Eighth grade was a hard year for Diana (all names are changed to protect identity), a young Salvadoran woman who now participates in the girls’ leadership program at the Latin American Youth Center. That was the year she got caught jumping other girls in the locker room (that means that she, and other girls from her crew, had instructions to beat the girls for exactly 13 seconds everywhere on their bodies but their faces.) Her godmother marched down to the school during Dians’s meeting with school officials and the police and made Diana get on her knees and stay there for the whole meeting. Diana was expelled and spent half of her eighth grade year at home with her abusive mother and nothing to do.

Diana managed to convince the school to let her come back, but she had to do community service hours and a presentation on what she wanted to be when she grew up. She prepared a poster about her dream of becoming a surgeon, and was ready to go in and give school another shot.

And then she cut school the day before the presentation to go to a skipping party with other kids from the STC gang – Street Thug Criminals – who were also skipping school that day.

Jumping In
Diana’s story echoes through the schools and streets of this city. As Mack Jones, Assistant Principal at Bell Multicultural High School, said, “Our kids’ problems are waiting for them at 3:15 on various corners of this neighborhood.” Gangs as big as the notorious MS-13, with an estimated 100,000 members in the United States and Central America, as well as smaller neighborhood crews operate in Columbia Heights and surrounding neighborhoods.

Joining a gang or crew can start as organically as just hanging out with a bunch of friends. Kids sometimes join gangs for protection, but most of the time, they just want to be part of something. Lacking the access to programs and activities that higher-income youths have, kids will join gangs just to have something fun to do.

You need to get “jumped in” to a gang, meaning the other members beat you for a certain amount of time. Sometimes 20 kids will line up and beat and kick an initiate all at once. If he or she gets up afterwards, they’ll do it all over again. If it’s a girl being jumped in, sometimes she’ll have to have sex with all the boys in the line.

Win One for the GIP
Between 1999 and 2003, Columbia Heights and Mt. Pleasant experienced a surge of homicides by Latino gangs battling for turf. The city responded with a new program called the Gang Intervention Partnership (GIP), which brought together the kids, the community, and the cops to build relationships and share information.

The program has been hailed as an enormous success, with only one homicide attributed to Latino gangs in the four years since the program’s inception (compared with 21 in the four years preceding it.) According to Councilmember Tommy Wells, Chair of the Human Services Committee, “The GIP has been successful because it engages youth on their level, provides them with positive alternatives to gang activity, and provides services delivered by youth experts and professionals who are, in many cases, trained to identify issues in the lives of the youth and their families.”

GIP police officers, trained in community policing that marries prevention and enforcement, serve as mentors stationed in the schools and after-school programs. Jasmin Benab of the Latin America Youth Center (LAYC) testifies to the trust that’s been built between the kids and the police officer stationed there: “Three years ago they used to run away from him. Now they give him hugs.”

Not everyone agrees with the model of including police in gang-fighting strategies, however. One person with a different perspective is Kenneth Barnes, the founder of ROOT (Reaching Out to Others Together), which seeks to bring African-American communities together to address the root causes of violence. Barnes holds a degree in clinical psychology and is himself a victim of DC’s violence – his son was murdered in 2001.

“I believe violence is a public health issue,” he says. “The police’s job is to provide public safety and to protect the citizens – they’re not supposed to solve our health issues.” Barnes credits Latino community organizing with the drop in crime in that community, not police involvement in gang intervention.

In any case, as Latino gang violence has cooled, African-American crews have filled the gap. In October and November 2007, eleven people were shot in Columbia Heights in shootings attributed to a raging turf battle among the 17th and Euclid crew, CTU (Clifton Terrace University--a crew that operates around 14th and Girard), and the Hobart Stars, off Georgia Avenue.

Although there is no African-American equivalent to the enormity and brutality of the MS-13 gang, stopping the crews’ violence has become a top priority for Ward One Councilmember Jim Graham. He lobbied hard for expansion of the GIP to include African-American crews. What he got may not please everyone.

Tweaking the Model
The GIP is joining with a similar program that has been operating east of the river. They will operate out of a new, centralized location in order to better share intelligence and respond to crises. Though the future location of this new unit is yet to be determined, for the immediate future it is moving to police headquarters at 300 Indiana Avenue NW.

The Latin American Youth Center, which has been a primary partner in the fight against youth gang violence, is worried that the move will take officers out of Columbia Heights, where they have been so accessible. Assistant Chief of Police Diane Groomes said, “Every neighborhood in all four quadrants has a crew… if Jim Graham gets a gang unit in Columbia Heights, everyone will want one.”

Chief Groomes also questions whether the same strategies will work for African-American crews as for Latino gangs. “Latinos have a strong family structure,” she said. “Many African-American families have been torn apart, a lot of times by crack. They also have a different relationship with law enforcement. It’s harder to break down the barriers.”

Barnes agrees with Groomes’ analysis. “She’s right,” he says. “Latino families are more cohesive. There’s no doubt about that. They live together, they play together, they work together.”

Mai Fernandez, Legal and Strategy Director of the Latin American Youth Center, disagrees. “You always have to tweak a model,” she said, “but the model of community groups working with the police department and knowing who the kids are and where they’re going to be, preventing the crime before it happens – all that is the same. A good relationship between kids, the community and the cops: that works anywhere.”

The Calm Before the Storm
But the current lull in Latino gang violence might just be “the calm before the storm,” according to Mercedes Lemp, Director of the Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs. The new gang-fighting strategies may have just caused a re-shuffling of organizational structures, with smaller crews folding into bigger gangs. The gangs haven’t gone anywhere. And as Chief Groomes says, “The Gang Intervention Partnership doesn’t get people out of gangs. It just mediates a situation when something sparks up, and calms things down.”

The move to bigger gangs could prove even more dangerous. Neighborhood crews are like any group of adolescents – they hang around and find trouble; some more than others. They throw “skipping parties” during school hours, drink beer, and smoke pot. They tend not to be heavily involved with the drug trade, and the fighting – usually over perceived disrespect – doesn’t usually lead to murder as it does in the bigger gangs.

“We talk about these gangs as if they’re super smart,” said Mai Fernandez. “They’re not organized in such a way as to gain a great profit from what they’re doing. It’s goofball stuff, but it’s goofball stuff where people get stabbed.”

On the other hand, gangs like MS-13, with large hubs of activity in San Salvador and Los Angeles and bases in 33 U.S. states, have far greater access to weapons. The MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha as it’s also called, is linked to “international terrorism, arms smuggling, drug smuggling, numerous homicides, beheadings, machete attacks and countless assaults,” according to the filmmakers of a documentary about the MS-13, Hijos de la Guerra. “Their power is such that the FBI has declared them to be among the biggest threats to the domestic security of the United States and has established a task force to put an end to the gang.”

Leaving a crew is relatively easy, though it can involve a process of getting “jumped out” similar in brutality to the “jump in.” Gangs tend to be a youth phenomenon, and there aren’t many people in them over the age of 25.

Rays of Hope
Still, with schools and community organizations coming together to provide opportunities to kids, they’ve been able to transform countless lives. Innovative programs like graffiti arts instruction and a dance program (complete with a professional choreographer) give young people something positive to do and a new “crew” of sorts. Ex-gang members are taking the lead in organizing the mayor’s D.C. Latino Youth Summit. Youth Outreach Workers provide support to kids outside of school hours, and after-school leadership programs at the Latin American Youth Center sign contracts with kids that mandate everything from attendance to good grades to curfews in an attempt to turn around their lives. Groups like Peaceoholics and Alliance of Concerned Men also run programs designed to provide positive alternatives to violence and build self-esteem for African-American youth.

Washington’s gang problem is small compared to Chicago and Los Angeles – or even D.C. suburbs like Gaithersburg and Wheaton. With any luck, neighborhood partnerships will continue to reduce youth violence by showing young people that their communities care about what happens to them and are willing to work to provide them with positive opportunities.

As one ex-crew leader who now works at the Latin American Youth Center said, “Before coming to the program, I felt like it was just me, dealing with problems alone.” Another said that the counselors at schools “aren’t even interested in your social life; all they want to talk about is college.”

Youth leadership programs were the answer for Diana too. After she convinced the school to let her come back, she kept skipping class and was eventually held back a year. A school administrator brought Jasmin from the LAYC in to do some workshops at the school, and Diana started going to programs at the LAYC when the semester ended. Now she sees herself as an example for the younger kids.

“If it wasn’t for the LAYC, I’d probably be on the streets, or pregnant,” said Diana. “Or even dead.”