THE NEW gang injunction bill advancing in the state Legislature with the support of some prosecutors and Boston police would give them broad authority to bring civil lawsuits against reputed gangs or their members. The proposed bill would bar gang members from hanging out together in the neighborhoods and parks that police say they terrorize.
Despite legitimate concerns about trampling on the constitutional rights of individuals to congregate in public areas, gang injunctions have become increasingly popular with law enforcement, public officials, and community residents, especially in California, which leads the nation in this anti-gang strategy. Having worked in Boston and Los Angeles with gang members and communities over many years, I know that such injunctions are not a panacea.
Studies of their impact offer both caution and hope. There is some evidence that injunctions lead to modest, short-term improvements in community safety by addressing the immediate threats neighborhood gang members can present. Injunctions can reduce gang member visibility and intimidation along with residents' fear of gang confrontations and crime. That is the good news.
But there is little evidence that injunctions significantly affect mid- to long-term outcomes, with the exception of lessening fear of crime. Positive effects are likely only with focused and sustained investment in the social fabric of the impacted communities. It's true that marginalized communities generate gangs, but these neighborhoods also hold the key to preventing or controlling them.
In order to succeed, the Boston injunction needs to be part of a coordinated effort to reach out to these neighborhoods, increasing and strengthening community and resident groups. And it should be coupled with increased resident access to municipal and other public resources. New services to promote social, educational, or vocational skills are needed to divert neighborhood youth from joining a gang. Gang members must be offered positive alternatives.
These and other efforts to increase mutual trust and stronger bonds among families, local groups, and neighborhood organizations can help reduce local crime and violence, and make it harder for gangs to form in the first place. As one young man told me, "When I was in a gang, I always wanted to be something else, too. I had a double mind. I wanted to be with the gang and I also wanted to be a family person. I wanted to have a job, a business, a family; a home is what I wanted. . . I just didn't know how to get there."
Without community engagement, an injunction cannot by itself improve a neighborhood held hostage by a gang. It becomes just an ordinary gang suppression strategy - a Band-Aid for beleaguered communities. In Boston's case, we need to ask whether community residents and groups would be directly involved in selecting which gangs to target and in building evidence for the injunction. They could determine which neighborhood areas, what time of the day or night poses the greatest threat, what offenses have the most impact on resident safety. Are community oversight mechanisms in place to monitor the quality of police intelligence, and ensure that individual and group rights are not being violated through targeting efforts? Studies of past injunctions reveal very little direct community involvement - even as supporters promoted them as a strategy to engage community residents with law enforcement.
Injunctions should be used selectively and narrowly, and implemented with vigilance. If deployed as a stand-alone enforcement and prosecution approach, gang injunctions will be ineffective in the long run, or easy targets for abuse by authorities. Indeed, it's not uncommon for community residents in targeted neighborhoods to view the police as an occupying force.
Police and prosecutors must engage community residents and groups of all ages in lasting, collaborative relationships in which reactive enforcement is only one aspect of promoting safety and well-being in communities. Decades of uncoordinated, inadequately conceived gang-control policies have not been able to stifle gangs in communities in Boston or in Los Angeles, where some gangs go back four generations. Boston has a tradition of innovation, strong neighborhoods, and a commitment to eliminating disparities. Surely we can do better.
Joan Serra Hoffman is a visiting scholar at the Center for Youth and Communities at the Heller School, Brandeis University.
