Commentary

NYPD Doubles Gang Unit, Cites Social Media

Social media provides an amazing set of tools to help people organize themselves whatever their purpose may be, with applications ranging from revolutions to elections to social advocacy to group discounts to crowd-funding to shooting each other.

Yes, shooting each other is definitely on the list: this week the New York Police Department announced it is expanding its gang unit to 300 detectives in response to an uptick in criminal activity which the NYPD blames, at least in part, on social media. According to the NYPD, social media is helping fuel violence between low-level street gangs which Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly described as “looser associations of younger men who identify themselves by the block they live on, or on which side of a housing development they reside.”

Kelly went on: “Their loyalty is to their friends living in a relatively small area and their rivalries are based not on narcotics trafficking or some other entrepreneurial interest, but simply on local turf.” In other words, these gangs are not shooting each other over drug profits or control of some criminal enterprise; they’re just, you know, shooting each other. With nothing substantial to fight over, these endless cycles of tit-for-tat killing are basically vendettas -- which is bad news, because it means there’s no logical end-point for any given dispute (besides killing everyone on the opposing side). 

Kelly said that the expanded gang unit will work closely with other parts of the NYPD dedicated to monitoring social media.

The news comes close on the heels of a big gang bust facilitated by social media in September. According to the commissioner, the NYPD was able to bring charges against dozens of members of two gangs, the Very Crispy Gangsters and the Rockstarz, in part because of their online braggadocio: “Because of these individuals’ insatiable desire to brag about what they did, these investigators were able to draw a virtual map of their activities and bring them to justice.”

And in January of this year the NYPD busted two other gangs from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, the “Wavegang” and “Hoodstarz,” for a series of shootings that killed three and injured more. Social media played a key role in nabbing 43 gang members from both gangs, according to Kelly, who said police investigators “followed gang members on Twitter, on Facebook and on YouTube. By linking their boastings and postings on social media to active cases and other crime, these officers were able to build this case.”

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