Abstract
It is easy for American politicians and law enforcement officials to vilify gangs. Concerns about wanton violence and prolific drug trafficking are now well entrenched in the public imagination about gangs, and are easily mobilized by those who tout repressive measures. That gangs are commonly populated by racial or ethnic minorities makes the circulation of such fears all the more rapid.
It is often a very short step from moral panics about gangs to the stated need to ‘get tough’. Given the scourge that gangs are said to represent, their eradication seems necessary. Yet little time is typically spent investigating just what transpires when law enforcement seeks to crack down on gangs. Are violence and drug trafficking reduced? Are the ‘kingpins’ commonly detained? Are dynamics within gangs and their neighborhoods fundamentally improved? What is actually achieved?
Both Susan Phillips and Elana Zilberg pursue answers to such questions. Each relies on a large body of qualitative data, collected over a long time span, to assess the consequences of anti-gang policies. In Phillips’ case, the object of focus is ‘Operation Fly Trap’, a task force jointly overseen by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) aimed at gang-related drug trafficking in one neighborhood. For her part, Zilberg examines efforts to target and deport El Salvadorans presumed to be gang members. Hers is a transnational investigation, charting the movement of young men between the United States and El Salvador and the realities they encounter in each locale.
Each author develops close relations to those who are targeted. This enables them to chart the micro-level implications of anti-gang policies. As it turns out, these policies produce few of the benefits their proponents envision. If anything, matters tend to get worse.
Operation Fly Trap was designed to disrupt operations of two gangs in South Central Los Angeles, the Pueblo Bishops and the Blood Stone Villains. The task force’s architects used confidential sources and wiretaps of cell phones to discern an extensive network of drug dealing. After several months of elaborate work, involving up to 300 officers, law enforcement made 28 arrests in June 2003. Many arrestees found themselves tried under a federal conspiracy charge, which made it easier for prosecutors to secure long prison terms. Phillips was volunteering at an area health clinic at the time. This enabled her to develop relations with families impacted by the arrests and convictions. She was thereby well positioned to trace the results of the task force’s work.
Even though gang leaders were the ostensive target of the arrests, none were actually captured. Gang-related drug traffic was thus largely undisturbed. More profoundly disturbed were the extensive kin-based networks of which the arrestees were a part. To be sure, these networks were impacted because those arrested were, in fact, deeply involved in the drug trade, a reality that Phillips directly acknowledges. Yet she sets these activities against the backdrop of a de-industrialized Los Angeles that provides few meaningful job options for South Central residents. If individuals are motivated to provide financial support for themselves and those they love, the drug trade is too lucrative to ignore. This means that few residents escape some financial reliance on illicit drug trafficking, as extended family networks share resources. At the same time, these networks make it easy for any one person to identify several others who are engaged in the trade. A key to Fly Trap’s success was the recruitment of people willing to snitch on others.
Anchored in a close analysis of kin networks, Phillips’ story becomes one of law’s unintended consequences. Family members suffer when others are carted off to prison: matriarchs lose financial resources, children lose parents, neighborhoods lose stability. The health of many individuals rapidly declines, as responsibilities and stress multiply. Fear of snitches breeds a mistrust that erodes the support that extended families can offer. For these reasons, Phillips argues, an alleged anti-crime effort only amplifies the struggle for neighborhood residents to find a stable place from which to participate in the legitimate economy. What Fly Trap proponents advertised as a precision strike to remove gang overseers of the drug trade was instead a massive and far-ranging disruption of interdependent relations of financial and emotional support. For this reason, Phillips concludes that the conditions from which criminality emerge are hardly eradicated, but only made more trenchant.
An analysis drawn from relations with those targeted by anti-gang measures is also the project of Zilberg. Her book is similarly anchored in Los Angeles, particularly those neighborhoods home to gangs whose members hail from El Salvador. In addition, she investigates the circumstances of many of these young men when their criminal involvement leads to their deportation back to El Salvador. As with Phillips, Zilberg endeavors to uncover realities normally obscured, and to situate anti-gang discourse and policies within a broader framework than hegemonic discourse allows.
Here, Zilberg emphasizes the long-standing militarized relationship between the United States and El Salvador, the continued entrenchment of neo-liberal economic policy, and the increased concern about terrorism. The young men she gets to know unwittingly drift in these transnational currents, their capacity for agency largely obliterated by policies that make their positions in social and physical space exceedingly tenuous. In both Los Angeles and El Salvador, their gang involvement makes them a target for other gangs and for law enforcement. Even when they seek to renounce their gang pasts and to broker peace accords within rival groups, they continue to attract attention and violence. Indeed, a sobering number of those Zilberg comes to know are murdered over the course of her fieldwork.
The economic, political and ideological connections between the United States and El Salvador are extensive and well entrenched. The collapse of the El Salvador economy rendered migration northward necessary. Further, the remittances that flowed back home became a critical economic support for many El Salvardorans. Yet zero tolerance policing rose in prominence in each country, and was amplified by 9/11-inspired terrorism phobia. US laws changed to make it easier to deport any individual engaged in criminal activity, no matter how minor. Many of those deported possessed only minimal familiarity with El Salvador, and hence struggled to integrate. This challenge was made more difficult by their status as a criminal deportee, which rendered them objects of concern for existing gangs and for law enforcement agents. Zero tolerance in El Salvador took the form of ‘El Plan Mano Dura’ (the Firm Hand) which legitimated harsh anti-gang measures. These, in turn, pushed gang dynamics further underground, and rendered them less susceptible to efforts to broker peace between warring factions. Gang violence only multiplied.
Read separately, each of these books provides an opportunity to understand the results of repressive laws more completely. In each case, anti-gang initiatives destroyed familial networks and made daily life more perilous. Avoidable deaths resulted from increased stress or increased gang violence. More constructive measures—to provide jobs for the unskilled, to help create conditions for peace between rival gangs, to craft more sensible immigration policy—were sadly ignored.
Read together, these books serve as a testimony to the value of deeply qualitative work that is simultaneously attentive to wider social, political, economic and legal realities. Phillips and Zilberg clearly wish to see their subjects as agents in crafting their own destinies. Yet the authors can hardly avoid noticing how much their subjects’ circumstances are shaped by broader dynamics they cannot control, including de-industrialization, the collapse of welfare, the infatuation with incarceration, and the often-twinned hysterias over immigration and terrorism. That these individuals’ life possibilities are determined by these wider realities is a tragic result of their position in social and physical space.
The hegemony of anti-gang discourse, and the simplistic stories it renders about misbegotten miscreants plaguing urban neighborhoods, is unlikely to abate. As these books make clear, this is beyond unfortunate. Absent attention to such accounts as those provided by Phillips and Zilberg, the catastrophic if unintended consequences of gang suppression will almost certainly continue.