By DAVE COLLINS Associated Press
Nearly gone are the gang days of the 1980s and '90s, when the Bloods
wore head-to-toe red, the Crips wore blue and Latin Kings wore black and
gold.
Gangs from coast to coast have toned down their use of colors and are
even removing or altering tattoos to avoid being easily identified by
police and witnesses, law enforcement officials say.
Today, the most you might see is part of a red handkerchief hanging out
of a back pocket or a gold and black baseball cap, said Johnmichael
O'Hare, a Hartford police sergeant who monitors gangs.
"Many of them don't wear colors. They tell us they're not in gangs,"
O'Hare said. "They're trying to avoid detection from law enforcement."
Gang members also don't want to stand out because they are committing
more white-collar-type crimes, such as credit card and identity thefts,
authorities say.
"If you want to go into Macys or Neiman Marcus and use a fraudulently
obtained credit card and you have all these tattoos, it's more
difficult," said William Dunn, a Los Angeles police detective and author
of the 2007 book "The Gangs of Los Angeles."
Another impetus: laws passed in several states making it easier for police to target gangs.
In Connecticut, officials can use racketeering laws once reserved for
the mob to go after gangs. In Los Angeles, court injunctions allow
police to enforce nighttime curfews and arrest people for hanging out in
public and wearing gang colors.
"So we don't see so much wearing of the colors. We don't see so much of the tattooing," Dunn said.
When it comes to going to prison, gang members also don't want to be
identified because they'll be placed in more restrictive conditions for
security reasons, officials say.
Wearing colors has long been a way for gang members to show solidarity,
but the FBI says gang members are indeed shying away from displaying
identifiers. Often the only time colors and other identifiers are now
displayed is at gang functions and funerals, according to the FBI's 2013
National Gang report.
While gangs are showing their colors less, they have given police
another way to identify them — their use of Facebook, Twitter and other
social media sites.
"Today they declare themselves gang members on the Internet," O'Hare said.
Still, he said, their detection-avoiding efforts on the street have made
police officials' jobs a little harder. Hartford officers now have to
get up close to identify gang members, he said. On a recent day,
officers stopped a group of youths in commonplace T-shirts and shorts
breaking a loitering law and made them all sit down.
O'Hare, interested in gathering information on gangs, got several of
them to pull up their sleeves and pull down their shirt collars,
revealing telltale tattoos of the Los Solidos gang — theater masks with
the words "laugh now cry later" and the letters TSO for The Solid Ones,
the English translation of their group's name. Officers then let the
youths go — but kept their names and suspected gang affiliations in the
event of future encounters.
In addition to well-established gangs like the Bloods and Latin Kings,
police are dealing with smaller, neighborhood-based street gangs that
can be just as violent and often wear no colors or tattoos at all, law
enforcement officials say. The neighborhood gangs usually are friends
who grew up together and claim several blocks as their territory, O'Hare
said.
One such neighborhood gang in Hartford, Money Green/Bedroc, often wore
the kind of athletic jerseys popular among kids nationwide, according to
a state grand jury report issued in December.
The reputed leader, Donald Raynor, was arrested last year. Raynor, 29,
is now on trial in state court in Hartford on a murder charge and awaits
trial in five other cases involving attempted murder charges.
Police say he led the particularly violent gang, which sold drugs and
had "hit squad" enforcers who were involved in shootings of rivals in
2007 and 2008. Raynor has pleaded not guilty in all the cases.
Source http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/street-gangs-tone-colors-tattoos-25528300
Drake stopped off at the famous Shamrock Social Club for a couple new tattoos on Wednesday.
