About: Gangs in the United States   Sponge Permalink

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When one conjures up an image of street gangs in the United States it is usually influenced by media portrayals of gun-toting youths engaged in disputes over territory and disrespect. The most publicized street gangs in the U.S. are African-American; black gangs were not recognized as a social problem until after the great migration of the 1910s. An exception was noted in 1853 Philadelphia.

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  • Gangs in the United States
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  • When one conjures up an image of street gangs in the United States it is usually influenced by media portrayals of gun-toting youths engaged in disputes over territory and disrespect. The most publicized street gangs in the U.S. are African-American; black gangs were not recognized as a social problem until after the great migration of the 1910s. An exception was noted in 1853 Philadelphia.
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  • When one conjures up an image of street gangs in the United States it is usually influenced by media portrayals of gun-toting youths engaged in disputes over territory and disrespect. The most publicized street gangs in the U.S. are African-American; black gangs were not recognized as a social problem until after the great migration of the 1910s. An exception was noted in 1853 Philadelphia. The history of European-American youth gangs extends as far back as the 1780s. Although lacking a definition, the gangs then were characterized by young people hanging out on street corners. It is thought these early groups formed to protect their localities from other similar groups of youths. Herbert Asbury depicted some of these groups in his history of Irish and American gangs in Manhattan. He described how gangs would fight for territory, control of criminal enterprises, and simply for the love of fighting. The title of Asbury's book (though little of its content) was later used by Martin Scorsese for the motion picture Gangs of New York. Gangs in the 19th Century were often multi-ethnic as neighborhoods did not display the social polarization that has segregated different ethnic groups in the postmodern city (see Edward Soja). A host of European nationalities including English American|English, Scottish American|Scottish, Irish American|Irish and German American|German could be found in the same neighborhoods. This made territoriality for gangs much more important than ethnic homogeneity. There were at least 30,000 gangs and 800,000 gang members active across the USA in 2007, up from 731,500 in 2002 and 750,000 in 2004. By 1999, Hispanics in the United States|Hispanics accounted for 47% of all gang members, African Americans|Blacks 31%, White Americans|Whites 13%, and Asian American|Asian 6%. According to a Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth, many street gangs in Texas have no organized command structures. Individual "cliques" of gangs, defined by streets, parts of streets, apartment complexes, or parts of apartment complexes, act as individual groups. Texas "Cliques" tend to be headed by leaders called "OG"s (short for "original gangster"s) and each "clique" performs a specific activity or set of activities, such as controlling trafficking of recreational drugs and managing prostitution in a given area.
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