Baltimore’s gangs battle for turf and power

Even by Baltimore standards, this shooting was outrageous.

On June 9, during a heat wave that sent temperatures soaring toward 100 degrees for four days, two toddlers were shot on the city’s west side as they played in a small inflatable pool at the Warwick Apartments. Police linked the incident to ongoing warfare between the Bloods and Crips gangs in Sandtown-Winchester.

Terrified witnesses said they saw a car filled with gang members pull up to a corner where rivals were hanging out. An argument began and within seconds, someone in the car opened fire with a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun.

As people scattered, two small bodies lay wounded. Steven Cole Jr., 2, and Talayha Mable, 3, survived after hospital stays. Mayor Sheila Dixon and Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III denounced the shootings as “unacceptable” and “cowardly.”

While this shocking incident could easily have come from a script of “The Wire,” it’s all too real these days.

Linked by the Internet, cell phones, social networking Web sites like Facebook and MySpace, and even global positioning systems, gangs are taking hold in all areas of the state.

Tentacles from multiple gangs, some part of national groups like the Los Angeles-based Bloods and Crips and the El Salvadoran gang MS-13, reach daily into crime scenes. Officials tick off a list of gang-related calling cards: street violence, murder, drug dealing, the illegal gun trade.

“What we’re seeing is the recruiting of younger kids who are intrigued by the coolness of joining a gang,” said Baltimore police Lt. Col. Rick Hite. “They get duped into believing what they see on television — Snoop Doggy Dogg standing next to Lee Iacocca selling cars like he’s a hero. Life in a luxury house, and all that. At the end of the day, though, they find out that the cars were rented, the houses were rented, even the bling is rented. The reality is that when they go to prison, it’s not as glamorous as they make it out to be.”

Hite, who for years has worked to help solve the social woes of Baltimore’s young violent offenders, said gangs are proliferating for many reasons. Kids join because they seek a haven from life on the city’s violent streets. Within a year of joining, he said, they are asked to ratchet up allegiance.

“Now they are being asked to go out on a mission and attack or assault innocent people,” he said. “And then the kids want out, and they try to form subgroups to try to get away from the threat group.”

“It’s a very serious problem and it is growing exponentially daily,” said Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler, who made it a priority to seek out and prosecute MS-13 members when he was Montgomery County state’s attorney.

Baltimore County police spokesman Bill Toohey said his department also has made gangs a top priority.

Police have identified 527 gang members who live in the county — those who police say have demonstrated knowledge and traits of street gangs, have gang tattoos, or use gang terminology, Toohey said. But he added, “It’s hard to gauge how much of the county’s crime rate is gang-related.”

“We have a headquarters-based enforcement team and every precinct has a gang coordinator,” Toohey said of an anti-gang system started by county Police Chief Jim Johnson two years ago

The Interstate 95 corridor is a focal point for gang activity in Maryland, said Joseph I. Cassilly, the Harford County state’s attorney. He said the East Coast’s main artery makes it easy for national gangs to connect their New Jersey and New York branches with those here.

It’s not clear how many gang members are in Maryland, Gansler said, but “it is safe to say there are thousands and they range in age as low as elementary school.”

Gansler spoke of a visit to Calverton Middle School in Baltimore. There, the principal told him that 85 percent of the school’s teens were affiliated with gangs.

“I thought it was surprising that it was that high of a number, and also tragic,” he said. “You can’t expect children to learn in an environment which is that heavily laden with gang activities. And you can’t learn if you’re scared.”

For many teens, joining a gang begins by offering “a safe passage to school,” says Philip J. Leaf, head of the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. But once teens get into a gang, allegiances and expectations escalate.

Plus, as the street saying goes, once you’re in a gang, there’s no way out except in a coffin.

Leaf has studied local gangs from a public health perspective. He said young people — most from dysfunctional or shattered families — join gangs in search of community and acceptance that schools and churches have not been able to offer.

“In many instances, the gangs are replacing their families,” he said. “In both the terms of offering an inviting environment where there’s positive support as well as structure. It is a place where they can have some respect, a positive role model, someone who is going to be supportive and protective of them — all the things families usually have done.”

Leaf said the city has always struggled with street gangs. The difference between what’s going on today and the smaller, take-over-the-corner groups of a couple of decades ago is the growth of national, established gangs into urban areas where illegal activities are already a part of the fabric of life.

“The drug-dealing market in Baltimore is a market they want to get into,” he said. “… If they can get existing groups to affiliate, it’s a much more cost-effective and responsible way to establish footholds in a territory than trying to go out and kill people to get it.”

Leaf said gangs have used “positive” recruitment strategies to gain members locally and statewide. They offer a sense of place, well-being and economics to make the pitch to teens and “tweens” as young as 12. The city’s problems with unemployment, education and poverty, he said, make these youths an easy target.

His observations are echoed by gang members. In an East Baltimore row house-turned-community center, a five-star general in the Bloods known as Black told Exhibit A that being a member can offer a “positive life.”

“On the police side, they see gangs as terrorism. They see gangs as an act of violence and all negative,” Black said. “But in actuality, being part of a gang has developed as an uplifting community and brotherhood. It’s the same as a Hell’s Angels motorcycle group, or a religion like Christianity, Catholic[ism] or Muslim. We pay tithes and dues just like a church and we go out and recruit like churches.”

Black and another member of the Bloods in East Baltimore, who identified himself by his middle initial, G, said the group is working from the Rose Street Community Center to promote positive activities for gang members. This includes donning day-glo vests to clean trash from streets and alleys in the McElderry Park neighborhood for $20 a day and operating small businesses, like corner stores.

Black, who is 27, said the murder of one of his closest friends, also a Blood, forced him to rethink his life.

“He was killed for no apparent reason but hatred and jealousy,” Black said. “And from that day forward, I vowed to change. He told me before he passed, ‘Every homey is not your homey.’ I’ll never forget it. Now, I’m trying to open everybody’s eyes.”

Black said he is trying to bring Bloods and Crips together to find common ground. It took eight months, but he said he was able to get members of those warring gangs to sit down recently for a meal “without any knifeplay, gunplay, or arguments or cussing.”

They now play pickup basketball games on city courts. And he said he plans to take a group of Bloods and Crips to an amusement park this summer to try to “stop the violence.”

Black said his motivation is to teach lessons many members never learned, usually because they dropped out of school. Going by the saying “each one, teach one,” he focuses on financial education, including checking and savings accounts and certificates of deposit.

The younger members, G said, are the toughest to convince. To them, violence and a badass gangster image is a coveted way of life.

“The gang members ages 12 through 16, they feel as though they have something to prove,” said G, who is 30. “Many have no father. They have no mother and they are practically raising themselves.”

Clayton Guyton, a community activist in the Rose and Ashland neighborhood of East Baltimore and director of the Rose Street Community Center, has worked with gang members for years. He said the city’s gangs are changing.

“On one level, the transition has something to do with gang education in terms of how they educate one another,” Guyton said. “I’m experiencing they are more interested in the culture, more interested in helping one another get jobs, adding a positive aspect to their life. Also, they are moving to a less violent level.”

Guyton said he has seen gang members turn their energy toward the communities in which they live. That change in philosophy, he said, is a direct result of recent targeting of gangs by law enforcement under programs like Project Exile, a city-federal effort that focuses on violent offenders. Prosecutors use federal gun laws to gain convictions and send offenders — many of them gang members ¬— to distant federal prisons to serve time with no chance of parole.

So far this year, 20 Baltimore residents have been convicted under Project Exile, city police said.

“A lot of gang members, like Black and others, they are saying, ‘Hey, we are part of a community. We don’t want to be villain-ized. We got family in the community.’ Our sons, a lot of them have their own children and they are thinking about the welfare of their children, the future of their children, so they are thinking more like a normal person,” Guyton said.

This new approach to a gang’s role in the community has little impact on police and prosecutors. City police spokesman Sterling Clifford chuckled at the concept of gang members in East Baltimore doing good deeds. Lt. Col. Hite said investigators are trying to find a way to help kids get out of gangs.

Hite cited a Father’s Day gathering of 5,000 men at the Baltimore Convention Center. That group aims to provide male role models to help city youth stay in school.

“We have to find a quid pro quo relationship for the gangs—something in exchange for what the gangs offer,” Hite said. “We have to make sure there is more opportunity for our young people.”

Melody Simmons is a freelance writer based in Baltimore.

---

More information:
A closer look at recent Maryland gang activity
Gang facts