"The Hood" Is Everywhere

The Bucks County Courier Times reports today that Patrick Murphy is currently trying to secure $250,000 in federal funding for local police to combat gang violence in Bucks County. As the story by reporter Ben Finley tells us…

The funds would bolster efforts by departments and schools to help officers, teachers and parents better identify gang activity. The money also would go toward surveillance, undercover work and other operations that involve gangs.
For example, police are buying more cameras to catalog known gang tattoos and gang signs to better educate officers and teachers.

…

So far, the proposed spending has made it through a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives as part of the Commerce, Justice and Science Spending Bill, officials said. After being tinkered with in committee, the bill faces one more House vote, a Senate vote and a presidential approval, officials said.

“It’s only a matter of time before [gang activity] affects every community in Bucks County if we don’t stop it now,” Lower Makefield police Chief Ken Coluzzi said.

Patrick held the news conference outside the Lower Makefield Police Department with many of the county’s police chiefs, as Finley tells us. In addition, according to the story…

Just last month, two Bucks teenagers were arrested in New Jersey for their alleged involvement in gang warfare between Mercer County’s Bloods and Crips street gangs, police said.

New Jersey police arrested a 17-year-old Morrisville boy who allegedly took part in a drive-by shooting at a rival gang’s house in Ewing. And Tyre Johnson-King, 19, of Falls was arrested the same night and charged with weapons offenses.

Since last year, police have identified more than 150 gang members involved in crimes in Bucks County, including members of the Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings and other street gangs, white power groups and motorcycle gangs.

One of the signs of gang encroachment into areas where there was no visible presence before is graffiti appearing on highway signs or elsewhere (such as the type in the photo), which are often coded messages from one gang aimed at another as a whole or among particular individuals, or simply a means of marking turf (I saw that explode in Philadelphia, and it is occurring with more and more frequency in Bucks).

This links to a story from World Vision about a Youth Empowerment Summit conducted in Washington, D.C. from June 27th through the 30th against gang violence discussing, among other things, prevention strategies. The story also mentions S. 456, the Gang Abatement and Prevention Act, sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and co-sponsored by, among others, Orrin Hatch (R-UT, as we know...every now and then, he stands up in a big way).

The bill seeks to amend the federal criminal code to punish more gang-related activity, including recruiting of individuals to join gangs, and it also increases penalties for gang-related crimes.

Among a whole host of other objectives, the bill also includes funding for conducting media campaigns in high intensity interstate gang activity areas to educate the public about efforts to combat criminal gang activities, and also establishes in the U.S. Marshals Service a Short-Term Witness Protection Section to provide protection for witnesses in state and local trials involving homicide or other violent crimes (expanding the federal witness relocation and protection program to include protection against criminal street gangs).

(There is a companion bill in the House, H.R. 1582, sponsored by Dem Adam Schiff of California, and Patrick is a cosponsor).

It’s good to see attention paid to prevention in the two bills, as well as the importance of protecting witnesses, as illustrated in this Boston Globe story that mentions what happened to someone who reported a rape to the police (and don’t get me started on this “no snitching” business, by the way – I don’t have the right to tell someone living in a high crime area what to do, but I DO have the right to tell people in the supposed “entertainment” industry to shut the hell up when I hear them yap about this, and kudos to Chuck D here for doing the right thing).