Recent reports of rising violent crime rates reflect the need for a federal anti-gang law and aggressive implementation of best practices in anti-gang investigations and prosecutions. These escalating crime figures also demonstrate the gang-related risks of short-range notions of “criminal justice reform.” The fact that no serious anti-gang components are part of legislation like the First Step Act and its state equivalents proves the connection with between these “reforms” and increased gang crime.
In a recent column, commentator Daniel Horowitz explains that Bureau of Justice Statistics calculations show that during the period that “criminal justice reform” began to take hold, “the number of violent-crime victims rose from 2.7 million in 2015 to 3.3 million in 2018, an increase of 604,000 victims.”
Federal studies tell us that gangs are directly responsible one-half to ninety percent of violent crime in the U.S. With the rise that Horowitz identifies, it is therefore obvious that gang crime victims have increased part-and-parcel with the implementation First Step Act and its state counterparts.
This includes homicides. Using a chart to show the relation between decreases in prison populations and matching rises in murder rates, Horowitz explains, “The rate of violent crime is almost perfectly inverse to the rate of incarceration.”
No one denies that improvements are needed to the criminal justice system. At the top of the list is enacting and enhancing anti-gang laws across the country.
When programs that lead to mass release of prisoners are proposed, however, responsible leaders in politics and the media should demand that proportionate guarantees that gang members will remain in custody. If effective anti-gang restrictions are not baked into those cakes, right-thinking politicians and media should oppose them.
They should also condemn those who blindly push for legislation that demonstrably empowers gangs, enables gang crime, and increases gang victims.
Will the upsurge in victims need to hit one million before “reforms” like the First Step Act are reigned in? Is 1,000,000 more victims the number that we will have to see before a federal anti-gang prosecution law is passed? Will it take another 400,000 added victims before law enforcement and prosecution in states with anti-gang laws, like Georgia, to utilize them to their full potential?
And while no credible law enforcement officer or prosecutor wants to see individuals incarcerated when they should not be, or expend limited resources on minor offenses, recklessly invoking those principles in a way that generates exploding numbers of gang crime victims ranges from negligent to callously indifferent—to accomplice.
Gangs dominate all crime in this country. This includes violent offenses, illegal narcotics distribution, and human trafficking. Real repairs to the criminal justice system must include laws to ensure that gang membership, crime, and victim numbers all go down instead of continuing to go up.
James “Jimmy” Callaway serves as the President of the Georgia Gang Investigators Association and is the Chief of Police for the City of Morrow. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily express those of the Georgia Gang Investigators Association or Morrow.
