Frisking Tactic Yields to a Focus on Youth Gangs in New York

[Julius Skrrvin]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/n...yields-to-a-focus-on-youth-gangs.html?hp&_r=0

Not far away, Sgt. George Tavares circled the neighborhood in an unmarked police car, and later, officers stood sentry on street corners, prepared for violence by a local gang, Addicted to Cash, known on the streets as A.T.C. “Our intelligence suggests there could be a retaliation,” Sergeant Tavares said.

The show of police force in Brownsville reflects a broad shift in the New York Police Department’s strategy for combating gun violence. The stop-and-frisk tactic, once the linchpin of the police’s efforts to get guns off the streets, is in a steep decline; it has been rejected by the City Council, a federal judge and, most recently, the Democratic voters who supported the mayoral candidacy of Bill de Blasio, an outspoken critic of the tactic.

In its place, the department has focused on those responsible for much of the city’s violent crime: youth gangs, known as crews or sets. And while the new strategy has raised some objections, including privacy concerns, it has also garnered support from the stop-and-frisk tactic’s greatest critics.

As crime in New York continues to decline, violence by youth gangs has grown more pronounced: 30 percent of all shootings in recent years were related to crews, the department found.

Compared with gangs like the Bloods or the Crips, crews are more informal groups of teenagers and young men who are organized geographically, around a housing project, a block or a single building. Members are rarely involved in criminal enterprises beyond robberies or marijuana dealing, and there is frequently no initiation. Their conflicts, the police said, are mostly based on rivalries over reputation and turf.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly says the effort, called Operation Crew Cut, has helped drive murders down to new lows over the last year. Citywide, the police recorded 774 shootings through Sept. 8, down from 1,029 over the same period last year. In one of the most violent precincts, the 75th Precinct in East New York, shootings so far this year are down 30 percent.

“If I had to point to one reason why the murders and the shootings are down, it is this program,” Mr. Kelly said. “And I can tell you that there is a lot of positive feedback from cops.”

The strategy seeks to exploit the online postings of suspected members and their digital connections to build criminal conspiracy cases against whole groups that might otherwise take years of painstaking undercover work to penetrate. Facebook, officers like to say now, is the most reliable informer.

Operation Crew Cut melds intelligence gathered by officers on the street with online postings, allowing the department to track emerging conflicts in a neighborhood before they erupt into violence and, when shootings do occur, to build conspiracy cases against those responsible. But the scrutiny online has raised concern that idle chatter by teenagers might be misinterpreted by the police.

“Once there was a fight in the classroom, it was just you and that person who had a fight; now on social media, it’s 500,000 people looking at this fight,” said Erica Ford, the founder of Life Camp, a nonprofit organization in Jamaica, Queens, that works to defuse conflicts among teenagers. “Why are you creating a unit to incriminate and criminalize what they’re doing and lock them up?”

The police and prosecutors in New York have made no secret of their efforts, splashing arrays of arrest photos after big roundups in Brownsville and Bushwick in Brooklyn, and in East Harlem.

Other cities, like Chicago, have sought to create dialogues with gangs, intervening in disputes and brokering cease-fires. Los Angeles has long made a practice of obtaining court orders to prohibit gang members from appearing together in public, drawing criticism from civil liberties advocates who say that it criminalizes ordinary behavior. More recently, the police there have been working with former members to tamp down conflicts.

 

[Julius Skrrvin]

But the approach in New York has been squarely on enforcement; about 500 officers are involved in the department’s anticrew and antigang efforts. That includes a gang division that is doubling in size, to 300 officers, and about 75 officers in precincts across the city whose primary responsibility is to track and pursue crews. Many of them were veteran narcotics officers who were reassigned last year. Others work in the Community Affairs Bureau, which houses the department’s social media unit.
Several months ago, Mr. Kelly joked at a news conference that he would like to be Facebook friends with all the city’s criminal crews. The reality is not that far removed: much of the strategy’s success has been pinned to the police’s ability to comb through social media.

Officers follow crew members on Twitter and Instagram, or friend them on Facebook, pretending to be young women to get around privacy settings that limit what can be seen. They listen to the lyrical taunts of local rap artists, some affiliated with crews, and watch YouTube for clues to past trouble and future conflicts. Party announcements posted to social media draw particular attention: officers scour the invitation lists, some of which explicitly include members of opposing crews, beseeching them to “leave the beef at home,” said Assistant Commissioner Kevin O’Connor, who heads a police unit focused on social media and youth gangs.

The strategy is not the only way the department uses social media to bolster cases, but it has proved particularly effective despite being widely publicized, officials said, for the simple reason that an online persona is a necessary component of social life for the young crew members.

Veteran officers keep lists of teenagers believed to be affiliated with crews — 178 in Brownsville alone, by last count. On the street, the officers might pick them up for truancy or issue summonses for biking on the sidewalk, to reinforce the notion that the police are watching.

“These are not hardened criminals,” said Deputy Chief Michael Harrington, who oversees the program. “You lock one kid up, he’s going to tell you about everybody.”

At Brooklyn’s Finest Barbershop in Brownsville one day late last month, two young men recently indicted on felony conspiracy charges in a takedown of the Hoodstarz and the Wave Gang crews said the new approach by officers amounted to a virtual stop-and-frisk effort. “It’s just because we grew up in a certain place,” one of the men, Cuame Nelson, said. “If you was born on this block, you would have been Hoodstarz. Whatever block you’re from, that’s just what you are. And because of that, we have no privacy.”

Mr. Nelson, 21, who raps under the name Murda Malo and belonged to the Hoodstarz, a crew the police said was in a violent conflict with the Wave Gang, said he had received friend requests on Facebook from accounts he believed belonged to police officers. “I just could tell,” he said. “I don’t know you. You don’t know me. You’re having a weird picture of some weirdo on a page you made yesterday with no friends except for my friends — but we don’t know you?”

So far, Operation Crew Cut has engendered mostly praise, even from those most critical of the department’s stop-and-frisk tactic, including Mr. de Blasio and two city councilmen, Brad Lander and Jumaane D. Williams, who sponsored two new laws expanding independent police oversight. “I hope the next mayor and the next police commissioner will do more of these kinds of programs,” Councilman Lander said.

For years, crews did not receive the type of police attention given to more established gangs, and the police did not include them in their database of gang members.

For the Police Department, things began to change with the 2006 arrest of 15-year-old Desean Hinkson for numerous gunpoint robberies. His online activities piqued the interest of the police: on his page on Sconex, the now-defunct social media site aimed at high school students, he openly listed his affiliation with the Get Money Boys in Central Harlem and named 40 of its members.

Around the same time, officers began noticing three-letter strings — T.M.G. or A.I.O. — on buildings or etched into classroom desks. Each of the cryptic tags seemed to demarcate boundaries, each representing a crew: True Money Gang for T.M.G., or Air It Out for A.I.O.

 

[Julius Skrrvin]

Investigators now count 320 criminal crews, though their names and rosters are constantly shifting. Larger ones often include subsets divided by age. Because some claim allegiance to the Bloods or Crips, newer alliances have also formed, as hyperlocal crews find themselves mixing at Rikers Island.
Some pointedly avoid walking the streets in rival territory, taking buses or cabs to stay away from trouble, officers said. Carl Swift, 22, a former teenage crew member from Harlem’s Lincoln Houses, testified in court that merely seeing rival crew members in his area led him to suspect they were armed. “Because we have problems with their block, so why would they be on our block?” he said, describing events just before a shooting.

For the police, one of the goals of Operation Crew Cut is preventing the deaths of children like Antiq Hennis, the 16-month-old boy shot to death in Brownsville on Sept. 1 as he was being pushed in a stroller by his father. That killing was perhaps the most extreme example of how this back-and-forth violence — in this case, between groups of men from the north side of Livonia Avenue versus those from the south, the police said — can ensnare innocent bystanders. A 23-year-old crew member has been accused of aiming at the child’s father, a rival from the neighborhood, the police said.

The death a year ago of Ronald Wallace, known as Ron G, came during an escalating feud between two Brownsville crews, A.T.C. and the Bully gang, that had once been allied but split over a girl, the police said. Several young women were slashed; at least five young men were shot.

Police officials said the boy was “hanging out with A.T.C. members” on the night he was killed. Ronald’s mother, Tiffany Orr, described her son as a kind and popular boy who did well in school and spent all his free time playing basketball. “Everyone knows Ronald wasn’t in any gang,” she said.

As officers patrolled the streets on the anniversary of Ronald’s death, no episodes of violence were reported, according to the commander of Brownsville’s 73rd Precinct, Deputy Inspector Joseph Gulotta. “All was quiet,” he said.