of gangs.
"As long as young people feel there is no way to make money
legally, there will always be gangs. In the same sense, paranoia
about what these youths are up to will always be out of proportion
to reality."
February 15, 1998
The Fear Is Real Enough. The Gangs Are Another Story.
By LYNETTE HOLLOWAY
