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Street Gangs
Take it to the Tweets
By Laura Herrera
Gangs have taken their promotion, recruitment and fights from their streets to their tweets.
Called “cyberbanging,” street gangs are getting tech savvy and using social networks, like Twitter and Facebook, to glorify and promote a street gang lifestyle that has become predominate in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles. Gangs also use these websites to traffic drugs and coordinate crimes.
Gangs, like The Original Young Gangsters (OYG) located in East Harlem, have initiated what some investigators called turf wars through Twitter. Insults via tweets have been used to incite fights between rival gangs in the neighborhoods.
According to the New York Daily News, a boy shot in the leg last November may have been targeted as a result of a fight started by OYG through provocative tweets.
Police said that tweets, like the one posted by a girl with the username LickSumIishaHun which read “I knoe b*tches from oyg that would dead mob yah sh*t in harlem,” aim to incite a fight by luring out a rival faction.
Insults via tweets have been used to incite fights between rival gangs in the neighborhoods.
The West Coast of the United States, specifically in Los Angeles, is experiencing the same shift in gang promotion tactics from on the street to online.
Alex Alonso, a Los Angeles gang expert, told the Los Angeles Daily News that although gang members are using social networking websites, like MySpace and Facebook, that does not mean they are using it for recruitment purposes. To Alonso, “they’re just representing their neighborhoods, not trying the recruit.”
However, authorities believe that impressionable youth may be influenced by the slang and clothing that comes along with gang culture portrayed on the Internet. Gang members post pictures of themselves in attire with gang logos and bullet proof vests. This may entice young people to befriend gang members on the Internet and eventually join their group.
The tweet gang trend has also appeared in unsuspected areas, like Tulsa, Oklahoma. According to Fox 23, thousands of gang members in Tulsa are using Facebook, Twitter, Xanga and MySpace to communicate with one another.
But with the influx of gangs on social networks comes an influx of police officers tracking them. Investigators are monitoring Twitter and other social networks, creating false accounts and trying to befriend gang members. This way police can track people for clues on crimes.
Cyberbanging may be helpful to police in the long run because the Internet is considered public domain in a court of law. Regardless if a website is set to “private,” the Internet is not expected to have any privacy and any evidence is fully admissible in court.
Crips and Bloods drug dealers in a Manhattan housing project were busted Jan. 13 for selling crack, cocaine and heroine. Their arrest was accredited to the dealers bragging on their MySpace page. Members could be seen flashing gang signs on their pages and boasting about their affiliations.
But with police attempting to scout out members, gangs have crafted ways to avoid exposure. Gang affiliations are hidden through cleverly created, and almost incomprehensible, slang. These codes include letters, numbers and symbols, and take time for police to crack.
Organizations are also tracking gang members in hopes to prevent violence. The Perfect Peace Ministry Youth Outreach in Harlem tracks 4,000 at-risk youth and has managed to break up gang fights in the area.
Gang members post pictures of themselves in attire with gang logos and bullet proof vests.
Gang recruitment through social networks has even gone beyond United States borders. Mexican drug cartels use YouTube to post videos of slain victims to intimidate enemies and recruit newcomers. The videos are slideshows set to professional singers’ tracks that show shell casings and murdered police officers. YouTube informed officials about the videos, and both the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and Mexican officials use these videos to track gang members and predict any future crimes.
Police say that the simplest way to stay out of the way of street gangs targeting youth through social networks is to avoid free song downloads on gang-affiliated pages and by not giving telephone numbers, home addresses or school names out on these websites.
No longer are street gangs limited to their ‘hoods. Messages on Twitter and Facebook make it easy for gangs to target youth in their own homes. Monitoring the sites for cyberbangers takes privacy settings to a whole new level.
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