Decades after authorities identified gangs as a growing and deadly menace in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities, the tracking of gang-related crime remains sporadic and incomplete, with no statistics at all kept in many jurisdictions.
National gang experts say the result has been a generation's worth of policy decisions, anti-gang programs and law enforcement initiatives based on social theories and public fear instead of verifiable trends.
With no means to track gang-related crime accurately, experts say, it is impossible for cities to know how to reduce gang violence. Authorities even disagree on what a gang crime is.
"What are the dimensions of the problem? Are they smaller or greater than people think?" asked John Moore, director of the Florida-based National Youth Gang Center. "I get calls all the time asking me for comparative information, and we have no way of doing that because we have no standardized system, and police departments aren't required to keep track of it."
Even without such statistics, California has spent more than $57 million on gang violence suppression since 1991. But the Office of Criminal Justice Planning, which oversees the spending, doesn't collect the data needed to verify whether any of the programs work, according to a report last year by the state's nonpartisan legislative analyst's office.
Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn and Police Chief William J. Bratton were in Washington, D.C., this week to lobby for more federal assistance to fight gangs after the city finished 2002 with the most homicides in the nation. Although the number of killings in L.A. went up 10% over 2001, what little data police have show virtually no increase in violent gang crime.
Gang killings, the only widely tracked gang crime, have fallen nationwide since their peak in the mid-1990s. But the quality of those numbers is inconsistent, gang experts say, and, alone, they fail to draw a broad picture of gang crime.
Even as they unveil the latest anti-gang initiatives, top Los Angeles police officials acknowledge that they do not know enough about the extent of the city's gang crime.
The Los Angeles Police Department relies largely on "guesstimates," Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell said. Though the LAPD, since the 1970s, has kept an informal tally of gang-related homicides, assaults and a handful of other serious crimes, the department has never, for instance, tracked the relationship between gangs and narcotics.
