Mayor’s Gang Prevention Task Force

The mayor’s gang prevention task force is a form of primary and secondary gang prevention that has been widely successful in reducing crime rates among at risk or high at-risk youth. The task force was created to prevent, intervene and suppresses at-risk youth and youth gang members. The gang prevention task force stemmed from the problems of increasing drug use, gang violence and other sorts of crime during the mid-1980s. As a response Project crackdown was launched as the city’s response to these developing problems. It was a combined effort from different city departments, the police and the community much like what the gang prevention task force is today. With these problems continuing into the 90s, the gang prevention task force was started in 1992 by former San Jose mayor Susan Hammer and is comprised of many parts of the community like the police and neighborhood organizations. The drive for a gang prevention program came from interest groups, according to Christensen and Hogen-Esch (2015), “when the individuals get together and organize themselves to attempt to influence the policies and programs of government by applying whatever political resources they have. With gangs being a community problem, these interest groups included the police, education and neighborhood organizations. The whole aim of this program is to give these kids something to do other than a life of crime. San Jose’s gang prevention task force has been so successful it is the model for other gang prevention services like GREAT/The Gang Resistance Education and Training which was started in Phoenix, Arizona. One form of gang prevention will not work by it self which is why we need a primary and secondary approach to gang prevention and intervention.

Primary or general prevention focuses more on social services and youth development programs. Secondary prevention involves addressing the needs of youth that are at high risk that cannot be satisfied with the services being offered on the primary level. These are high-risk youth can already be in a gang or possibly join one. According to Hennigan, K., Kolnick, K., Vindel, F., & Maxson, C. (2015) “anecdotal evidence suggests that youth who are most likely to join a gang may choose not to engage in available primary prevention programs and when high risk youth do engage their attendance is often not sustained.” One huge problem with youth crime is that it forces them to grow up at a very young age. At that point these kids are already heavily invested which makes it hard to bring them back into society. Secondary prevention involves knowing where to set up the gang prevention program in accordance to where gang members are or where they live. It also involves knowing the gang culture and their mannerisms. The 3rd step to secondary prevention is to approach these youth in person. Studies have shown that these programs fail when they fail to reach the high at-risk youth. A huge problem of enrolling these high-risk youth is that they don’t want to admit they are involved within these criminal organizations.

Identifying these youth comes through what is called Gang Risk of Entry Factors or GREF. According to Hennigan, K., Kolnick, K., Vindel, F., & Maxson, C. (2015) “The purpose of the assessment is to enable secondary gang prevention programs to concentrate their resources on those high-risk and hard to reach youth who are most likely to join gangs.” One of the problems they face is that no matter how hard they try some of these youth will still try to join the gang. These gang prevention programs focus on youth because people that become life long gang members tend to join in their youth. The general age ranges that cities and police departments across America target are in between elementary age to early college.

These high at-risk youth are identified through 8 risk factors and a youth self-reporting scale called a GREF assessment. This assessment was conducted in conjunction with probation officers in southern California. Data on youth was collected by meeting with parents and their youths, or referrals from the parents or the youths them selves with some meeting with their probation officer for personal interviews. These 8 factors According to Hennigan, K., Kolnick, K., Vindel, F., & Maxson, C. (2015) “are impulsive risk taking, guilt neutralization, anti-social tendencies, negative peer influences, friends delinquency, parental monitoring, family gang influence, the number of critical life events and a count of recent involvement in delinquency and substance abuse use in the past year.” To understand the efficacy of the GREF assessment youth were picked in southern California because the police departments there already have secondary preventive measures to gang prevention. The GREF assessment shows that the youth that are likely to join gangs are the ones that are hitting multiple risk factors.

Using the risk factor data, the GREF assessment was able to determine 4 levels of gang involvement. These 4 levels are no gang involvement, some gang involvement which could be just hanging out with gangs, former gang member and current gang members. Results showed that youths that hit 4 or more risk factors could’ve been enrolled into secondary program services. At risk youth that were under 4 within the GREF risk factor scale were found to be unable to attend prevention services. According to Hennigan, K., Kolnick, K., Vindel, F., & Maxson, C. (2015) “Of the 136 males who were found eligible for a program (with 4 or more risk factors), slightly more than half reported some participation in gang activities.” Taking part in secondary prevention programs depends how invested an individual is to the gang life. The GREF assessment goes onto show that the youths that are gang members have impulsive risk taking, guilt neutralization and anti-social tendencies as risk factors as the most prevalent ones. Other factors include family gang influence and peer influence. Just because an individual might have family members that are in a gang doesn’t mean they are in one. The GREF findings show that the assessment can be used to reach out to more gang or protentional gang members.

The San Jose Gang prevention task force does this through prevention, intervention and outreach of these at-risk youth. What they do when they intervene and do outreach is connect these at-risk youth to social services within the city or county. The whole aim is to get them to go to school and steer them away from anti-social and violent behavior which is a primary form of prevention. What can happen is that officers or community members will reach out to those at risk, or it can even be a gang member that is reaching out to the community which would be a form of secondary prevention. It is a way of creating opportunities for people that think they don’t have any. The target age for the task force is 6-24. What they are looking for is people that are exhibiting anti- social, violent behavior and gang activity. It can anyone that is in a gang, looking to join a gang or being at risk or joining a gang.

Their asset delivery system is primary and secondary prevention system that the city connects at risk youth to the resources they need. One of the ways this happens by is developing and carry out strategies that come from the city of San Jose like early childhood education initiatives that increase the proper development of youth. A huge chunk of how an adult turns out is how they are raised as a child. How an adult is, is a good indicator of how they were brought up. Another part of intervention and prevention is working with the schools these kids go to. This can happen in the form of an after-school program. Some of these youth don’t want even to be in school, which has caused the school to monitor their truancy rate and use forms of secondary prevention to stop it from happening. Its just the amount of youth that is ditching classes to go do things they shouldn’t even be doing. Another aspect is targeting youth that are known to be involved with gang activity which would be a form of secondary prevention. This could come in the form of increased patrol of specific areas these individuals are known to hang out at. There is then the user-friendly information and referral system which is basically a card with a bunch of numbers these at-risk youth can call to get help. This help can be counseling or just somewhere to hang out.

Apart of getting them the help comes from the very people that used to be in the program themselves or Their crisis response. This is a form of primary prevention. This comes in the form of training workshops within the communities these people live within. This could be at school, their church or other easy to reach facility. These workshops are former participants sharing their experiences and teaching other youth about gang awareness and how to access the community resources they need to get out of gang life. A huge part of the strategy to reducing overall gang violence is getting to these youth before it happens. Apart of their crisis response is if something does happen incidents can be reported to the SJPD at which point they can implement steps to resolve problems with the affected individual. It involves officers visiting the victim wherever they may be at. This include patrolling around the area the victim lives at.

The efforts of the gang task force have been a huge success. A study using data from 2006-2015 by the resource development associates shows that there have been reductions in gang involvement and crime where the gang task force has been operating. The resource development associates or RDA are a group of people that use federal funding to do research projects. To get this information RDA used data collected from the SJPD to pinpoint arrests to specific zip codes. They also used this data to tie in the amount of youth that taking part within the gang task force programs within a given zip code. They collected data on individuals that were either enrolled or in the process of enrolling. Data on probation about offenses committed and individual case information and arrest dates were collected as well. This data was tied in with data from the Santa Clara County Probation Department during the research period. In addition to collecting individual data RDA also collected data from California Healthy Kids or CHKS to get an overall view of crime within the city. It’s just a questionnaire that was passed around schools within the south bay about gang involvement. They tied in the answerers to the location of the school, to further tie that in with the individual data previously discussed.

RDA used the city-wide data and individual data in concurrence with 3 modes of analysis to show the reduction of crime rates within a given area. These 3 modes of analysis are reduction in crime by neighborhood, city wide gang identification and direct impact within the juvenile justice system. This study found that there was an overall reduction for youth crime within San Jose. Data collected shows that arrest rates dropped in areas the task force was operating. The data also shows that for every 1% of youth that is served within a given area youth arrests rates decreased at a rate of .57. Data tied in with task force program enrollment coincides with a decline in arrests rates within a given area. The 1% that is served also yields .11 reduction within the violent crime rate among youths.

To further analyze the direct impact on the juvenile justice system data from those that were enrolled within the task force programs and those that have already had contact with the system were again analyzed against zip code. RDA looked at things like hours of services provided, date of enrollment along with client demographic information to measure changes within the justice system participation before and after enrollment of the task force programs. The people that took part within this study are mostly male and Hispanic with an average age of 17 years old. Data taken from these studies showed that enrollment within the gang task force programs correlates with decreased referrals or enrollment with the Santa Clara County Probation Department within the given zip code of gang task force operation.

Long beach, California had a very similar approach to San Jose’s gang prevention task force. They created their gang prevention because cultural and racial clashes between people living there and moving into the area. This resulted in people forming gangs along racial lines to protect themselves. Long beach’s gang prevention program was called Task Force on Gangs. Long beach to was involved in both primary and secondary preventive measures. The city of long beach brought in social programs to help steer their youth away into a different direction. The Long beach model included anti-gang instruction, program consultant/ coordinator, recreation programming, employment training and development and collaboration between school districts and park. The did more then one thing other then classroom instruction which is why they were so successful. The anti-gang instruction was in class instruction about the dangers of gang life. The program consultant is a secondary preventive measure that actually tracked at risk youth.

GREAT was started around the same time San Jose’s gang prevention program was started. Much like the gang prevention task force within San Jose, their goal is to shift at risk youth away from a life of crime. GREAT was more of a preventive step to stopping gangs and violent crime. It involved social services and primally community interaction within the youth’s schools. All they did was educate at risk youth about the dangers of joining or living the life of a gang member. They did many of the primary preventive measures but didn’t get the same results because they just focused on one aspect of gang prevention. They only focused on the primary prevention method which is why they failed. This program had a positive relation to reducing game membership within Phoenix, Arizona but wasn’t as successful in reducing violent crime among existing gang members. According to Pyrooz “Albuquerque and Philadelphia drove the 4-year aggregate findings on gang membership, but the former site saw numerous program effects on the mediating mechanisms, whereas the latter site saw next to none.”

Just because the people of GREAT didn’t have as much success as San Jose’s gang prevention task force doesn’t mean it didn’t do great things for the people of Phoenix, Arizona. The whole idea behind the San Jose gang task force and GREAT is that if you spend time away from the gangs then that’s less time you can get in trouble. With less time people spending with gangs they end up shrinking in size which turns out to less crime within the streets. A study of GREAT shows that these youth were responsible for 36% of the violent crimes across 9 cities. According to Pyrooz “not all criminals are gang members and not all gang members are criminals” This is the very reason why not one approach will work by it self and needs a multi-faceted approach to effectively deal with gangs and crime. It would be a difficult undertaking to figure out if the people committing crimes were apart of gang or not because they would have to admit to it or have a tattoo that identifies to the gang which not everyone will have.

The results from the San Jose gang task force, Long beach and Arizona’s GREAT program prove that proper gang prevention takes a primary and secondary approach to gang prevention. With San Jose taking multiple approaches and becoming wildly successful and Arizona only take primary preventive measures and not having as much as much success only shows that the only answer to this is one that is flexible. With our youth being our future, it is important to get them while they are young so they don’t waste their lives away committing illegal acts that can send them away for years or decades at a time. There is no one solution but just trying one thing is why Arizona had the results they did.