Heavy crackdown on youth gangs counter-productive: study

Tough police crackdowns on gang violence are counterproductive and lead to better-organized gangs, a new study showed amid talks between US and Latin American police chiefs to hammer out a global strategy to tackle the scourge.

The year-long study, conducted in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and the US capital, said repressive police actions against youth gangs have actually made the problem worse. "The research shows that gangs have grown more organized rather than less in response to hard-line police approaches. Public security has not improved as a result of these strategies," said the researchers led by the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico, a private institute of higher education in Mexico City.

The report, released by the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), comes a day after a three-day international summit opened in Los Angeles with the aim of forging a strategy to curb the menace of violent criminal gangs.

Latino gangs that originated in Los Angeles have been blamed for smuggling drugs and weapons as well as murders, rapes and robberies.

The report recommends following "best practices" seen elsewhere in Central America and the United States.

Recommended practices cited by the report included police efforts in Washington to treat the problem comprehensively, "police involvement in prevention programs" in Nicaragua and local efforts in Central America to develop community-based responses.

The report called for such successful methods to be considered in Mexico, "where there is a need of preventive and coordinated responses."

In the case of Mexico, the investigators said they had reached "a surprising conclusion": gangs made up of Central American immigrants -- or linked to Central American youth gangs such as the Mara Salvatrucha or the 18th Street Gang (Mara 18) -- are not widespread. "Mexican youth gangs exist, and drug-trafficking criminal gangs are a serious security problem. But, despite alarmist rhetoric, research shows that Central American gangs are not a major problem in Mexico," the report said.

The investigators emphasized the nature of gangs varies from country to country. "Youth gangs are a serious threat to public security in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala" and represent "a much smaller problem" in Nicaragua, they said.

In the Washington area, gangs made up of Central American immigrants or the children of immigrants are active in certain areas, "but are not at this time a major public security issue," they said.

In San Salvador on Monday, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his Central American counterparts weighed proposed cooperation projects to fight youth gangs which have become a criminal transnational problem.

The international summit underway in Los Angeles has drawn police chiefs from Mexico, Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and the United States as well as officials from the FBI and the US Justice Department.

In Central America, according to local police estimates, more than 200,000 marginalized youths, many of them deported from US cities, are members of gangs, including the notorious Mara Salvatruch and Mara 18.

8 February 2007

http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=162091

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