the crime report

Chicago law enforcers have embarked on a pilot effort to stem the gang-related violence by applying direct pressure on top gang leaders, reports the city’s Tribune. Earlier this month, police Superintendent Jody Weis and federal prosecutors secretly met with a group of West Side gang leaders, informing them over snacks and beverages that they would be held accountable for violence committed by their gangs. If a crime is traced back to a particular gang, Weis said, police will “come down with every bit of firepower we have, every prosecutive trick we know.” (more…)

Twenty-seven percent of public school students ages 12 to 17 say that their school is both gang- and drug-infected (drugs are used, kept or sold on school grounds), says a new survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. This means that 5.7 million public school students attend schools which are both gang- and drug-infected. Compared with teens attending gang- and drug-free schools, teens who attend schools infected with both gangs and drugs are five times likelier to use marijuana, three times likelier to drink, and 12 times likelier to smoke. (more…)

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In America’s border ‘war zone,’ a U.S. Border Patrol agent is assaulted every eight hours

Border Patrol Agent Jose Morales has patrolled the same stretch of no-man’s-land in his unmarked SUV between Tijuana, Mexico and San Ysidro, Calif., hundreds of times. But the world seemed to stop around 9 a.m. one morning last month when a dispatcher broke through the radio chatter with a solemn announcement, “Border Patrol Agent Robert Rosas, you will never be forgotten.”

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Last month, federal agents spanned out over seven states to arrest more than two dozen members of the Outlaws motorcycle club and charged them with weapons and racketeering offenses. National Public Radio says the case “lifted a curtain on the violent lifestyle of one of the nation’s largest outlaw motorcycle gangs.” (more…)

A much-praised Pittsburgh anti-gang program gets a critical review from RAND, but it’s not the last word on the subject.

Seven years ago, when Pittsburgh experienced an upward spiral in youth homicides, community leaders went to a former gang leader for advice on how to stop them. A year later, in 2004, the Allegheny County Department of Human Services established a violence prevention program called One Vision One Life, which deployed ex-prisoners― including gang members—as streetwise mediators to quell gang disputes and connect troubled youths in targeted neighborhoods to social services that could get them off the streets.

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