Gangs in the United States
Approximately 1.4 million people in the United States were part of gangs as of 2011, and more than 33,000 gangs were active in the country. These include national street gangs, local street gangs, prison gangs, outlaw motorcycle clubs, and ethnic and organized crime gangs.
Many American gangs began, and still exist, in urban areas. In many cases, national street gangs originated in major cities such as New York City and Chicago but they later grew in other American cities like Albuquerque and Washington, D.C.
Street gangs can be found all across the United States, with their memberships differing in terms of size, racial and ethnic makeup, and organizational structure. The most significant danger is posed by prominent national street gangs, as they engage in the smuggling, production, transportation, and distribution of substantial amounts of illegal drugs, often resorting to extreme violence. In an attempt to earn recognition from their adversaries, local street gangs frequently emulate the larger and more influential national gangs. Over time, loosely structured street gangs pose a growing threat by expanding their involvement in drug trafficking, especially in the smuggling of drugs into the United States, and establishing connections with international criminal groups and drug trafficking organizations.
History
The earliest American street gangs emerged at the end of the American Revolutionary War in the early 1780s. However, these early street gangs had questionable legitimacy, and more serious gangs did not form until at least the early 1800s. The earliest of these serious gangs formed in northeastern American cities, particularly in New York.Early street gangs in the Northeast: 1780–1870
In the 18th century, slaves living in New York formed two paramilitary groups which could be seen as "gang" like, Smith's Fly Boys and the Long Bridge Boys. Notable examples of slave rebellions in colonial New York include the New York Slave Revolt of 1712 and the New York Conspiracy of 1741. In the early 1800s, three main immigrant groups entered the Northeast US via New York: English, Irish, and German. On the Lower East Side of New York, these immigrant groups formed into gangs in an area known as the Five Points. Of these were the Smiths's Vly gang, the Bowery Boys, who recruited from the native white population and were typically anti-Irish and anti-migrant, and the Broadway Boys, which were predominantly Irish immigrants. These early gangs were not exclusively engaged in criminal activity; their members often were employed as common laborers.After the early 1830s, however, gangs began to focus on criminal activity, one example being the Forty Thieves, which began in the late 1820s in the Five Points area. Other criminal gangs of the pre-Civil War era included the Dead Rabbits and the Five Points Gang. The Five Points Gang in particular became influential in recruiting membership to gangs and toward establishing gang relationships with politicians. The New York City draft riots were said to have been ignited by young Irish street gangs. Herbert Asbury depicted some of these groups in his history of Irish and American gangs in Manhattan, and his work was later used by Martin Scorsese as the basis for the motion picture Gangs of New York. However, these early gangs reached their peak in the years immediately prior to the Civil War, and gang activity largely dissipated by the 1870s.
Reemergence and growth: 1870–1940
During the late 1800s, gangs reemerged as a criminal force in the Northeast, and they emerged as new criminal enterprises in the American West and the Midwest. In New York after the Civil War, the most powerful gang to emerge was the Whyos, which included reconstituted members of previous Five Points area gangs. Another late 19th century New York gang was the Jewish Eastman Gang. Meanwhile, Chinese immigrants formed tongs, which were highly structured gangs involved in gambling and drug trafficking. These tongs were matched in strength by an emerging Italian organized crime network that became the American Mafia.Gangs emerged in the Midwest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Chicago. European immigrant groups such as Poles and Italians formed the core membership of Chicago gangs, while only 1% of gangs were black. However, gangs in the 19th century were often multiethnic, as neighborhoods did not display the social polarization that has segregated different ethnic groups in the postmodern city. The gangs of Chicago in the late 19th century were particularly powerful in the areas around the Chicago Stockyards, and engaged in robbery and violent crime.
As in New York and northeastern gangs, it was during the early period of Chicago gang growth that gangs connected themselves politically to local leaders. Such gangs as Ragen's Colts became influential in Chicago politics. By the 1920s, several gangs had grown to the point of becoming organized crime groups in Chicago, and gang warfare was common among them. Street gang activity continued alongside these larger criminal organizations; contemporary estimates suggested some 25,000 gang members and 1,300 gangs in Chicago during the late 1920s. By the early 1930s, however, these immigrant-dominated gangs largely died out.
Just as with the Midwest, the American West experienced gang growth during the late 19th century and early 20th century. The earliest Los Angeles gangs were formed in the 1920s, and they were known as "boy gangs"; they were modelled on earlier social groups of Latino and Chicano men known as palomilla. Frequently these groups were composed of Mexican immigrants upon coming to the United States. The youth of this culture became known as the cholo subculture, and several gangs formed from among them.
By the 1920s, cholo subculture and palomilla had merged to form the basis of the Los Angeles gangs. The gangs proliferated in the 1930s and 1940s as adolescents came together in conflict against the police and other authorities. Territoriality was essential to the Los Angeles gangs, and graffiti became an important part of marking territory controlled by gangs. Neighborhood identity and gang identity merged in ways unlike other parts of the United States; in addition, the gangs of the West were different in their ethnic makeup. Finally, they were unique in that, unlike gangs in the Midwest and the Northeast, they did not grow only out of social problems such as poverty, but also out of ethnic segregation and alienation.
Postwar growth and change: 1940–1990
Gangs reemerged in the Northeast in cities such as New York during the second half of the twentieth century with rising Latino immigration, especially from Puerto Rico in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as a rising population of Black Americans migrating from the American South. Although New York built large, urban high-rise public housing in the 1940s, much of the public housing was built in low-rise form and in outer areas during the 1950s and 1960s; the effect of this was to mitigate much of the gang-on-gang violence that other American cities suffered in that period. During this time, there was also a lot of urban renewal headed by Robert Moses on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where low-income neighborhoods, many of which were home to lower-class Puerto Rican, black, and white Americans, were being demolished to create more middle and upper class housing. However, this only escalated gang conflict, as New York saw gangs nonetheless form among the youth of the Latino, black, and white population as neighborhoods became smaller and populations were pushed closer together, resulting in turf wars for the small amount of land they had left. Various pre-existing European gangs united under a "white" identity to combat the onset of Puerto Rican and black migration. In 1957 there were 11 murders perpetrated by gangs in Manhattan. By the end of the 1960s, two-thirds of gangs in the city were black or Puerto Rican. Youth gang conflict was depicted in popular media, such as West Side Story in 1957, which brought more attention to the issue.The re-emergence of Midwestern gangs also occurred after the rapid increase in the black population of northern American cities. During the 1910s and 1920s, the Great Migration of more than one million black people to these cities created large, extremely poor populations, creating an atmosphere conducive to gang formation. The significant and rapid migration created a large population of delinquent black youth, forming a pool of potential gang members, while black youth athletic groups fueled rivalries that also encouraged gang formation. A final factor encouraging gang formation was the Chicago race riot of 1919, in which gangs of white youth terrorized the black community, and in response black youth formed groups for self-protection.
However, the actual formation of Midwestern black gangs only began after World War II, concomitantly with the Second Great Migration. It was in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s that black gangs such as the Devil's Disciples, the Black P-Stones and the Vice Lords were formed. By the late 1960s, the construction of public housing in Chicago allowed gangs to consolidate their power in black neighborhoods, and the Vice Lords, P-Stones, and Gangster Disciples controlled the drug trade of the area. These and others emerged as "super gangs" with more than 1,000 members each by the 1970s.
During and after the 1940s, gangs in the American West expanded dramatically as a result of three factors: expanding immigration from Mexico and the resulting xenophobia, the Sleepy Lagoon murder, and the Zoot Suit Riots. The two latter events served to unify the Mexican immigrant population and turned many youth into gang members, thus creating the cholo subculture. It was also from the 1940s to the 1960s that black gangs emerged as a criminal force in Los Angeles, largely as a result of social exclusion and segregation. Racial anti-black violence on the part of white youths directly contributed to black youths forming self-protection societies that transformed into black gangs by the late 1960s.
As the war on poverty began to shift into the war on crime, the idealism of the social movements of the 1960s gave way to ideas of "revolutionary suicide" as police violence against Black Panthers and other radicals began to take its toll. Influential leaders of the black community had been killed, including Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Hampton. Author and social activist bell hooks wrote, "After the slaughter of radical black men, the emotional devastation of soul murder and actual murder, many black people became cynical about freedom". This "nihilism", as Cornel West put it, spread after the 1960s.
Black gangs of Los Angeles began forming into territorial-based groups by the early 1970s, and two federations of black gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, emerged during that period. The practice of allying local street gangs together into federated alliances began during the 1960s and expanded rapidly across the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Out of the prison system of Illinois came two gang alliances by the late 1970s, the Folk Nation and the People Nation. These two alliances included a variety of white, black, and Hispanic gangs and claimed territory in and around Chicago and other Midwestern cities. Another of these federated alliances were the Latin Kings, originally a Chicago-based Latino gang. In the case of the West, nearly every major city in California reported gang activity by the mid-1970s, and often it was related to gangs affiliating themselves with the Bloods or Crips.