When police departments set up special units to deal with gangs, they—and the taxpayers—don't always get what they pay for, say two criminal justice professors.

Vincent Webb, director of SIUC's Center for the Study of Crime, Delinquency, and Corrections, and Charles Katz, of Arizona State University, spent three years studying police gang units in four Western cities.

They found that, for the most part, those units—usually housed in out-of-the-way locations—functioned almost like little gangs of their own with a culture that differed from that of the larger departments. Officers generally had no training or assigned duties and little supervision, and they often had relatively little to do with gang members. What contacts they did have—citing gang members for jaywalking, for example—did not lead to gang "control" and even got in the way of producing useful "street" information.

The two researchers reported their findings in a book titled Policing Gangs in America, published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press.

The past 25 years have produced what Webb terms "tremendous growth" in police gang units. "Fifty-six percent of all departments with 100 or more officers have an identifiable gang unit," he says. "They were established rapidly to parallel the perceived growth of gangs in this country, but they've not been studied before in any systematic way."

For their study, underwritten by the National Institute of Justice, Webb and Katz focused on gang units in Albuquerque, Inglewood (a Los Angeles suburb), Las Vegas, and Phoenix. They analyzed police documents and interviewed departmental commanders, gang unit officers, other administrators, players in the criminal justice system, and community members. They also hung out with two gang units as they went about their daily tasks.

With the exception of Inglewood, where the unit was housed within the larger police department, gang units had secret locations several miles away from the regular forces, with special keys and access codes. They didn't have much to do with other officers, and they didn't have to perform regular police duties—they didn't even have to respond to calls that didn't interest them.

"Instead, the gang units that we observed allowed their officers to engage in buffet-style policing, picking and choosing what to do and when to do it," the authors write.

What they chose—again, with the exception of Inglewood—was mostly enforcement, with officers spending two to three hours daily on it during an eight-hour shift. Yet the Las Vegas officers averaged only three "contacts" or "stops" per shift, while Phoenix and Albuquerque averaged little more than one.

"If 'stops' are an important part of dealing with gangs, these units aren't doing very much of it," Webb says. Nor did the stops do much to control crime. In Las Vegas, only 30 percent of the stops resulted in arrest; in Phoenix, only 11 percent.

Although other police officers, prosecutors, and community groups wanted hard information from the units on gang members and their activities, only the Inglewood unit, set up specifically to supply such intelligence, delivered.

In fact, the emphasis on enforcement actually got in the way in the other three cities. Disrespect, bogus stops, and other aggressive behaviors cost the gang units the trust needed to gather solid information. And gang unit officers seemed uninterested in—sometimes almost hostile to—sharing the information they did have with others.

"The picture that emerges is that these units are highly autonomous," Webb says.

"You start to understand some of the problems with gang units (for example, a member of Chicago's gang unit accused of drug trafficking) where they have developed into a culture within a larger culture."

The researchers think that police departments should adopt Inglewood's model: integrate gang units into the department and focus on intelligence and information-sharing. "Inglewood does a good job of that because it's all their officers do: update intelligence," Webb says.

The authors also recommend training in community policing problem-solving approaches.

"Typical [gang] suppression strategies have limited potential," they write. "Gang units, like other police units, need to become 'smarter,' and one way to do this is to emphasize formal problem solving carried out by gang units in collaboration with other core police units, especially patrol."

—by K. C. Jaehnig, Media & Communication Resources