Gang colors reappear in city
Warning signs put police on the alert to head off trouble
Sunday, July 25, 2004By Jonathan D. Silver, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
When gangs arrived in Pittsburgh a decade ago, flashing hand signals, wearing colorful bandannas and carrying out organized crimes, police were caught flat-footed.
" ‘They don’t exist, they don’t exist,’ " was the early mantra among top police officials and the mayor’s office, Pittsburgh police Deputy Chief William Mullen recalled. “They got so organized that we were a day late and a dollar short.”
Police are trying to avoid making that same mistake in light of a recent resurgence of gang colors, the most provocative and open display of affiliations among groups of young men since police dismantled the gangs in the mid-1990s with federal help.
No one is saying that the gang phenomenon of the 1990s has returned. On the surface, police, community activists and outreach workers say, the groups of young men displaying colors today seem to be doing little more than representing their neighborhoods. There’s no firm evidence of the organized drug dealing, armed robberies and murders that characterized gang activity of the past.
But warning signs exist. At Shuman Juvenile Detention Center, detainees are making gang signs. There is talk of Crips, Bloods and Original Gangsters in certain neighborhoods. A smattering of gang graffiti has been spotted. Arms are adorned with gang tattoos.
In parts of Homewood and areas of the North Side, young men are openly wearing dark blue and black again. Light blue can be seen in Larimer. Red is favored in sections of Garfield and the Hill District. Police are trying to determine if white T-shirts signify affiliations in the West End.
Most of those wearing colors are black, but one person who works with at-risk children said white teenagers in some neighborhoods share the dress code.
“There’s definitely a resurgence in gang posturing,” said police Cmdr. William Bochter, of the Hill District station. “You may see 10 or 12 kids on a street corner that look like a baseball team because they’re all wearing red.”
These young men are between 13 and 18 years old. They hang out in groups of eight to 10 in what are known as cliques, sets or posses. They might have bandannas around their heads, tied around their wrists or dangling from a back pocket or belt. Or they might just be wearing ball caps, pants or sports jerseys of the same color.
Police worry about what those colors portend.
“We’re anticipating the level of violence and criminal activity is going to increase,” Bochter said.
Some recent crimes bear out that fear. Police believe the victims of two nonfatal drive-by shootings in the Hill District since May were targeted “possibly because of a gang connection, possibly because of colors,” Bochter said.
Three recent holdups in Garfield were committed by a trio of armed men with red bandannas over their faces. Whether they are gang members is unknown. But the incidents are ominous.
A 14-year-old arrested recently by officers from the East Liberty station had the name of an infamous '90s gang written on his pant leg.
“He said he had no idea what we were talking about, even though he was wearing clothing with the word ‘Crips’ on it,” said Cmdr. RaShall Brackney.
Prevention strategies
Bochter and Brackney presented their intelligence to a regular meeting of the police brass several months ago. The department responded.“We’re trying not to get caught like we got caught in '92, '93, where we denied the existence of gangs and we had to catch up,” Mullen said. “We’re just trying to take some proactive steps.”
Detectives in each of the city’s five zones have been ordered to gather information about people they arrest with possible gang connections.
They store the information in what is colloquially known as a “gang book,” which contains mug shots, known associates, preferred vehicles, likely hangouts and nicknames. That same information is fed to the police bureau’s intelligence section, which maintains a central repository.
Those in the gang books are not actively under investigation. Pictures of innocent children are not supposed to appear among the pages; teenagers with criminal histories, though, are fair game.
"We don’t keep records of someone if we just get a phone call saying ‘This guy’s in a gang,’ " Mullen said.
Police are also not planning to target young men simply because they’re wearing a particular color.
“Certainly, we’re not going to grab everybody wearing red. That’s absurd,” Mullen said. But, he added, “We’re allowed to talk to them.”
Mullen has taken the concerns so seriously that he has made several trips to the Hill District and Garfield to see for himself if gang colors are visible. He said he had not spotted any in the Hill during his midafternoon forays, but he came across a group of youths wearing red at Broad and Winebiddle streets in Garfield, the site of a double shooting last week and a midafternoon shootout July 11.
On the flip side, outreach workers are pursuing a prevention strategy, trying to defuse hostilities and stem any turn toward organized criminal activity among those who are prominently wearing colors.
Richard Garland, 51, a onetime Philadelphia gang member who went straight after getting out of prison in Pittsburgh, ran the nonprofit YouthWorks and now is in charge of Allegheny County’s One Vision, One Life program.
He has enlisted about two dozen workers, many of them ex-convicts or reformed criminals. They earn $1,000 a month to counsel at-risk youths and intervene in squabbles that could turn deadly. The group’s focus this year has been the Hill District, the North Side, St. Clair Village and Beltzhoover.
“We got guys that used to be in it – drugs, the whole nine yards. They came home. Now, we make them part of the solution,” Garland said. “We’ve got guys telling them they don’t want to do this.”
Garland credited the efforts of his “community coordinators” with staving off potential problems during proms this year at Langley High School in the West End and Oliver High School on the North Side.
“We could have had a real bad situation,” Garland said.
No rush to judgment
To law enforcement, the word gang carries a precise connotation: people engaged in an organized criminal enterprise.Members committing violent acts as part of that enterprise can be prosecuted under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, which was used to break up the Larimer Avenue/Wilkinsburg (LAW) gang in the mid-1990s.
Police choose their words carefully when they speak about the return of colors. The same goes for Garland.
“The main thing is, we don’t want the public to panic,” Garland said. “I don’t want to start going off the deep end, like in the early '90s.”
Some say that just because young men are wearing colors, it does not mean they are part of a gang.
“Young people have always had social gatherings, and there have always been colors,” said T. Rashad Byrdsong, president of Community Empowerment Association Inc. “We have to be careful we don’t lump all of those kids into a basket. That’s not to say in the early days the colors didn’t represent gangs. What I’m saying is the evidence is not here yet. We shouldn’t rush to judgment on whether we’re seeing a resurgence [of gangs].”
Bochter, the Hill District commander, is of a similar mind.
“A group of neighborhood bullies, because they dress alike, doesn’t make them a criminal gang.”
But in the future, it might.
“If history is any gauge, and I think it is, they will evolve into criminal groups, and a lot of the young kids are going to be sucked into that,” Bochter said.
No colors, but tattoos
Gunplay today tends to be between people who know one another instead of anonymous drive-by shootings. The arguments can start anywhere, from perceived slights to girlfriends to turf.Neighborhood loyalty runs deep and strong. Wearing colors is a proclamation of one’s stomping grounds. Often, people growing up in one part of the city know not to wear certain colors in other areas.
Mark Tortorella, a 14-year veteran juvenile probation officer for Allegheny County, said children in his North Side territory were sticking strictly to their neighborhood boundaries.
“They really just stay in their area like never before,” he said.
Tortorella said one of his charges recently was planning to play basketball, but the youth refused to leave his Brighton Heights neighborhood to meet at a court on the central North Side.
Tortorella said the city was fractured into neighborhood groups more than it was in the '90s. Brackney is seeing the same thing in the city’s East End.
“Gangs have never really gone away. They’ve just changed,” Brackney said. She described a decentralized network akin to terrorist cells, with small groups and no overall leaders.
Tortorella has not spotted colors on the North Side, but he said he had seen tattoos. Young men from Manchester have “OG,” for Original Gangsters; kids from the Northview Heights housing project wear “NV,” for “Northview Crips.”
Drugs are pervasive among the groups, and children as young as 13 are “trying to be players, when they’re very immature, very gullible, very naive, very easy to be sucked in from being a lookout one day to actually slinging, holding,” Tortorella said.
“A kid coming from a family with nothing all of a sudden feels like he has power, self-esteem.”
Gang signs or slang
Middle-school children seem to be at the heart of the resurgence of colors, Garland said. These youngsters do not have any true idea of what gang life was like a decade ago, but they feel as if they are coming of age and want to emulate the street characters who once haunted corners in their neighborhoods, said Garland and Erin Dalton, who works with him.The youngest of these children under scrutiny by police are not hardened yet, and that might provide police and community activists an advantage.
“I believe in intervention. Go talk to these kids,” Brackney said. “A lot of these kids aren’t as hard as they think they are.”
When these young men get in trouble, many are taken to Shuman. The director, Alex Wilson, ran the facility during Pittsburgh’s gang wars.
“Those were the absolute most horrendous years,” Wilson said. “What we’re seeing now is kind of a sample of what had occurred back in the early '90s. We’re just beginning to see, possibly, what could be a resurgence of that activity.”
With a 130-person capacity, Shuman houses children from all over the county, and from Pittsburgh’s feuding neighborhoods. Wilson said the rivalries weren’t lost on his staff.
“We can feel the tension among the residents, and we certainly want to get a handle on this before anything becomes more explosive.”
The indicators are subtle. Wilson said his staff had caught some young men flashing gang signs. Others are using gang-related slang.
On Thursday, Wilson and his staff discussed strategy. In the early '90s, when gang members were entering Shuman, they were placed in a single unit to force them to get along.
“We just basically said, 'Well, irrespective of their gang affiliation, Crips, Bloods, LAW, whatever, they were all going to have to go in this particular unit and have to live together in this unit. That’s what we did, and it worked well,” Wilson said.
The policy remains in place.
Many teenagers are armed
Adrienne Young has been busy this year trying to keep children on the straight and narrow.As founder and executive director of Tree of Hope, a faith-based organization, Young has operated workshops on the North Side, in St. Clair Village and, most recently, in Garfield to educate the up-and-coming generation about the dangers of gangster life. She introduces them to onetime gang members who speak about the realities of prison time, not the tall tales of easy money and fancy cars.
“They’re wannabes,” Young said. "What we’re trying to stress to them is: ‘This is what you want to be? Well, let’s show you the results.’ "
Young has experienced the results firsthand. In 1994, her 18-year-old son, Javon, a Carnegie Mellon University student, was killed because he refused to support the Bloods street gang.
In those days, some gang members were stone-cold murderers. Young does not see the killer instinct in the boys wearing colors today.
“A lot of these young guys are really just trying to make a statement. They don’t understand fully what they’re getting into. If we can get to them right now, we can turn them around. The other ones were vicious, more organized,” Young said.
Young first got an inkling that something was going on last summer. Then, she attributed the colors to a handful of kids. She thought the fad would fade away.
“But this spring it looked like red was sprouting everywhere,” Young said. “It had all stopped, and it had died down, and kids were wearing regular clothes. Now our whole neighborhood is red again, the Hill is red again. Homewood is blue again, the North Side is blue again. Crips are blue and red is Bloods. We’ve got East Hills that split apart. Some is red and some is blue.”
Most troubling to Young is that so many teenagers are armed.
“That’s what makes them extremely dangerous. Why should the kids even be able to get the guns? These kids aren’t just wearing colors. They’re armed. And that’s why we’ve got a great concern, 'cause they feel the other side is armed and they’ve got to be armed.”