GANNETT STATE BUREAU
The state's 2006 Uniform Crime Report, issued last week, shows gang-related murders accounted for 11 percent of the state's total homicides, falling into step with past years' numbers.
But another state department's statistics show that the crime report is grossly underestimating gang-related violence and paints a far more brutal picture.
Katherine Hempstead, director of the Center for Health Statistics at the state Department of Health and Senior Services, says her department's Violent Death Reporting System found 300 homicides in 2005 roughly 72 percent were either gang-related or "gang-like" in the style and circumstances of the death. This is compared to the 52 reported gang-related murders in 2005 by the State Police's annual crime report.
"What we were finding was that (the UCR) was really under-measuring," Hempstead said.
"You see all these other homicides that are exactly the same," Hempstead said. "They are occurring in the same areas, the same kind of victims."
Hempstead said while the state's UCR narrowly defines a murder and can potentially lowball the amount of gang-related homicides in the state, the Violent Death Reporting System includes the deaths in the gang category if the circumstances are gang-like in nature, even if no positive link is found.
Typically, this means a firearm is used in a public place with young males involved where no motive can be found.
Although the law-enforcement report is called "uniform," it is up to each municipality to decide how it reports a crime. Even if a crime is suspected of being gang-related, without a positive indicator, it can be filed under a variety of other circumstances, and that is left to the discretion of each department.
East Orange Police Director Jose Cordero said because departments have not been given an explicit definition on how to classify these types of incidents, "Every municipality has its own flavor on how to report a motive."
"Oftentimes motives are listed as disputes, robberies, retaliation, and a whole host of other categories that do not specifically link it to gangs, although they are very much gang- and or drug-related," Cordero said.
Essex County Prosecutor Paula Dow said even if their office has a "strong suspicion" a homicide is gang-related, they cannot report it as such without positive information.
"That is an area where the reporting is not 100 percent clear or accurate," said Dow, whose county saw the largest number of homicides in the state in 2006, 146.
These large disparities are one of the reasons Gov. Corzine is pushing a new anti-crime initiative which, in terms of law enforcement, looks heavily toward revving up intelligence-led police work.
Attorney General Anne Milgram said the new tracking system will look to better define and unify across departments the characteristics of gang-related crimes and that the state "really needs to start tracking this better."
"We should all have uniform criteria," said Milgram, who added it is important the new system "flag not only when the defendant, the shooter, is a gang member, but also when the victim is gang-related because it allows us to draw a broader picture on whether the homicide is gang-related."
Milgram said it was "probably right" that the gang-related homicides reported by the UCR are lower than actual incidents.
"I would hazard a guess that, if we track it well, we would be well above 11 percent," Milgram said.
Cordero said his department analyzed 2004 homicides two ways and saw the share of gang-related homicides jump from 12 percent to 88 percent once it abandoned a system similar to the UCR in favor of a newer, broader tracking system. Cordero said the number of gang-related homicides reported on the UCR is "way off the mark."
"I would suspect it's a lot higher than that is reported on the UCR, and I mean a lot higher," Cordero said.
But it may not just be the definitions that account for the disparity in the numbers.
Detective Frank Clayton, of the gang intelligence unit at the Mercer County Prosecutor's Office, said about 70 percent of the homicides in Mercer since 2005 were gang-related, reflecting Hempstead's numbers. Clayton added "politics plays big" into why the general UCR numbers are so much lower.
"If you're trying to develop a city or trying to get developers to come in, you don't want to tell them you have a gang issue," Clayton said.
"You got lies, big fat lies, in the statistics," Clayton said of the UCR.
Hempstead admits the Violent Death Reporting System's definition is "loose and broad." She cautions the numbers should not be understood to mean everything is a gang shootings, but rather "a kind of violent behavior that is associated with gangs and the gangster life."
"Gang-like" murders are taking place more frequently, even if they are not gang-related, said Patrick Carr, an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University, who specializes in gang activity in cities. Carr attributed this to the proliferation of guns among gang members, who could use their guns during an incident even if the victim is not a gang member.
"It ratchets up the odds of any kind of altercation of any type of dispute turning more violent and/or lethal," Carr said.
The rise in "gang-like" shootings could also be attributed to "wannabe gangsters," as Carr and Hempstead put it. Carr said most of the time, it's "mundane behavior" but other times, though less likely, it can become violent.
"In other cases, it can have more lethal outcomes where kids who see this behavior start getting guns and imitating drive-bys and wannabe behavior can turn deadly," Carr said.
Michael Rispoli: mrispol@gannett.com
[BACK] |
