 As you on the front lines of criminal justice know, the federal offender population is increasing, serving longer sentences, and requiring more intensive supervision. These changes have created new challenges in probation and pre-trial services offices across the country. To help you meet these challenges, the Federal Judicial Center has developed the Special Needs Offender Series. The series consists of educational products, online conferences, and satellite broadcasts. Each program in the series takes an in-depth look at a unique population. A special needs offender bulletin outlining the population's general characteristics initiates each program. This is followed by a center-sponsored online conference that fills on the information in the bulletin. Officers share effective case management practices and useful resources. Most programs also include an interactive satellite broadcast that features panel discussions, DS speakers, and video segments to provide current information on the offender population. Now our first program in the Special Needs Offender Series, an overview of gangs in the federal system. Street gangs, prison gangs, non-traditional organized crime, what are they? How do they affect your work as probation and pre-trial services officers? What makes gang members different from other offenders and defendants? What strategies can you use to ensure that gang members successfully comply with the terms of their probation and pre-trial services release? What safety issues arise? Gangs is an important topic. But it's also a topic that lends itself to media hype and stereotyping. Most of us have seen movies and news reports of drive-by shootings and other gang-related violence around the country or even in our communities. How accurate are these stories? How do you get past the hype and beyond the stereotypes so you can objectively assess the risks defendants and offenders pose to the community and determine the appropriate conditions and supervision strategies required? Well these are some of the issues that we'll be examining over the next 90 minutes. I'm Mark Maggio of the Federal Judicial Center and I'll be your host. Welcome to each of you. You're among more than 3,000 participants at nearly 50 sites across the country who are receiving this program live via satellite broadcast. As you can see from your participant guide, the agenda on page number Dromeneral 5, today's broadcast is divided into 5 segments. We'll start with an overview of gangs in the United States from two nationally recognized experts. Then, we'll hear from 4 probation officers who will fill us in on how they handle gangs in their districts. We encourage you to ask questions and we've built in time for them throughout the program, so please phone or fax your questions to us using the toll-free numbers appearing on your screen. Gangs are not a new phenomenon in the United States. One of the first reports of disruptive youth gangs appeared in Philadelphia in 1791. In the 19th century, New York City experienced problems with youth campaigning for the Know Nothing Party and with Irish street gangs that started draft rides during the Civil War. Gangs emerged in U.S. cities in the course of successive waves of migration, beginning with a movement from farms to cities followed by waves of foreign immigration. Gangs emerged in communities that were not part of the mainstream. Members of these communities were often overwhelmed by poverty, unemployment and low levels of social services. They may or may not have had the opportunity for achieving economically as they perceived it. Protection and exploitation of the community were both hallmarks of gang activity. Gangs offered protection and economic opportunities to those who believed rightly or wrongly that the larger community would not respond on their behalf. Extortion, random violence and intimidation, however, were often the price. Many of these same issues arise in current discussions about gangs, including the reasons people give for joining them. A sense of identity and belonging, rules, power, respect, excitement. But things have also changed. There appear to be more gangs and gangs in more cities. Gangs with female members appear to be growing. The variety of gangs and gang structures has grown, making generalizations about them more difficult. In addition, it's sometimes hard to separate general societal trends from those affecting gangs. For example, street gang members may be more violent than in the past, but so too are those who aren't involved in gangs. The good news for you is that more resources exist today on gangs than ever before. In this broadcast, we'll explain common terms and concepts that apply to gangs, highlight the need for interagency cooperation, especially between the Bureau of Prisons and Probation and Pre-Trial Services. We'll discuss the impact of gangs in the federal probation and pretrial services, we'll identify safety issues that arise when dealing with gang members, and we'll let you know how to find and evaluate resources so you can create in-district expertise in gangs. And we'll also hear periodically from my colleague, Denise Rolando Morningstar, who conducted the Center's online conference on gangs. Officers from around the country exchanged lots of valuable information during this conference, and Denise will be sharing some of those highlights with us. Prisons plays in the management and supervision of gang members. To do this, we'll discuss strategic intelligence and what we mean by it, and the Bureau of Prisons Gang Management Strategy. After we speak with our first guest, we'll take questions, so be sure to phone or fax your questions to us at the numbers on the screen. We'll be getting to the first questions in about five to seven minutes. Our first guest is Craig Trout. Craig is the Bureau of Prisons liaison to the counter-terrorism section of the FBI. Prior to this, Craig served as the Chief of Intelligence for the Bureau of Prisons for ten years. Craig, welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. Glad to have you with us. Now, you heard me say in the beginning of the program that we're going to divide this segment into strategic intelligence and operational intelligence. Your role is to get us started and weave us through the discussion on strategic intelligence. So I'm going to ask you to do that by starting off with a definition of strategic intelligence. Well, I think strategic intelligence is basically the concept of establishing who's out there in the general population. What do they look like? How do you recognize them? Are there tattoos, hand signs, colors or whatever? There might be aides in recognizing who they are. And then in that process, establishing what their specific threat characteristics might be, then through this process, we establish what we call security threat groups for tracking purposes. Okay. Now, given that definition, we know that the Bureau of Prisons has a rather comprehensive gang management strategy. So would you take a few moments and talk about that approach? Well, it's a rather complex process, but I think the essential elements are that first we want to canvas the population, as I said, to see who's out there in population. But most important, we want to look at their behavior. We want to look at their disciplinary record, look at their activities in the institution. Then we want to come up with a ranking system where we can tell which groups pose the greatest threat. And then we can customize a gang interdiction strategy for those individual groups. So ranking is a very important piece of the strategy that we know who we should be watching and using our resources to watch them appropriately. Okay. A large part of our audience is made up of preparation and pretrial services officers. Why would this be important to them? Well, I think over the long term it's going to be very important to them because as we develop this body of information, it's very easy for them to call us directly or possibly call a Sacramento Intelligence Unit and ask very specific information about a gang that might be of concern to them that they're within their case load, their supervision, or getting ready for a pretrial services report. They may have specific questions about an individual that is in our custody or has been, say he's coming back out to the community and they're wanting additional information. So that's their safety, something to help them with supervision. So we can provide a great deal of information to pretrial services officers. Okay. Going back a few steps now, you've mentioned a couple terms and I want to talk about this briefly. You use the term security threat groups. Now we're using on this program the term gangs. What's the difference between the two of them? There's not really a difference as such. Gangs are like a subset of the concept of security threat groups. When we talk STGs or security threat groups within our agency, we're talking about all of those groups. We use the working definition. We call a security threat group, a group of inmates that are acting in concert to threaten the safety of other inmates, to threaten the safety of staff, the security of the institution, the welfare of the surrounding community. In some cases even national security. But the point being is we're tracking them under this umbrella term of which gangs, what we're talking about today is a subset of that term. It also includes things like domestic terrorists and traditional mafia and other groups too. But of course today we're talking about gangs. Let me mention to our audience at this point on page six of the participant guide. We've got a list of the current BOP disruptive threat groups. I think that's as effective as April of 97. That's right. Okay, so for the purposes of our discussion today for the broadcast, when we talk about gangs now we're going to be talking about groups such as the Latin Kings, the Texas Syndicate, the Bloods and the Crips, what have you. Under the larger umbrella title of security threat groups which you used, we've got that includes also like domestic terrorists, international terrorists and mafia, which we will not necessarily be focusing in on for the day. The other term you mentioned was an organization, the Sacramento Intelligence Unit. Again, tell us what it is and why it was formed. Well the Sacramento Intelligence Unit is really an important piece of our intelligence operation. What we've done is set up an intelligence consortium or clearing house kind of environment where we it's hosted by the Bureau of Prisons but it's also staffed by US Marshall Service from their Investigative Services Division and I think most relevant today we also have full time staff from US Probation and Parole. They're at SIU to help with any inquiries that might come in. Okay, so we have a tri-agency organization here. What can SIU provide to probation and pretrial services? Well the goal of the SIU is to provide a networking ability to provide information to any of the member agencies or other agencies that might call in. So if we have a call from say a pretrial services officer of probation and parole, we can provide them detailed information about the various inmates in BOP custody, say their pending release date, threat characteristics, officer safety issues, what they can expect in the community. We can help them with their plan in terms of how to supervise the individual. We'll provide a whole wealth of information to them. Okay, now we're highlighting interagency cooperation here. On the flip side of the question, what can probation and pretrial services officers provide to SIU? Well I was hoping that you'd asked me that because obviously for SIU to be fully effective, it means full participation by everyone involved. So if probation and pretrial services officers contribute information, if they call us and give us information about inmates in the pipeline coming to us, we build that baseline, we build that database of information and there's a greater likelihood that we're gonna be able to provide meaningful, timely, effective information later on when they call for assistance further during the period of incarceration or supervised release. Okay, you've got us off to a good start on strategic intelligence and we're gonna be taking some questions in a few minutes. I have a question I wanna ask you about. Getting to the issue of strategic intelligence, or actually, I'm sorry, the Sacramento Intelligence Unit. And that question quickly escaped me. I'm gonna come back to that, give me a second. Let me give you a question from our online conference. Maybe that'll draw my memory. Certainly. Can we as officers make contact with the various prison intelligence officers who can give us up-to-date information on a supervised release C? For example, could I contact the intelligence officer at FCI Sandstone and have him let me know who's on the defendant's visiting list, who's sending him money, who's writing to him, et cetera? Absolutely, we encourage those kind of inquiries, they can be directly to the institution. If they have a reason to call the institution, they would ordinarily speak to the Special Investigative Supervisor, which is, we normally call that the SIS. But rather than trying to remember who they should call and what to ask for and whatever, they might wanna call SIU first, and we can kind of facilitate that contact, whether they talk to them direct or we gather the information form and provide it or whatever. But yes, those kind of inquiries are very welcome, of course. Okay, I knew it would draw my memory. It came back to the question. Officers that contact SIU regularly or hopefully after the end of this program will begin contacting SIU on a regular basis. The information they provide, for lack of a better phrase, is this sort of a garbage in, garbage out type of thing? If SIU or BOP gets paid information, is this a problem for them as they begin to track? So it's important for officers to focus in on the information that they're providing. So as good as what they give is as good as what they get, I guess is what I'm getting to the point. Well, I think what we really focus on at SIU is a really a quality control kind of concept. We're going to use all-source collection. We're going to be talking to FBI, to local law enforcement, look at our own BOP intelligence. We're going to look as many sources as possible. And we'll go through kind of a quality control kind of process to make sure we're accurate, timely, providing effective information. So if someone does contribute information that needs further development, we'll certainly look at it and make sure that we've made it as accurate and timely as we possibly can. Okay, so you're going to corroborate what you get from the officers as well and then track the information going in. And when it comes out, you've got good solid information for the officers. Absolutely. When these have come out. Yes. Okay, like I said, you've gotten us off to a good start and we're going to take our time out now. That's all we have for questions right now. And we'll be getting to more of them soon later in the broadcast. But before moving on to our discussion of operational intelligence, we're going to be hearing now the first of our reports on the online conference from Denise Orlando Morningstar. So Denny? Thanks, Mark. This fall over 95 officers met during an online conference to discuss identifying and supervising offenders and defendants who are members of a gang. An online conference is really similar to an internet chat room, but not everyone has to be logged on the computer at the same time. Now during the conference, the officers share information, strategies and resources. Some of the officers who participate in the conference have actually seen gangs in their communities and have extensive experience dealing with these individuals. Other officers were just beginning to see gangs in their communities. In some cases, officers weren't even sure if they had gang members on their caseload. And in fact, identification is a real issue when dealing with this offender population. As one participant noted, identifying gang members is getting more difficult. In Utah, we have noticed that a lot of street gang members are steering away from their traditional colors. Another said, there are few fail-proof methods for determining whether a person is a member of a gang. And it's equally as important to identify gang associates, affiliates and wannabes. Full-proof identification methods are hard to come by, but during the next segment of the broadcast, we're gonna give you some pointers on what to do if you think someone on your caseload is a gang member. Well, now that we've addressed strategic intelligence, let's move on to our discussion of operational intelligence. And here, we'll define operational intelligence. We'll learn about the national major gang task force and the services that it provides. And we'll pinpoint several specific factors to take into account when supervising known gang members or offenders and defendants, rather, excuse me, who you suspect are gang members. Now, we'll have another question and answer session in about 20 minutes. So be sure to keep your calls and your facts as coming in. Well, I'd now like to introduce our second guest, joining Craig and me in the studio is Dale Welling. Dale's a private consultant and executive director of the National Major Gang Task Force. He was with federal probation for 20 years and then transferred to the Bureau of Prisons as the first chief of the Sacramento Intelligence Unit. Dale, welcome to you. Mark, how are you? Glad you're able to join us today. Glad to be here. Before I get you into the operational intelligence discussion, we're gonna go back a few years to your days as a probation officer. Now, the title of this program, an overview of gangs in the federal system, is part of the largest series that we're calling a special needs offender series. And we took the term special needs offenders from the probation and pretrial services system. So my question for you is, what makes gang members special needs offenders? Well, when I was a probation officer, that was several years ago. A few years ago. We dealt with the individual. And with the offender, you would interview him, you'd interview his family. You'd talk to maybe employers, possibly neighbors. You'd give counseling advice. And eventually, hopefully he would internalize these controls and become a productive, law abiding citizen. Today, we have the new element of gangs. It changes the whole complexion of supervision on the street as well as supervision in a prison environment. With gangs, in many situations, a gang member, his family, is the gang. And you have an outside influence that you didn't have before. You're dealing not only with just the individual, but you're dealing with a group. And so, with the outside pure pressure, there's a bigger likelihood that he will violate his conditions of supervision, be more violent, move guns or drugs, that type of thing, that he wouldn't be involved with as an individual. Okay. Now it's your turn to go now. Let's see, define operational intelligence for us. Operational intelligence is what's happening right now. When Craig talked about strategic intelligence, as a probation officer, that would be similar to getting the case file, opening it up and doing a case plan. This is what you're gonna do with the case. Operational intelligence is what is happening with the case at the moment. And this could be an example would be you go and talk to the offender and he says he's living here and he's working here. And you think, well, I wanna double check on that. So you go to the local police department and they say, oh no, he says he's living there. Well, he's actually living across town with another girlfriend. He's dealing math, manufacturing math, moving it all over the state. That would be supplementing the information that the offender is telling you. So operational intelligence is actually supplemental information that helps you better manage the case. Dale, you've had an opportunity as a member of the National Major Gang Task Force, executive director rather, to travel around the country and do quite a bit of training. Are there common questions, common concerns that you hear from officers throughout, whether you're in New York, Omaha, Los Angeles, that sort of running theme, recurring theme for that? Probably the question you get more than anything else is, what does this mean? And that would be drawings, it would be graffiti, it could be hand signs, tattoos. And what I find is that officers don't know what they're looking at. Some of it is very significant, some of it is not. And when we talk about the impact, officers don't understand the impact, if you have a sign or symbol that's upside down, which is disrespect, or if it's crossed out, it tells you what's going on in the neighborhood, graffiti is the newspaper of the street. And so not understanding the impact and not knowing what it is, it kind of puts you on the outside. The third thing is not knowing where to go to get the information. And the resources that you have available to you, which is a whole vast network out there that you can go to. Okay, let me jump on that last point then, as the executive director of the task force, can officers come to you? And if so, what can they expect from the National Major Gang Task Force? Yes, they can. We are a national network of correctional information. And we're a task force, we're not an association. But if officers need information, they can call us. And we're like brokers of information. We put out security alerts, officer safety bulletins, newsletters, but more than that, we deal, focus on the state and local level. But if you need information, say you're an officer in Illinois and you need information out of the Washington Department of Correction, we can put you in direct contact with a gang investigator that you may not yet, if you send a collateral contact to Washington State to another probation officer to contact the Department of Correction. We can get you inside the closed community, so to speak. Okay, now I'm gonna give you a chance to do a little bit of a plug here. I know the National Major Gang Task Force has a lot of national training programs that are running, and you've got one coming up, I think, in Daytona? Yes, that's correct. Daytona, Florida in May of next year of 88. It'll be our fourth national conference. It's an excellent time for officers to network across the nation, here leading gang experts, making presentations on trends and management strategies for security threat groups on the street and in the institution. Last time we had, in Colorado Springs, we had 550 participants from 32 states. So it's their major correctional conferences. Let me pose this question to you and Craig. The National Major Gang Task Force, we've heard about briefly, Sacramento Intelligence Unit. Is this an either or situation for officers? In other words, do you go to one or the other? How do they complement? How do they differ from one another? Well, it's not really either or. When they call the Sacramento Intelligence Unit, they're gonna get a lot of information that's based on federal information from the Bureau of Prisons, from the Marshals, from the FBI, from whatever. And as Dale was pointing out, the National Major Gang Task Force has outstanding contacts in the various states in some of the major counties, like Dade County or Los Angeles County or whatever. So what we'd really encourage them to do is blend all of that information available, blend the intelligence available from the various sources. So it's not an either or, we'd really encourage them to call both. But if they call one or the other frequently, we're gonna help them with that networking also. So they really designed the two organizations to complement one another. Exactly, let me take a moment to mention our audience again. On pages 20 and 21 of your participant guide also, there are logos, the mailing information, the telephone numbers that you can use to call both the National Major Gang Task Force and the Sacramento Intelligence Unit. Coming back, Craig, for SIU, for our non-fed participants that are out in our audience, SIU is a resource for them as well? Absolutely, that's the reason it's effective is that because we encourage all the various jurisdictions to call, and it increases our database, it increases our baseline information. So not only do we welcome their calls, we encourage it because it helps us build our database, our understanding of the various gangs out there. So they're very welcome to call, we encourage them to. Okay, let's go down another road. In my discussions with both of you in preparing for the program, one of the things I learned is that as you travel around the country, the officers do ask questions that they seem to be looking for, the macro answer, the big solution, or like we saw, the big coon of all this, how to imagine this offender population. So using that as a segue, I do know from talking with you that there are special considerations that probation and pretrial services officers need to focus on when dealing with this offender population. And I'm gonna ask you to start highlighting some of those. Craig, let's start with you. Well, I think the first one that jumps to mind is the need to stay current. Gang dynamics are changing constantly, where you see new feuds, you see new alliances, you see various gangs on the move or whatever. So it's very important they stay very current in the current situation. There might be new leaders emerging, new problems emerging in their city. So as we look out across the country, we see a rapidly changing situation. For instance, if we were to look out to say the West Coast, out in California, for instance, we see the Aryan brotherhood starting to distance themselves a little bit from the Mexican mafia. Traditionally, they've been very close allies. Now, they're not at war right now, but they're distancing themselves a little bit. Mexican mafia is having some difficulties here, and brotherhood's distancing. If you're to look, say, to Texas, we used to have the Texas Syndicate and the Mexiconomy at war, at open war for years. And now we find themselves in a brand new alliance where they're actually allies and operating in each other's best interest. When you move up to, say, the New England area, you have emerging groups such as the Latin Kings, the various factions from, say, New York or Massachusetts or Connecticut or whatever. You have the Latin Kings, then you also have other rapidly emerging groups like Los Salidos. And it's kind of a hot and cold relationship. You have to be very current to know whether they're currently having difficulties between the various factions or whether they're currently at peace or have a treaty. And when you go to some of the other traditional areas, such as, say, well, Chicago, for instance, a black, ancient, disciple nation has recently gone through major changes to the result of their recent indictment, prosecution of their top leadership structure. They're reinventing themselves trying to get their balance again with the loss of so many leaders to prosecution. The same thing, so true of the El Rucans, where you had a number of successful prosecutions and whatever, so you see them trying to reinvent themselves. So I think they're maybe going back to their old name, Black Pea Stone Nation and some of their older strategies prior to being El Rucans. So it's changing quickly. I'm starting to appreciate the need for staying current, just listening to you. Absolutely. Okay, so we're staying current. What's the next point? Well, I think another one that's very, very important is you need to be as specific as possible. When you're looking at an issue, oftentimes we're dealing with groups that operate in alignments, such as Crips or Black Anxious Cyples or Vice Lords or whatever. But when we're looking at an issue involving a gang, we need to be as specific as possible. What faction, what crew, what set, what posse? Very specifically, who are we dealing with? And I'd even go further on that. I would even say what part of town? For instance, Chicago, when you're talking Latin Kings, there might be some difference between Northside Latin Kings and Southside Latin Kings within the same city. So we need to be very, very specific. Same thing goes to tattoos. Not just general tattoos and whatever, but we need to be very specific details. What tattoos, what colors, how are the hands-on use as much specificity as possible. Okay, so we're staying current. We're being specific. Third point? Well, I think one that's always been very important to me is to make sure that we're looking at behavior and not just visibility. You'll see some gangs, for instance, that are very, very active with hand signs and colors and graffiti. You'll see the aerosol internet down the back alleys where they put the graffiti all the way down the back of the warehouses and things like that. And you see this bigger-than-life presence in the city where you're convinced that all this graffiti represents the largest gang that you've ever seen. Where, in contrast, you might see a street-level drug trafficking organization, a gang who's selling crack down on the street corner. Extremely dangerous, very, very violent, but they're not using colors, hand signs, graffiti, those kind of things. So when you're developing a gang strategy and you're developing what intelligence you might need about the various groups in your caseload, make sure you're looking at gangs that are dangerous, the behavior, rather than concentrating on just how visible they might be. Okay. Dale, let me get you to jump in the fray here. We're staying current, we're being specific. We're focusing on criminal behavior and not just visibility. The last point, I think, would be all-source collection. You don't take one piece and make it a fact. You would call SIU, call us the National Major Gang Task Force, talk to local law enforcement, you know, state resources, the community resources, whatever they may be, health agencies and whatever. Also, on the internet, it's a great research. The Black Gangster Disciples have an internet site, the Latin Kings, a new one out of Florida. The gangs are getting their own web pages. That's right. So you go to the internet, but it's really important, and I think we both stress the quality control is what is really important because you don't want to misidentify and put bad information out. Okay, now I know the last point, although you said that was the last point. This is actually the last point. Don't look for a gang member behind every door. It's something you shared with us, and I love it. Tell us what it means. Craig and I both have done a lot of training around the country, and after you've made a presentation, people will come up and they'll ask questions, and then they leave and they go back to their work site. Well, one thing we say is don't find a gang member behind every cell door or every street corner because what happens, it's so dynamic, and everybody kind of gets warmed up in the moment, and then you go out and you find things that aren't there, and you don't want to overreact, you don't want to create something that's not there, you don't want to alarm the staff, you don't want to scare your people, but you have to be objective, you have to go out, and if it's there, you deal with it, but you don't want to be an alarmist about it. Okay, you mentioned quality control, and you've introduced, you've brought us, you've given us the gang validation criteria, which again, I'll take a moment and mention to our audience is on pages nine and 10 of the participant guide. Tell us what the gang validation criteria is and how is it used? The document that's in the bulletin is modeled after the federal bureau of prisons, but it's produced by the National Major Gang Task Force. It's not only the bureau of prisons, but it's a, from all the other agencies and their input as far as how do you validate a gang member? It's very important that you validate something that will stand up in court. If you're going to take adverse action against a offender or an inmate, and you do it, it's behavior driven, but also because he's a gang member and you have it validated, then you have some substantiation for your actions. And then also, you have like different classifications. There's a member, a validated member. There's an associate, there's a suspect, there's a want-to-be, there's a throw-away. And so you- A throw-away? That's right, a throw-away. We're going to come back to that term. Okay, go ahead. So you need to know where they are in the classification process. So it's a quality control document, so you're not just throwing it out and saying, okay, there's three individual standing on a street corner. Two of them are gang members, so the third one's got to be. That's not necessarily true. Okay. All right. A want-to-be's, I think I understand, throw-aways. Let's build on that a little bit. Tell me about these folks. A throw-away is someone who wants to become a member of the gang. If you were supervising a throw-away, you would think he was a want-to-be. But a throw-away is an offender or an inmate that is used by the gang. They have no intention of ever bringing him in as a gang member. And they'll say, you're up, you're up, you're like, you're up for the vote or we're going to bring you in. And so he'll do anything. He'll move guns and drugs. He'll murder contracts. Whatever the gang wants him to do, he's like a little puppy dog, yes, whatever you want me to do, I'll do it. And when they're finished with him, then they just throw him away, which means he has to leave town. They may kill him. It depends on how much he knows about the gang. And if he's, it's a minor thing he's done for the gang, they'll just say, we don't want you anymore. How do you differ, or if you can, between the throw-away and the want-to-be? I mean, if I'm an officer on the street and I'm, how do I know? It's very difficult. There were times that we would call an officer and say, well, you're dealing with a suspected gang member or an associate, but we think he's a throw-away. And they'll say, well, this guy's so dumb, nobody want him in their gang, you know? And so I said, well, he's probably a throw-away. And many times that would be the case, but it's very hard to tell. Wow, that's fascinating. Let me go back to the gang validation criteria for a minute. In my obsessive-compulsive style, admittedly, I totaled up the points on the gang validation criteria. I think I came up with 78 points. I noticed at the top of the criteria, it indicates 10 points, I think, to validate an individual. 10 out of 78, that seems a little low. Could you kind of explain that a little bit? It's cumulative. If he's validated at 10 points, then you have a validated gang member. Then if it goes up higher than that, say, 40 points, 50 points or whatever, he's more active, he's more visible. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he's a leader, because a lot of the leaders may only have 10 points or 12 points and just be very validated, but they're sitting back and they're calling the shots. But as we've said about the throw-away, the wannabes are the most dangerous. Those are the ones that are gonna be out there that are going to have the higher points because they're the most active in the gang. So you have to watch everything on the spectrum. So wannabes are most dangerous for whom? For the officer. For the officers. As far as carrying things out for the gang, actually doing things for the gang, the leaders normally are not out in front. Like a wannabe, an initiation may mean to assault a correctional officer in a prison system or it may be to assault a probation officer on the next home visit to show heart. And so you need to be aware, if they are a wannabe, because they're very dangerous. So, okay, let's clarify a little bit. The gang validation criteria, I've got an individual I think is a gang member. We could have the leader of the gang, I mean, just hypothetically score 10 points. We've got over 10 points on there. And yet this person is really pretty much heading up the operation. And yet a wannabe, because if I'm understanding correctly, the level of activity we're seeing, we could see upwards, well obviously in excess of 10. Yeah, actually he would be a member by that time when we say validated, but the wannabe and the younger gang members would have a higher score because they're actually doing things for the gang. Okay, Craig, does the BOP use the gang validation criteria? Yes, absolutely. We have been using it since the middle 1980s. And prior to that time, we just used a system where we had, say, three observations would result in a person being validated as a gang member. But we realized it was useful to give point values to various observations. Like we might give so many points to self-admission, a different point value to possession of gang materials, much higher point value for actually writing gang correspondents or writing gang instructions or whatever, and another point value for, say, inter-agency intelligence. So the way we designed it, no one criteria by itself will result in validation. It typically takes three or four. But let me also add to that that even though you've reached the validation point of 10 points, we'd encourage the officers to continue to collect against as many of the criteria as possible. You know, always want to use all-source collection and use as many observations as possible so that you kind of cooperate the information, quality control kind of process. So I use this validation criteria, this person sitting in front of me and we go through the questions. I mean, or is this something you just, as you investigate, as you use all-source collection, you're marking this off as you find out the information and corroborate, is that the way that works? Over a period of time, you gather the information. Wherever it comes from. But if you notice, when it says membership, and he admits it, we don't take that as, that he is a member. You don't take it as gospel. No, because. He may ever want to be. No, do that, you're right. And he'll do that to manipulate. It could be for very many reasons that he will admit. And then the other side of it is that as they realize that being a gang member is gonna be detrimental to their supervision plan or their custody placement, then they'll start denying it. And then they'll say, oh, well, I'm not a gang member, but I grew up with them or I've been around them for a number of years. And so they'll start denying it and they'll start going underground. And the gangs that are more serious and are actually into conducting serious gang business are not gonna be in your face and they're gonna be a lot lower profile. Who developed the criteria? Well, we developed it in the Bureau of Prisons some years ago in the middle 1980s, but then we worked with the National Major Gang Task Force to blend in some ideas for some other states and whatever so that we could come up with a model document that would be useful across a wide variety of jurisdictions, be it state, local, whatever. So what we see in the work guide today is similar to the federal criteria, but it's actually a model for all jurisdictions. One thing I would suggest when, because this is being adopted nationwide, when an officer is talking to a law enforcement officer or a gang unit or particularly in a prison setting, if you're talking to Bureau of Prisons or you're talking to your state correctional agency, ask if he's a validated member. Because that way you know he's gone through this process. If it's not just somebody saying, oh, well, he's a gang member, you actually have a process that they've gone through. And then they say, no, he's a suspected member, but he's not validated. At least you know the language, you know what they're talking about. Okay. I could take this conversation on for the next hour, but we've got lots to cover. You guys ready to take some questions? Let's do that. Let's do it. We've got a fax. Do I have the location? Oh, okay. This is from Eastern District of New York. Question, how can we obtain information on active Hispanic gangs? Are there any known Colombian or other Hispanic gangs known besides the Mexican mafia? I am an officer covering a largely Hispanic and I apologize, I can't make out that word, neighborhood where drugs are prevalent. What district is he from? Eastern District of New York. One of the large groups there are probably Nieto's. The Nieto's? The Nieto's of Puerto Rican. Latin kings are real heavy there. In fact, there was a conflict between the almighty Latin Charter Nation in Connecticut and the almighty Latin kings that are controlled out of Chicago in the New York area. So yes, there are a lot, but the major ones, would you say, Craig, Latin kings and Los Alitos? And Los Trinitarios, various other groups like that. Quite a bit of information is available on that and I would encourage him to call in and get more details as he needs them, but there's quite a bit of information available on that. Okay. Got another fax for you. Once again, from the Eastern District of New York. Thank you, EDNY. In clarification, for information to be provided to SIU, should there be some formal corroboration of gang affiliation, i.e., defendant, offender, acknowledgement, court acknowledgement, et cetera, or should suspicion of gang affiliation by the officer be provided? And we have a little sub-question here. I'll give that to you in a second, but go ahead and... Well, I think that kind of fits into my comment. I made a little earlier about being specific. They should provide as specifically as possible what they have. If they have a self-admission, if they have an observation, let's say when they did a home visit and saw something in the home or they have inter-agency intelligence, say, from another police department, it's helpful to be as specific as possible on what they have. So if they could provide as much as they have, it would help us in the quality control process, also help us in understanding their exact needs and be able to blend that intelligence into other intelligence that we have. Okay. Sub-question. Dale, this may go to you. Does the presumption of innocence of pretrial defendants impact upon, it looks like, the provision of information? Yes, they're certain, they're not convicted, they're pretrial. Exactly, the presumption of innocence of pretrial. When I was with SIU and also a federal based officer, we try to provide as much information as we can within the guidelines and within the policy and procedures and protect the rights of the defendant. So there are certain restrictions and that's what you need to do is check with your local jurisdiction to find out what you can do and what information can be released, what information cannot be released. Okay. Dale, let me try and run this by you. This is always a danger when we take live questions. What are the benefits of having, and it looks like an officer or a unit of officers specifically supervising gang members versus assigning gang related cases to the specialist officer who have limited gang experience? I should say who may have limited gang experience. We should have. If I understand the correct question, it's whether you should have a gang unit that has assigned gang members or a gang, like a special offender specialist. I think that's what we're going with this one. You really need to have specialized gang people because as I said, if you send it to a regular officer they don't understand the dynamics, they don't understand the feuds and treaties. It's especially all in itself and you need somebody that would be like the district or office expert who would supervise and meet those special needs and that way, I think that you'll hear that from our professional officers later that you really to be effective need to have special units. Okay. You mentioned feuds and treaties and Craig walked us around the country a little bit very nicely and talked about some specific gangs and I remember when we talked about the need to stay current and if you don't recall at this point, please tell me from an operational standpoint, feuds treaties that are, other feuds and treaties that are going on at this point that you might be familiar with. Yes. And it's very important for the officer so he's not caught in the crossfire. You have like the, well the Aryan Brotherhood and Mexican Mafia which have been in the line for a number of years and this is in California, you know, separating you have the Mexicanami and the Texas Syndicate have been at war for a number of years and that's in Texas, that Mexicanami being the Texas Mexican Mafia, they are now coming together on the East Coast, the Latin Kings and Los Salidos and, but it's wherever you are in the country, you need to be aware of the treaties, who's working with who and who's at war. But not only that is that we can say this today and that can change next week or it can change in six months. So when you think that they're getting along, you may drive into the neighborhood and find out that they're not at all in being caught right in the middle. So it's critical that the officers be aware of how the gangs are aligned and how they impact each other. I'm just gonna take a moment and first I'll thank our audience for the fax questions, they're great, but please make use of the phone we wanna hear you live if you're so inclined to do so, use the telephone number that should be coming up on your screen now and take a moment to phone in a call when you go live on the air with you. I've got some questions as I threw back, I threw one at Craig quickly in the first part of the segment, I'm gonna come back from our online conference that I mentioned that Denise Landa Morningstar facilitated earlier in this fall. I'm gonna pick one that I want. From the district, this came from Florida, Northern. Says our district is comprised of large rural areas. How are the big city gangs spreading to the smaller towns? Well, I think one of the things that we're seeing, the offenders coming into BOP custody as we look through their PSIs and their criminal record and whatever, we find that they may have been based out of say South Central Los Angeles or maybe Chicago or whatever, but as the police pressure increases on them or as they have other reasons why they might want to expand, they may literally go on what amounts to a road trip where they get on the interstate, they go down to exit 53, go down to the Howard Johnson or whatever, and they may set up and sell drugs for say two, three days to the local small jurisdiction finally realizes there's really unusual traffic going into that hotel area, that motel area, and they gather up, pack up, go on down the road. So I think the point to learn from all this is we shouldn't fall on the trap of thinking, well gee, I'm in rural Georgia or rural Nebraska or whatever it doesn't affect me. Chances are excellent it does. The Black Anxious Cyples or the Vice Lords or the Rolling 60 Crips or whatever, if they're not there now, they might be in the future and whether it's a permanent presence or whether it's just passing through in the interstate setting up for a two or three day operation in a local motel and selling and moving on, we can almost guarantee, and in fact looking at our own BOP records, we can almost guarantee that for instance the Vice Lords and Black Anxious Cyples down in Florida and Georgia and Mississippi and all that, we shouldn't fall on the trap of thinking they're Chicago. Same with Rolling 60 Crips, I've seen various evidence of Crip members right here in Washington, D.C. Okay, again, we could take this conversation on forever but unfortunately we're not going to. And thank you again to our audience for faxing the questions and that's it for this segment. It's now time for our program break. 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