Atlanta Area DA: We Need to Do Something about Gangs

Criminal street gangs are responsible for an average of 48 percent of violent crime in most jurisdictions, yet the mainstream media gives almost no attention to the issue.

Even a cursory examination of American gang crime undeniably establishes that our country is in a state of crisis. In 2011, the federal government, in statistics that are widely regarded as “lowballed” and plagued by underreporting, estimated the number of gang members in the nation at 1.4 million. This represented a rise in 400,000 gang members from just two years prior. Sounding even greater alarms, academic studies place youth gang membership at triple the federal calculations.

This monstrous population of gang members is hauntingly matched by gangs dominating the very crimes Americans fear most. Federal reports determine that criminal street gangs are responsible for an average of 48 percent of violent crime in a majority of jurisdictions and up to 90 percent in others. In terms of drugs, United States government assessments conclude that gangs are America’s prevailing street-level distributor of illegal narcotics. Another federally-funded study revealed that an estimated 85 percent of sex trafficking was gang-related.

Can it be any wonder, then, that, in 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimated the number of murders in the United States rose 8.6 percent from 2015, and 16.1 percent from 2012?

Commensurate with the pervasive ascendancy of gang-motivated crime is another sobering reality: the lack of political and media attention that gang criminality receives. Federally, there is no specifically tailored gang prosecution law on the books. Many state attorneys general do not prosecute gangs or gang crime. And of all high-profile congressional hearings political factions demand, no one appears to contemplate an investigation into whose failings are responsible for the explosion of gang membership and skyrocketing levels of gang crime.