Gang problem growing

Published 10:16 pm Saturday, July 14, 2007

Graffiti on walls. Kids wearing gang colors. A young man shot dead.

Those images are all too vivid for many Dalton residents after the individuals charged in connection with the Memorial Day shooting death of Dalton High School student Andre Johnson were linked by law enforcement officials to a gang.

Lt. Scott Ware with the Hall County Sheriff’s Office in Gainesville can relate.

“(Our gang problem) started with some graffiti,” he said. “In 1998 a gang task force was started following a drive-by shooting that left a person dead.”

Since then the task force has dealt with 21 known gangs, ranging from the Crips to MS 13, according to information from the Gainesville Police Department.

“Their crimes (include) damage to property, drug dealing, fire arms and a lot of entering autos and petty theft,” Ware said, “not to mention fighting.”

The task force uses school resource officers in the summer as part of the patrol force, Ware said, which allows those officers to know by face and name who the gang members are when they come back to school.

“Certain schools didn’t want to admit they had a problem when it clearly was there,” Ware said. “Schools and law enforcement have to realize they have a problem to do something about it. That’s the way to handle something before it escalates.”

Ware said eradicating gangs is the goal, but the reality is the problem has gotten very large.

“We want to keep them at bay and scared to do business in Hall County,” he said. “It’s like drugs, I doubt I will ever work myself out of a job. I don’t think that’s realistic. But if we can keep them subdued, that would mean we’re doing something right.”

Sgt. Brad Grove with the Lawrenceville Police Department said that town in Gwinnett County has known about gangs for several years, but only in the last couple of years have police been battling them aggressively.

The city enacted an ordinance on May 1 designed to cripple the 19 gangs in the city. Under the ordinance, known gang members who commit even minor crimes like public drunkenness can be hit with stiffer penalties for violating the gang ordinance. Other Gwinnett County cities like Snellville and Norcross have also enacted gang ordinances this year.

“Other cities put in the ordinances but some were just (mirror images) of state law,” Grove said. “We reviewed it and saw it was worthless for city prosecutions. Ours is basically very similar to the state but we added some city ordinance violations.”

Grove said most of the gang-related crimes in Lawrenceville are drug-related or damage to property. The city has a four-man task force that works with a Gwinnett County task force to patrol the streets for gang activity.

Gwinnett County has the largest number of gang members in the state, Grove said.

“We’ve only made three charges (under the ordinance) and those have not gone through court, but the word is on the street,” Grove said. “We’ve seen a noticeable improvement as far as gangs gathering. We’ll see how long that will last. A lot of people are waiting to see how serious we are or if it’s just a fad, and it’s not. We’re very serious about it.”

Hall County’s task force began with some detectives from the sheriff’s office and uniformed officers from the police department.

“The task force has evolved to an eight-man unit which consists of two sergeants, one from the city and myself, two FBI agents, two immigration agents and two U.S. Department of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agents,” Ware said. “With the help of the feds, we’ve been able to dismantle one local gang and put it out of business.”



Task force created

The cities of Dalton and Calhoun and Whitfield County have a task force that was created in 2005 known as the Conasauga Safe Streets Task Force that is comprised of six officers, two from each law enforcement department. There is also an FBI agent who is a liaison between the task force and federal agencies, said Dalton Police Public Information Officer Chris McDonald.

The Conasauga task force identifies gangs and organized crime organizations and works to arrest their members for crimes ranging from graffiti to drugs to weapons violations, as well as violent crime.

The officers are “federalized,” meaning they do not have to abide by the jurisdictional boundaries of their departments, although McDonald said that doesn’t mean they are traveling the country looking for fugitives.

“If they have to go to Atlanta to find someone they don’t have to worry about jurisdictions,” he said.

Task force officers have made 198 arrests, five of which were federally prosecuted, according to Dalton Police information.

In Hall County, Ware said the task force is equally as aggressive in battling gangs.

“We are as proactive as we can be in the limits of the law,” he said. “We will get them for anything and everything in our power. We do not give them breaks.”

Graffiti has been “one of the major thorns” for the city of Gainesville and Hall County, Ware said.

The task force had been using jailed gang members to paint over graffiti but found the work was sloppy and time consuming. So the city bought a spray-painting machine and now officers drive around the city and paint over graffiti as quickly as it is reported.

“We paint over private and public property, roadways and abandoned buildings, etc.,” Ware said. “We paint over it as fast as possible. We’re trying to show it will not be tolerated. We spent several years of trial and error on graffiti and we found this was the best way to cover it up. That’s part of our duties.”

The city of Dalton has a program called RAP (Report and Paint) to battle graffiti. When someone finds graffiti they report it to police, who photograph it.

The owner of the home or business agrees to the use of either donated paint or their own paint and Dalton Community Center director Tom Pinson takes a group of juvenile offenders out to paint over the graffiti. According to the Dalton Police Department blog (www.daltonpdblog.org/), it can take from one to three weeks from the time the report is made for the graffiti to be painted over.