Gangs
If some millionaire Bronco did not get killed at some club where folk were too busy flashing money and “bling” and indulging in drugs, drinking, and conspicuous consumption, while carrying guns, your headline about gangs would not have wasted the ink it has now wasted.
One tip-off to the shallow content of the article was that it trotted out the old “summer of violence” rhetoric, which was a term created by the media anyway.
I see the local “authorities” have again trotted numbers of “confirmed” gang members, and the article even repeated the lame criteria used to “confirm” the status of the members. If you have the time for even simple research, you’d see these “criteria”
originated with California authorities over 3 decades ago. When your reporters recite them it seems authoritative, but the criteria have more holes in them than Swiss cheese.
Your naive and inexperienced reporters recount that the last gang figures were released in 2003, and totalled 220 gangs with 14,000 members, but here is where your reporters again did not do any homework.
When the DPD gang unit floated those figures back in 2003, I and several others found that the figures the coppers cited stated that over 90% of the alleged gang members were Black or Brown.
Then we got the number for alleged Asian gang members.
Then we researched the US Census for Black, Brown and Asian youth in the prime gang ages [I think we used 14 to 26].
By comparing the cops silly assertions to the hard data of the Census for Denver, we found that the only way the figures could be true was if 2 of 3 of all Black males, 50+ percent of all Latino males, and 1 in 4 Asian males in the cited age brackets were gang members. That IS NOT TRUE and is probably statisically impossible. And to state the data in those terms demonstrates the RACISM implicit in the claim...
When we went to Judy Cisneros, Michael Hancock, Doug Linkhart, and Councilman Garcia with our findings and concern, NONE of them contested our findings, but neither would they look into the issue. Garcia essentially said he did NOT want to be perceived as being “soft” on gangs.
The only ones who paid less attention to us were the cops [FOR A WHILE]and the print media. Then, weeks later the cops lopped off several thousand names from the so-called gang list after our little research campaign. Neither daily, of course, found this worthy of any ink.
Reporters need to open their eyes [and their brains] before trotting out this hysteria-ridden “data.”
The person who crunched the figures for us in 2003 is a former gang member with tatoos. He also obtained a Ph. D. at UC Boulder. If you want a real “gang authority", contact him. He is Robert Duran who is now teaching at New Mexico State University at Las Cruces. [RobertDuran@mail.weber.edu]
Denver
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