More violence in Long Island – and a conference on how to stop it

Criminal justice experts are getting together to discuss options for preventing youth violence and gangs next month at Hofstra in Long Island. I’ll be speaking along with keynote Alfonso Wyatt of the Fund for the City of New York, Jeffrey Butts of John Jay, and prosecutors from around the region about who the gangs are, where the violence comes from, and what to do about it.

The timing is good: Hempstead High School, one of the main settings of Gangs in Garden City, has been dealing with more violence this week. As one student put it: “Hempstead is one little town, but everyone is divided.”

The conference is Tuesday, April 27, 2010, 8:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. in Hofstra’s Student Center.

Policing the Diverse Suburbs

Hofstra University has been hosting a conference this week on the “challenging and emergent phenomenon of suburban diversity,” which finishes up today. The conference highlights a growing body of research on suburbs that are confronting sweeping changes to their schools, neighborhoods and population dynamics as minority communities expand. On Thursday, I discussed how police are dealing with the changes in a panel that included the Nassau County police commissioner, Lawrence Mulvey. The panelists agreed that immigration crackdowns – at least the way they are being carried out in programs such as Operation Community Shield – have become part of the problem, alienating the communities that police need to work with to combat crime.

Also interesting was a discussion about the intersection of hate crimes – and the divisions between ethnic groups that they highlight and exacerbate – and other crime on Long Island. As I argue in Gangs in Garden City, the recent pattern of hate-motivated crimes against Hispanics should not be discussed in isolation from other crime problems on the island, including the reasons that so many minority youth have been attracted to the protection and sense of pride and identity offered by street gangs.

Policing styles are quite different in the two counties that make up the island. In Suffolk County, where there has been a spike in violent crime over the past year, police have worked closely with immigration agents, have been criticized for ignoring hate crime complaints and only recently started a gang taskforce to address a rising gang presence there. In Nassau, police in specialized units at both the local and county level have been focused on gangs for several years. They have been highly critical of Operation Community Shield. They have also partnered with schools and other local institutions to look for solutions beyond arrests and prisons, and in some cases have called for more education and afterschool program funding.

This broader view of the issue seems to be paying off: crime in Nassau is down by 10 percent since last year, compared to a 9.5 percent increase in Suffolk. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to hear from any Suffolk representatives on Thursday, and I should note that Nassau still isn’t crime free.

Solutions to Segregation in Long Island

A new study out last week offers some interesting ideas about how to deal with school segregation in Long Island and its associated problems.

In Gangs in Garden City, I wrote about how the patchwork of small, highly segregated school districts in Long Island was exacerbating the gang problem. Although Nassau and Suffolk Counties have some of the best schools in the country, they are also the home of several troubled districts with high concentrations of minorities living in poverty, where teachers and administrators have struggled for years to lift dismal graduation rates and test scores in overcrowded school buildings, which in some cases are plagued with asbestos, rodents and mold. These are the schools where many immigrant youth have landed over the past decade. They are also the places where the gangs have thrived.

The study compares five school districts in Long Island, and the disparities the researchers found are often extreme. The study argues that the “ceiling” of achievement in the struggling, high poverty districts is well below the achievement “floor” for the high-achieving districts, which are mostly white and wealthy. But the lead reseracher, in an op-ed in Newsday, suggests some interesting solutions, from creating inter-district magnet schools to the more radical option of consolidating school districts. Find the full study here and a Newsday op-ed by Amy Stuart Wells, the lead researcher, here.

Faster Times Review

The Faster Times, a new website run by a group of former print journalists, posted a review of Gangs today. The reviewer, Meaghan Winter, begins the review by describing reactions to the cover as she read it in a cafe and on the subway:

“Smartly dressed white women eyed the outfacing spine and asked me what I was reading. When I showed them the cover, they both gasped, both insisting that there are no gangs in Garden City. And there aren’t. Garland, and presumably Nation Books’ marketing team, observes that most Americans consider gangs a problem for somebody else—somebody poorer and darker and maybe from that town, definitely from that city, over there. By the end of Garland’s book, however, gangs are an American problem.”

She concludes: “Reading Gangs In Garden City should be required of anybody who thinks his mind is made up, anybody who considers himself a Long Islander, a New Yorker, an American, because it’s not often we’re offered the chance to learn so much about our neighbors.”

If you click on the review (which has some criticisms, too), be sure to surf around the website – looks like an interesting project.

American Prospect

An excerpt of the book appears in this month’s issue of The American Prospect. The article includes the story of Jessica, an American citizen who was raised by a family of Mara Salvatrucha members. To read it online, click here.

More Violence in Long Island

Another Hispanic immigrant was attacked in Long Island this weekend, allegedly by a group of white youth. In the book I wrote about a similar attack against Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant who was stabbed to death near the spot where the latest victim was attacked. Seven white teenagers were charged and are waiting to be tried in the earlier case.

The attacks highlight a host of issues faced in many suburbs across the country, where immigrants are moving in next to established white communities that are not always happy to have them. As I argue in the book, this hostility has played a role in fostering the gangs, which welcome alienated immigrant youth looking for protection and respect in neighborhoods where they find very little of either. The attacks are also are a reminder that gang violence is not just a minority problem.

In a related update, the Obama administration has decided to stay the course when it comes to the Bush administration’s immigration policy. Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security chief, says she will keep up the focus on deportations and border enforcement. This includes Operation Community Shield, an anti-gang program that has been criticized by local police and legal experts as dangerous and unconstitutional.

So far, this strategy hasn’t had much effect in uprooting the serious and complex conflicts faced in communities like Patchogue and Hempstead. And so, the violence continues.

Reactions on Long Island

The book has prompted a strong response from readers in Long Island. Newsday, the Long Island daily, posted a review of Gangs today. Several local police detectives, including a Nassau County gang unit officer who resides in Garden City, have contacted me to praise the book’s depiction of the gang situation they see on the ground. The book’s title, and its suggestion that gangs are also the problem of wealthy areas such as Garden City, has rankled others. You can read a critique of the book in the Garden City News, a community weekly, here, and my response here.

Here’s an excerpt from the Newsday review:

This ambitious, sometimes unwieldy book focuses on the community of Hempstead and two Latino gangs: the notorious Mara Salvatrucha, widely known as MS-13, and subsets of the lesser-known 18th Street gang. Originating in Los Angeles, both groups consist largely of immigrants from war-ravaged, poverty-stricken Central American countries.

Garland weaves her impressive research on immigration, education and criminal justice into the narrative stories of three young gang members. Jessica, the American-born daughter of a Honduran immigrant, grows up in an abusive family filled with MS-13 members. She joins a rival gang, Salvadorans with Pride, at the age of 13. Julio, a former Salvadoran soldier, joins MS-13 in Los Angeles before moving to Hempstead, where he’s eventually deported.

Perhaps most compelling is the story of Daniel, a Salvadoran boy who illegally crosses the U.S.-Mexican border at the age of 12 to reunite with his mother in Hempstead. There he meets Jaime, another recent transplant. The two become best friends until Daniel joins Salvadorans with Pride, while Jaime gravitates to MS-13. Jaime ends up dead, the first of several friends killed by gang violence.

Washington Post Review

The Washington Post Review of Gangs:

Don’t believe the fun-loving depictions of gang warfare in “West Side Story” and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” — thug life ain’t all jazz hands and high kicks. Newsweek staffer and first-time author Sarah Garland offers a softshoe-free view of real-life Scarfaces in “Gangs in Garden City,” a comprehensive history of the transition of Nassau County, N.Y., from idyllic Long Island retreat to posse-plagued demilitarized zone.

In muscular, Hemingway-esque prose, Garland weaves an economic and social history of Latino gangs in suburbia around unrelentingly bleak personal narratives of gang members, including one Salvadoran war refugee whose isolation drove him to the notorious Mara Salvatrucha (a.k.a. MS-13) crew: “If he could trust anyone to watch his back and not to betray him, it was these men. . . . They had been cannon fodder, and they had survived.” Though immigration hawks and jingoists demonize gang members, MS-13, like the Mafia and innumerable other ethnic gangs that predate the modern metropolis, is fed by America’s patchwork immigration policy, poor urban planning, need for cheap labor and race hatred as much as it is by flawed individuals. Gangs are not inevitable.

– Justin Moyer

Diane Rehm

I joined guest host Susan Page on the Diane Rehm show today to talk about the origins of Mara Salvatrucha along with journalist Sam Logan. We heard from the FBI and from a caller worried about the rise of gangs in her small Illinois town. Also some fascinating stories from a caller who worked for the United States in El Salvador in the 1990s protecting deported gang members from attacks by paramilitary forces.

A lot of different opinions about what is causing these gangs to spread, but we did agree that attempts to “arrest away the problem” have failed.

The Crime Report

The Crime Report, a news site affiliated with the Center on Media, Crime and Justice, posted a Q&A I did last week with editor Cara Tabachnick about Gangs in Garden City. I discuss how the title was chosen and how I got to know the gang members I followed in the book.

This week be sure to listen to the Diane Rehm show on Thursday. I’ll be on to discuss the book!