How I Got the Story: Youth gangs in the suburbs

By Fernanda Santos

Published 7.5.05

Those were the first hurdles I faced when I set out to write a piece about suburban teenage girl gangs for Seventeen magazine in 2004.

Seventeen asked me to profile a small-town girl gang member and write a sidebar that would explain how prevalent girl gangs are in small affluent communities and why “good” girls are lured into gangs.

My biggest challenge was finding the right girl to anchor the piece. She had to come from a middle-class background, I was told. She had to live in the suburbs. She had to be active in a gang. And she had to be willing to share her pains and secrets with a complete stranger.

I began my search on the Web, looking for stories about small-town gang bangers to help me zero in on a county or city in New York where, at least anecdotally, teenage girl gang membership seemed on the rise.

I interviewed Ron “Cook” Barrett, the gang prevention coordinator for the New York’s Department of Youth and Family Services. Barrett has an office he hardly visits. He spends his time talking to kids in schools and on the streets of Albany, the state capital. He visits juvenile detention facilities to make sure the teens he counsels have his support even after they’re locked up.

“There’s no color line or economic divider. Gangs are not a just the poor black kids’ reality anymore,” Barrett told me. “I deal with dozens of kids who come from good families, but they’re lonely [because] their parents are not around too much, they’re always working or they’re too busy dealing with their own problems. “These kids are looking for companionship and excitement; they’re looking for something new – and that’s exactly what they’ll find in a gang.”

Barrett spends his Saturday nights at the YMCA, running a dance-and-play program frequented by hundreds of at-risk youth. One of them is a sharp-tongued teen named Tina, the girl I would go on to profile.

Tina is 16. She grew up in a rural town in the Catskills, the picturesque mountains of upstate New York, but Albany had become her stomping grounds since she started hanging with the Crips four years ago. She has long dirty-blond hair and hazel eyes. She wears wire-rimmed glasses that give her an A-student look. She bites her nails, which are stained yellow on her right hand. That’s the hand she uses to grip the many Newport Lights she would smoke weeks later, on the day we finally met.

Tina trusts Barrett, a man I had never met but who bought the story idea I proposed and decided to help me out. Tina agreed to talk to me even as her boyfriend, who shares a likeness to the rapper 50 Cent, told her not to.

In early February, I traveled the 200 miles that separate Brooklyn and Albany to meet Tina, but she didn’t show up. “Tina’s like a kite,” Barrett told me. “She’ll go where the wind blows. There’s no such thing as commitment or responsibility in her life.”

She finally came through on a cold March afternoon, when she strolled out of her sister’s house, barefoot, wearing a baggy blue T-shirt and jeans. She and I sat on the back seat of Barrett’s Toyota, already crammed with two boxes, a sweater, candy wrappers and at least a half-dozen books.

During the three hours we spoke, Tina told me about her decision to join the Crips. She said she was teased in middle school for being one of the few white girls among mostly minority students. She told me about her mother’s alcoholism, her desperate desire to fit in, her craving for affection.

To make sure I knew where to steer my conversation with Tina, what to ask and which nuances really mattered in her story, I had spoken to a psychotherapist who counsels teenage gang members in suburban Connecticut, a police captain who runs a gang prevention program in a town much like the one where Tina grew up and, of course, Barrett. He has counseled Tina for three years, since she stopped showing up for class and her school filed a PINS (person in need of supervision) petition with Family Court.

Talking to current or former gang members, experts, parents and community leaders will give you the meat of your story. To back it up with numbers, check the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, which list the number of arrests by the age, race and gender of the offender in mostly every county, city or state. Has there been an increase in murders or shootings in your community? Take the numbers and ask your police chief or a precinct commander if the increase is at all gang-related.

Other useful numbers can be gleaned from Family Court statistics, which come out every year in most jurisdictions. Make sure you ask for the number of delinquency cases, preferably broken down by personal, property and drug offenses. A progressive increase in vandalism cases, for example, may be indicative of a growing youth gang presence within a community, a New York City Family Court judge told me. Don’t make assumptions, though. Ask the experts -- judges, cops, probation officers -- if the increase in crime can be associated with gang activity.

Juvenile detention facilities often keep a record of the number of detainees that are affiliated to gangs and which gangs they belong to. The information will help you identify the gangs that are active in your community. A youth police officer can help map out each gang’s turf. But be prepared to deal with denial, because many suburban police departments will refuse to acknowledge their community has a problem with youth gangs.

Tina’s story proved to me that youth gangs are as real in the suburbs as they are in the inner city -- something I know that East Coast reporters have yet to tap into.

In a town miles away from the big city, a place of clean, unclogged streets and manicured yards, I found a girl who went through the same brutal initiation that a would-be gangbanger would go through in the ghetto. When she formally joined the Crips last year, Tina was kicked and punched by at least 20 boys and girls. They beat her so badly that her right eyeball came close to dislodging from its socket. Tina spent three days in the hospital, nursing two broken ribs, scores of bruises and at risk of losing her eyesight.

She could have chosen another form of initiation.

“I could have fucked a bunch of guys, but it would be too nasty and degrading,” she said. “I asked to get beat up because I knew it would be quicker and in the end, I would still have my dignity.”

Fernanda Santos is a fellow with Johns Hopkins University's International Reporting Project. She was most recently a police reporter for the Daily News in New York. This article is a reprint from the Fall 2004 issue of the Journalism Center's annual magazine, The Children's Beat.