This week, a new law enforcement initiative was announced to launch a new strategy concerning gang activity. This was welcomed news to anyone who has picked up a newspaper or turned on the television lately. For those of you who have done neither, let me give you the fifteen second update. Gangs are here and they show no signs of leaving on their own. They are not “wanna-bes”; they are full fledged gang members. They are the driving force behind our crime rates and they will kill you in a heartbeat. And last, but not least, they are taking in a percentage of our young people only to doom them to a life of crime and failure and in many cases the loss of their own lives.
It is apparent that it is going to take a collaborative effort to win this battle and our law enforcement agencies are to be applauded for this program. It is interesting that the new initiative, that has been chosen, is similar in many ways to the same philosophy that is practiced by the gangs themselves. No, I am not suggesting that our police start wearing their pants down around their knees, or that we should come up with our own bandanas, but there are some things that can be learned from the gang mentality.
I don’t want to give gang members too much credit. The method in which they operate has been around for hundreds of years. Probably best marketed by the fictitious “Three Musketeers”; the all for one and one for all mantra makes plenty of sense in situations that are very much a part of real life as well as those that the sword wielding threesome may have encountered. Gangs have always lived by the credo that if you hurt one of them you hurt all of them. That is why they call them gangs. They don’t travel alone, they travel in gangs. Three is a more powerful force than two and four is a more powerful force than three and so on and so on. It is poetic justice indeed that this response to gangs is being made up of another gang, albeit a legal gang, to rid us of a problem that has not found remedy by conventional means.
This gang is made up of several divisions of the police department and code enforcement officers, utilizing laws that have been specifically written with gang activity in mind and being prosecuted in hopes of handing out stiffer sentences based on offenses committed under the gang defined statutes. Utilizing so many efforts into one force will have the same effect, but a more concentrated blow to the problem. It would be similar to doing away with a group of many carpenters who are pinging away with their smaller hammers and replacing them with one giant blow by a forty pound sledge hammer. The nails still get pounded into the surface but it happens much quicker and there is a great likelihood that the nail will stay in place for a much longer period of time.
These proverbial sledge hammers have many nails sticking up that need to be pounded and they need to be pounded soon. It is up to each of us to help with this effort by reporting what we know to local law enforcement officials. It is very easy to sit around and wring our hands while some of our neighborhoods are going to hell in a hand basket. We don’t like it, but we would rather just not get involved. For those of you who have chosen that response to gang activity, you might as well go ahead and sign your deed over to the gangs. Because before long, if gangs are left unchecked no one else would have the house if you gave it to them.
It is time to get involved and help the police as they try to help you. This new initiative is a great opportunity for us to regain some of the areas that face being lost to a bunch of thugs that could care less about those things that mean so much to law abiding citizens. They are not asking you to swing the hammer, just show them the nails that are sticking up and they will smack them for you. Sounds like a plan to me.
