“I had little respect for life when practically all my life I had seen people assaulted, maimed and blown away at very young ages and no one seemed to care. I recognized early that where I lived, we grew and died in dog years. Actually, some dogs outlived us.” — “Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member,” by ex-Los Angeles Crip member Sanyika Shakur, aka Kody “Monster” Scott


Thug life can be short.

Some gang members and their associates grow out of it, but some - like Fort Wayne homicide victims Contrell L. Brown, 18, and Randall D. Paris, 17, both gunned down in the past month - don't get to grow up. Brown's family said his death was the result of a feud between the gangs D-Boyz and the PAC.

“I don't know a whole lot of retired gang members,” Robert L. Rinearson said he tells youth. “They're either dead, they're smoked up or they're locked up in prison for the rest of their lives.”

Rinearson, Fort Wayne Community Schools' supervisor of safety & student management, said he saw thousands of gang members while working as a gang information collector for the state Department of Correction from 1979 to 1996. Part of his current job is working to keep FWCS students out of gangs.

Power, protection and partying are their primary lure, Rinearson said.

“They oftentimes use terminology like ‘we have a lot of love for each other,' so it becomes a newfound family,” Rinearson said. “It's just kind of thumbing your nose at the system.”

While many gangs deal in and use drugs, Rinearson said local gangs aren't as heavily involved in them as they were in the 1980s and 1990s when bodies and dollars were piled high, courtesy of the crack cocaine explosion.

“There's a lot more hybrid gangs,” Rinearson said. “Structure is a lot … looser.” Despite their sophisticated practices — clothing, graffiti, initiations, hand signals — experts said gangs are often a lot less structured than portrayed in movies and on television.

“Gangs themselves shouldn't be viewed as these corporate entities that only exist for the purpose of drug dealing,” said George Tita, a University of California-Irvine associate professor of criminology who has interviewed hundreds of gang members in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles during the last decade.

“Quite often you'll see that the violence in a city has nothing to do with fighting over drug markets and has everything to do with more expressive violence: fighting over issues of respect, or territory (as in) ‘This is my neighborhood, not your neighborhood.' ”

Tita said gang violence frequently occurs in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods where households headed by single mothers proliferate, although white gangs do populate more affluent neighborhoods.

The violence often starts with just a few people before a group dynamic takes over, generating a cycle of retribution, said David M. Kennedy, director of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Center for Crime Prevention and Control in New York City. Kennedy — who helped develop Operation Ceasefire, an initiative that drastically reduced gang violence in Boston in the 1990s and was replicated in Indianapolis — cites a gang war that occurred while he worked in San Francisco in the 1990s.

The battle, between the West Mob and Big Block gangs, started with a dispute over who would perform next at a neighborhood rap concert. It led to dozens of deaths during the next several years.

“The people involved now probably don't even remember why it started. The dispute takes on a life of its own,” Kennedy said. “Almost all the violence is strictly local, interpersonal stuff.”

Watching your back

Kennedy and Rinearson attribute the spread of street gangs from prisons and big cities to smaller communities such as Fort Wayne to the glamorization of thug life in music, movies and television. With it came the warped sense of street justice. While stressing he is not familiar with the particulars that led to the deaths of Brown and Paris, Kennedy said the circumstances sound typical of what's happening nationally.

“What we're really dealing with is an increasingly, nationally common street culture that says, ‘If I'm disrespected then I have to respond violently, and if my friends are disrespected, then I've got their back. And if you're their enemy then you're my enemy, too,'” he said. “It's only a step from that to these back-and-forth, group-on-group beefs.”

Even in the most violent neighborhoods, Kennedy and Tita said the majority of the gang violence is committed by a small, hard-core element. Kennedy cited Cincinnati, where he is assisting in an antiviolence program. He said 0.3 percent of the population was responsible for about 75 percent of Cincinnati's homicide suspects or victims.

For one 20-year-old Fort Wayne ex-gang member, the small gang he joined while attending Harding High School was a source of protection.

“You get involved because you want somebody to watch your back,” said the man, who asked not to be identified. “Without my clique, you might not even be talking to me today.”

Rinearson and Tita said gang solidarity doesn't last.

“I'm fond of sharing what a couple of gang members have told me on different occasions: ‘It was all great while you're out on the street, but I went to jail for a couple years and my homeboys never once came and visited or put a few bucks on my tab so I could buy cigarettes,' ” Tita said. “To me, that doesn't sound like much of a family or having one's back.”

While gangs are too endemic to American culture to ever be eliminated, Kennedy and Tita believe the violence they are responsible for can be reduced. They recommend a carrot-and-stick approach, such as Operation Ceasefire, that involves community members, police and social workers identifying the people committing the violence and making them understand it will not be tolerated.

Individual acts of violence by gang members must be met with collective punishment, Kennedy said. Target the entire gang, for minor infractions. Marijuana roach in the car ashtray? Unpaid child support? Out-of-state warrant? Go to jail.

“What works is to reverse the group dynamic,” Kennedy said. “To make everybody in the set understand that if any one of them pulls a trigger, everybody is going to pay.”

As Kennedy told Congress in February 2007, the strategy can't just be about crime prevention, but reconciliation and redemption. Gang members who no longer want to bang must be offered social services, and law-abiding community members must be assured that police are there to protect, not harass them.

In Indianapolis, where the Violence Reduction Partnership started in 1998, homicides dropped from 155 in 1997 to 115 in 2001, according to a study paid for by the National Institute of Justice. Police had community meetings in black neighborhoods before conducting targeted traffic enforcement designed to find drugs and guns. Supervisors were on site at traffic stops to reduce the chance of racial profiling or police abuses.

“It's very important to the community to say, ‘We want to save your children's lives by stopping the shooting,'” Tita said. “As opposed to saying, ‘We're declaring war on your kids.'”

Fort Wayne Police Chief Rusty York said the city does not use the Operation Ceasefire model, but the department employs similar techniques and has a newly formed anti-gang unit. He noted police seized about 300 guns in 2006 and another 300 last year through targeted enforcement, some of which are believed to have been used by gang members. Police try to work with residents in high-crime areas in reducing gang violence, York said, but it is difficult because many are renters. “People just don't get involved or concerned about their neighborhoods if they don't own property,” he said.

Kennedy attributes increases in violence in the last several years among cities that used the Operation Ceasefire model to a loss of focus and lack of a uniform approach.

“There's a place for law enforcement. There's a place for prevention. There's a place for the community. All of those things have to be focused on those groups,” Kennedy said. “You use existing assets to do the work in this slightly different way, and you get dramatically different results.”

Rinearson is skeptical about the long-term success of initiatives such as Operation Ceasefire. But he said the idea is similar to what Fort Wayne used to reduce a rash of gang killings in the early and mid-1990s. Neighborhood associations, schools and police all worked together.

Rinearson, who mediated two gang truces in those days, said that for some hardcore gang-bangers, death or prison was the only way out. But others got the message. “Kids who were joining into this found out, hey, it was fun to shoot, but guess what, somebody's shooting back at you.”

Others, such as the ex-gang member from Fort Wayne whose criminal record consists of a few minor misdemeanors, realize the thug life is not for them. While he still lives in a high-crime, predominantly black neighborhood and sees members of his old gang, he said he no longer runs with it by choice.

“Nobody's going to stop violence. There's always going to be war,” he said. “But it's on us to grow up and pick and choose our battles because the street life is a hard life.”