Juvenile delinquency (1955)

48 JUVENILE DELINQUENCY Mr. BoBO. You find in any of yoin* gang problems here that adults are in any way leading these youth gi"oups or youth gangs ? Mr. Sanders. I would say, sir, only to the extent that these are very naturally loose groupings. They are loosely structured gangs. In other words, they are an accumulation of those youth and young adults who happen to live in the neighborhood or community. In response to your question, insomuch as some of the young people in these areas are what we would call legal age, adult age—maybe they are over 18—maybe 21 or 23—but so far as adult leadership for positive criminal activity is concerned, I would say there has been in our experience a total absence of that. In fact, our gang warfare out here has not been the predatory type for committing planned criminal acts; it has primarily been an expression of their hostility and in- security by competing for status with other comparable groups. Most of their overt criminal actions have been in reference to other groups of youths such as themselves, rather than against public individuals or the public generally. Mr. BoBO. In the California youth gang situation, then, you don't have a condition where you will have one block gang interlocked with a district gang, interlocked with a city gang, as we have found ? Mr. Sanders. No. We don't have that type of situation. Most of the grouping here actually results, I would say, in—this is a field for security by these youngsters, and you will find that the constituents of the groups, the individuals, actually do not desire to get into a fight. They personally don't want to. But there is this esprit de corps: there is this feeling of being chicken; there is the feeling of loss of status if they don't show at least at some levels that they can be superior to some people. But it is not an organized process such as you refer to. Mr. BoBo. And the detached program which you use is used effec- tively to combat youth gangs ? Mr, Sanders. Yes. From the very beginning we recognized certain things, that you have to meet these young people at the level where they are and under the conditions where they are. You can't expect them to come into a building centered program. You have to go out on the street corners and you have to go out to the neighborhoods and you have to establish rapport by gaining their confidence, which is pretty slow, but gradually it can be done, and then using the influence to divert their type of gi'oup expressions away from those that en- danger public welfare. The only other thing that I would be inclined to say is this: I heard you earlier talking about the matter of statistics in reference to the delinquency pattern. I know that we have been quite alarmed by the reading of such things as over a 4-year period, 1948 to 1952, it increased 29 percent, over the Nation about 5 times the ratio of the youth popula- tion, and then the Bureau of Census tells us that in 1960 the youth population will be 40 percent more than it is in 1952; that these are pretty discouraging factors. With no smugness whatsoever, we can at least indicate that I think likely through community effort, citizenry interest, and agency responsibility—we do know that in the first 5 months of this year as against the first 5 months of last year the records of the juvenile division of the police department show approxi- mately a 3 percent increase in juvenile arrests.