While the drive-by killing of a 13-year-old in Longmont has residents on edge about a possible increase in local gang activity, a University of Colorado Boulder expert says community-focused solutions can make a difference in solving and preventing gangs.
The boy and a 15-year-old who survived were shot near a basketball court in Longmont on Aug. 20. The arrest affidavit of the accused shooter suggested that a gang altercation at the Boulder County Fairgrounds may have led up to the incident.
Longmont police said last week that the investigation into the circumstances surrounding the shooting is ongoing to determine what, if any, role gangs played in the shooting. However, that has not stopped the community from expressing fears on social media about the possibility of increased gang violence.
That type of reaction is normal for communities like Longmont, according to David Pyrooz, a criminologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Pyrooz researches the criminology of social groups, particularly gangs, and has recently co-authored the book “On Gangs.”
“When you say the g-word, it can really send people,” Pyrooz said. “There’s a lot of stereotypes and emotion and stigmatization that comes with the word gang. Naturally, when a smaller city like Longmont hears it, it’s a cause for concern. That’s pretty consistent across the country.”
Gangs are defined as a group of people with some sort of collective identity that have some level of organization to them and engage in recurrent patterns of criminal offending. While laws tend to focus more on the organizational dimension of gangs, Pyrooz said that the younger gangs he researches often don’t have much organization.
An estimated 2% of children are involved in gangs across the U.S., with the average age of youth gang members peaking at 14, according to Pyrooz’s research.
Pyrooz said people are most likely to join gangs in their preteen or early teen years, with most children only staying in gangs for a couple of years.
One of the earliest sources of gang activity tends to be low socioeconomic status, Pyrooz said. The groups that form gangs often begin from a more innocent association, like a breakdancing crew or tagger group.
Psychologically, early teen years are when young identities begin to form, and kids often want to join some sort of group.
“Whether it’s a formal club at school or an informal one, they want to join it for companionship, for identity,” he said. “They also see it as a form of protection, safety. They see economic opportunity sometimes.”
Some level of conflict or violence is typically what leads that group to join together more closely, leading to a gang association. Pyrooz added that individual gangs are different from one another, as are the people joining them.
“There’s no one reason why somebody gets involved in a gang,” Pyrooz said. “Think of it like a cluster of reasons and a cluster of these risk factors and an absence of protective factors.”
Longmont is no stranger to the consequences of gang violence, like in 2006 when a 19-year-old was stabbed to death in a gang-related attack. At that time, Longmont had over 400 documented gang members.
There are currently less than 50 known gang members in Longmont, according to Longmont Public Safety spokesperson Robin Ericson. However, the city has seen a recent uptick in tagging and graffiti mostly among middle and high school students.
Ericson credits the community’s history of partnerships between neighborhoods, businesses, nonprofits and the city to address quality of life issues. Using a multifaceted community approach is exactly what Pyrooz advises in preventing gang violence.
It’s typical to see a city denying that it has any gang activity until a gang-related incident occurs where a teenager or young adult dies, Pyrooz said, and then the city overreacts through almost exclusively punitive measures to try and deter gang activity. But that’s not an effective way to address the issue, according to Pyrooz’s research.
“You acknowledge that these problems exist, that they can linger and that they can explode on occasion, but you also don’t overreact,” Pyrooz said. “You react sensibly. By sensible reactions, you need to have government and non-government, community responses in place.”
He advises a full government response — not just law enforcement — including public health, social services, schools and mental health resources that are in place and prepared to regularly serve gang populations. Non-governmental entities need to step up as well, like service organizations, parent groups, neighborhood watch groups and former gang members to serve as mentors and dissuade groups from retaliating.
“It’s like a whole community approach to prevent these problems from boiling over,” he said.
Pyrooz added that unstructured socializing is one of the strongest correlations with gang activities, so ensuring guardians and role models are in place may help prevent kids from getting involved with gangs. This could look like after school activities, sports or even just keeping an eye on a child as they play video games.
Most of all, he cautions against pinholing gang members as simply threats.
“The kids who are involved in gangs are not just perpetrators of violence,” Pyrooz said. “These kids are also victims of violence. They’ve also been victims of community marginalization and issues in the household, and they need help.”
Pyrooz added that most communities over 100,000 people see some level of gang activity. While it might not be on the level of larger urban areas, it’s common in the United States for gangs to exist even if that’s not what a community wants.
“There are going to be, as a city grows, more big city problems that come with it,” Pyrooz said. “And gangs are one of them.”
