Malcolm W. Klein just learned that Los Angeles has created another committee to battle the city’s street gangs. And he’s not happy.
Mr. Klein, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, has spent 30 years working with and studying gangs, and he’s seen these committees come and go. So far, he says, they’ve been a waste of time and money. “These task forces haven’t led to a damn thing, but they’re needed politically.”
He admits that he doesn’t have the answer to how to break up gangs and curb their violence. But he has studied them long enough to know what doesn’t work. The Oxford University Press has just released his 11th book on the subject, The American Street Gang.
In it, Mr. Klein concludes that the country’s efforts to combat gangs are all wrong. He argues that the portrayals of gangs by the news media and most academics are myths, that the efforts of lawmakers and police officers to combat gangs are misguided, and that the result of these actions has been to increase the number of gangs.
He doesn’t pull punches, criticizing people and programs by name. And he argues that if experts like himself haven’t found the answers to eliminating gangs, then novices appointed to political committees surely won’t.
The latest panel in Los Angeles was formed in the wake of last month’s gang attack on a family that had lost its way and driven onto a dead-end street in the northeast part of the city. A 3-year old girl was killed by gunfire that horrified even some local gang members.
“This was one of several gang-related deaths this year,” he says, “but the only difference is that it was an attractive little white girl.”
Mr. Klein, who founded the Social Science Research Institute at U.S.C. in 1972, is recognized by his peers as a leading authority on street gangs. But he acknowledges that his work rarely makes it into the hands of the police or lawmakers. They tend to turn to their own colleagues, not academics, he says.
In his book and in a course of the same name that he teaches, he aims to break down myths about gangs. “Most students come to class with a sense of gangs from West Side Story, Colors, Boyz N the Hood, MTV, and newspapers -- all these aspects that try to put gang life in context.” Instead, they create misconceptions about gang life, he says.
“Right now, there are so many stereotypes as to what a gang is, and enormous variations. If you’re going to attack gangs directly, then you’ve got to know what to target.”
Mr. Klein learned what to target from firsthand experience. He became interested in studying the dynamics of gangs in 1962 and turned down a teaching job at the University of California at Berkeley to work directly with kids in gangs.
Together with some research assistants he hired with private support, he studied efforts to break up a gang by getting members involved in social and athletics events, like the midnight basketball games that have become common in many cities. But he found that the activities actually created more cohesion among gang members.
Then his research group gradually tried meeting with members on an individual basis, sometimes visiting their homes. That approach proved more successful at breaking up the gangs. But when a final meeting of a gang he was working with turned into a fight, Mr. Klein became fed up. He left his research for 10 years.
In 1980, Mr. Klein was asked to evaluate a new anti-gang project. This time he studied gang violence and street gangs’ relationship to drug sales.
What he learned is that gang members talk about violence much more than they commit it. For the most part, gang members lead aimless and boring lives that reporters never portray, he says. “Gangs have potential for violence when things go wrong, but it usually takes a lot to activate that potential.”
Many police officers take issue with that characterization, given that all it took to activate last month’s killing was a wrong turn off a highway.
Mr. Klein says he has found no evidence to show that street gangs are significantly involved in the drug market. And he criticizes legislation focusing on that link.
“Drug distribution requires good organization, and most street gangs are not well organized,” he wrote.
“The drama seemingly inherent in street gangs and drug trafficking is seductive and, like all drama, leads by emotions more than intellect.”
Mr. Klein says public ignorance about both gangs and drugs, along with publicity given to isolated connections between them, have been the basis of “rampant generalizations” that have misled efforts at intervention.
“Gangs are by-products of their communities: They cannot be controlled by attacks on symptoms alone; community structure and capacity must also be targeted,” Mr. Klein wrote.
The public’s response to gangs keeps him frustrated. “The fact is I get damn angry about the community’s response to problems. They waste so much time and energy doing the wrong thing for public effect, rather than real effects.”
Father Gregory J. Boyle, an East Los Angeles priest who set up a job-training program for gang members, agrees with Mr. Klein about faulty political programs but says denouncing all programs for not solving the problem is “like criticizing the ambulance for not being the hospital.”
“I don’t dwell on success. That’s somebody else’s yardstick. I dwell on fidelity instead,” Father Boyle says.
Mr. Klein agrees that he doesn’t have a solution to offer now, but he hopes his work provides people with knowledge -- enabling them to “vote better, talk better, and react less in a knee-jerk fashion.”