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Strategies Ages 18+

Description

Prevention

  • Conduct a communitywide assessment of risk and protective factors for delinquency and gang involvement.
  • Conduct a communitywide assessment of the gang problem.
    1. Acknowledge the gang problem.
    2. Form an agreement among stakeholders to work together in addressing the gang problem.
    3. Set goals and objectives.
    4. Develop and integrate relevant services, strategies, and graduated sanctions.
    5. Form an Interagency Intervention Team that targets gang members for interagency services and sanctions and provides case management.
    6. Create a one-stop center that addresses gang involvement and general delinquency involvement with individual problem assessment, services, service referral, and recreational activities.
    7. Implement an evaluation of outcomes.
  • Develop a strategic action plan to address the interrelationship of juvenile delinquency and gang problems, consisting of prevention, intervention, and suppression programs and activities.
  • Involve community stakeholders in establishing clear and consistent social norms and effective social policies.

Suppression

  • Provide support for state and local crime control agencies (e.g., police, prosecutors, courts) that work in teams focused on selective incarceration of the most violent and repeat older gang offenders in the most violent gangs; enforcement of probation controls (graduated sanctions and intensive supervision) on younger, less violent gang offenders; and arrests of gang leaders in “hot spots” of gang activity.
  • Crime data should be analyzed carefully when designing interventions.
  • Social services should balance law enforcement efforts to the extent possible.
  • City leaders should provide concrete forms of support to the municipal agencies involved.
  • City leaders should hold the municipal agencies involved accountable for the results.
  • Cost data should be collected to determine whether the project merits continuation.
  • Provide support for federal, state, and local law enforcement collaboration across jurisdictional boundaries.
  • Employ a variety of gang suppression strategies and tactics:
    1. Confidential informants and undercover officers.
    2. Surveillance/arrest, buy/bust, and reverse-sting operations.
    3. Interdiction, barriers, and warrant execution.
    4. Other investigative approaches, such as surveillance, follow-up investigations, and multijurisdictional task forces.
    5. Suppression through patrol, including directed patrol and community-oriented policing.
    6. Suppression through enforcement of health, building, and zoning codes and nuisance/civil abatement ordinances.
    7. Enforcement of curfew and truancy laws and regulations in gang areas.
    8. Consent to search and seize firearms.
    9. Use of traffic barriers to block gang mobility and reduce criminal activity.
    10. Vertical prosecution.
Date Created: December 16, 2020