Gangs: 1990 to Present

3.e

1990 – Present: Activities from 1990 to the Present

As a consequence of the migrations and urban renewal, the Northeastern gangs (white, black, and Latino) were at odds by the 1990s. In 2008, the Northeast had over 17,000 gang members and over 600 gangs, with Pennsylvania seeing significant growth in gang activity. The most active gangs in the region during the 2000s were federations of the Crips, MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha), Latin Kings, Neta, and the Bloods. As job cuts continued in the American West, the employers started hiring staff from the Latino immigrant community as they were willing to work at cheaper rates. African-American community’s unemployment rates reached 50% in the areas of South Los Angeles. It was a stepping stone for the newly established gangs to recruit these members. The ever-increasing sense of isolation felt by the community of African-Americans continued incessantly in the 1980s and 1990s, leading to an increase in social pathologies such as violence.

As gang violence increased in the West, so did police violence against African-American communities, culminating in Rodney King's arrest, which sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Following the riots, leaders of the Bloods and Crips announced a truce (led by Compton's then-mayor Walter R. Tucker, Jr.), and in May 1992, 1,600 rival gang members converged on Imperial Courts, which was the main housing project in Watts, Los Angeles, California, to demonstrate their new-found companionship. However, after only a few months of relative peace, tensions between Los Angeles County's more than 100,000 gang members began to raise murder rates (in February 1993), bringing them back to previous levels. In Oakland, California, there were 113 drugs and/or gang-related homicides in 2002 alone, with a similar number in 2003. President Bill Clinton condemned the murder of Stephanie Kuhen in Los Angeles in 1995, prompting a crackdown on gangs in the area.

During the 1990s, the American South experienced an unprecedented increase in gang activity. In 1994, Mary Beth Pelz, who was a criminologist at the University of Houston–Downtown, stated that Texas lacked a "rich history of street gangs" in comparison to other parts of the country. She claimed that in the 1980s, Houston-area gangs began to spread to newer developments. According to Skip Hollandsworth's 2006 Texas Monthly article, many street gangs in Texas lack organized command structures. Individual "cliques" of gangs act as individual groups, defined by streets, parts of streets, apartment complexes, or parts of apartment complexes. Texas "Cliques" are normally led by the "O.G.s" (short for "original gangsters"), and each "clique" performs a certain activity or set of activities in a particular area, for instance, the controlling of recreational drug trafficking and managing prostitution.

In 2009, David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, claimed that many acts of violence in the inner cities of the United States are wrongly titled as ‘gang violence’. In fact, it involves small, informal cliques of people. The introduction of cheap crack cocaine into American cities would prove fatal as gang members and factions grew. As the gang members started to fight over 'turf,' or the territory in which gangs could run their lucrative drug trades, violence skyrocketed, according to the FBI's national data on gang-related homicides, which ranged from 288 in 1985 to 1,362 in 1993. Tyshawn Lee, the 9-year-old son of a Chicago gang member who was lured into an alley and shot in 2015, represented a new low in gang violence, associated with the splintering of gangs into less organized factions often motivated by personal vendettas.