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The U.S. Justice Department’s comprehensive gang and youth violence reduction strategy calls for combination of three main approaches: suppress the violence, intervene in young people lives to help them leave gang life behind them, and support for community-based prevention to help kids avoid gangs all-together.

 

Research from the Los Angeles-based Advancement Project and the Harvard Civil Rights project have found that, the 2/3rds of funds going to reduce gang crime in LA and in federal gang reduction initiaves have gone solely to support ways of arresting, detaining and incarcerating people.

 

If there is a consensus that, “we cannot arrest our way out of this problem,” how do we engage elected officials, law enforcement and the broader community to support strategies to increase investments in intervening in young people’s lives to get them out of gangs, and to support strategies to prevent young people from engaging in serious gang crime?

posted 4 years ago
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Most law enforcement officials will say that the biggest challenge posed by gangs is, "we cannot arrest our way out of this problem." The comprehensive approaches to reducing gang crime held up by the U.S. Justice Department calls for supression of the violence, interventions to help young people in gangs leave them, and prevention services to keep kids out of gangs.

Research shows that bulk of the resources going to reduce gang and youth violence have been invested in ways to arrest, detain and incarcerate people. Reports from Harvard University and the Los Angeles-based Advancement project have shown that, nationally and in LA, 2/3rds of all the funds spent to reduce gang crime have been spent on supression strategies.

If "we can't arrest our way out of this problem," how do we engage law enforcement, elected officials, community leaders and the various systems that deal with young people to support prevention and intervention services at the level needed to impact this problem in the long-term?

posted 4 years ago
view in context