THE GANGS ARE ALL HERE

YOUNG THUGS

Inside the Dangerous World of Canadian Street Gangs

By Michael C. Chettleburgh

HarperCollins Canada,

276 pages, $34.95

Street gangs have been in existence for centuries. They roamed Han
Dynasty China and the Agora of ancient Athens. In his Confessions,
Saint Augustine described his criminal involvement in a youth gang. In
532 AD, during Emperor Justinian's reign, street-gang members were
arrested for murder following a disputed chariot race in
Constantinople. The Nika riots that followed caused 30,000 deaths.

Much later, the migration of European settlers to North America
created slum conditions and poverty in a newly industrialized,
competitive society. For some, gangs became their only source of
identity, social status and economic survival. And that is an
overriding theme of Young Thugs, a contentious work by Michael C.
Chettleburgh, a consultant on criminal-justice issues and an expert on
street gangs. His premise? Not only will the poor always be with you,
but so too will the street gang -- unless there is drastic rethinking
in the way mainstream society deals with the underlying causes of gang
affiliation, poverty, disaffection and lack of social mobility.

From the innocence of the Bowery Boys to the razored edges of Clockers
and Boyz N the Hood, street gangs are the stuff of the big screen.
Young Thugs asks us to consider their root causes, and offers several
controversial solutions to stifle their growth and development in society.

Rumbling through back alleys of Any Town, Canada, street gangs are now
the rule rather than the exception. Canada has more than 10,000 street
gang members and, according to Chettleburgh, a ready-made gladiator
school in federal prisons, which spit out battle-hardened clones in
the time it takes a criminal sentence to run its course. Their
relatively small numbers are more than made up for by the media
attention they get, including websites concerning their existence and
consultant positions produced to delve into their causes. Because they
involve the three highly sensitive issues of community, youth at risk
and public safety, street gangs are at our current vortex of fear,
frustration and guilt.

For Chettleburgh, gangs are bound together largely by drug-dealing
enterprise. For him, massive police sweeps and crackdowns are costly
and wasteful paramilitary exercises in futility, which do nothing to
eliminate the gangs or their causes. "They are breathtaking in scope
and dimension," he writes, "and the stuff of dreams as far as six
o'clock news directors are concerned."

Pointedly, the most menacing aspect of gang crime is one that
Chettleburgh overlooks: Gang activity is frequently undertaken in full
view of the community. The fact that gangs are willing to engage in
drug dealing and other criminal acts in the open indicates the level
of their confidence, and speaks volumes about the extent to which they
have succeeded in intimidating the community and its citizens. When
witnesses are too frightened to testify, and officers appear helpless
to stop drug trafficking, the police and community alike come to
despair about their ability to restore local stability. One
fundamental reason that gang sweeps are here to stay in troubled
Canadian neighbourhoods is that residents want such wanton criminality
suppressed, aggressively and permanently.

Advocates for greater social spending often fail to come to grips with
enhanced policing and the eradication of gun and drug dealers as
essential components in any community stabilization and
revitalization. Success of social programs, especially among people
skeptical about the willingness of society to give them a fair chance
at advancement, will be necessarily impaired as long as illegal
economic opportunities remain abundant.

What follows sweeps is not the vacuum that Chettleburgh portrays, but
a plethora of community initiatives, nationwide. There is nary a
mention in Young Thugs of the 77 unique Canadian programs of
intervention and prevention that are articulated in a noteworthy
recent national study by the Canadian Institute for Law and the Family.

Notwithstanding, the author is an adroit communicator. A popular
argument that the United States is an exporter of gun violence is
debunked by entertaining, albeit skewed, logic. In 2005, small arms
worldwide were responsible for the deaths of 500,000 people, or 10,000
per week. Of this amount, the United States was responsible for only 3
per cent, despite having 40 per cent of the world's small arms.
Following Chettleburgh's logic, the United States is relatively safe
and nonviolent, since Americans kill far fewer people, proportionally,
than they could.

Chettleburgh chooses not to blame the importation of U.S. firearms
into Canada for contributing to gang violence. In his view, inevitable
deteriorating economic conditions that marginalize people, combined
with brutal competition that results from selling illicit drugs for
profit, have far more to do with gang activity and expansion than do
guns.

The author appears to live at Statistics Canada. I admire his dogged
determination to glean every ounce of information from sundry stats in
what are, to others, intimidating spread sheets.

In the end, Chettleburgh proposes to resolve the street-gang problem
in a most dramatic fashion. He would legalize most drugs, from
marijuana to ecstasy, from mescaline to heroin.

In this, he appears to follow the lead of British scientists who
propose a new system for categorizing "recreational" drugs based on
"scientific evidence" rather than "prejudice and assumptions."

But though Chettleburgh comments blithely that ecstasy is relatively
harmless, British psychologist Philip Murphy, a leading international
expert, notes that in the last decade, a total of 394 ecstasy deaths
were identified in Britain. In 42 per cent of the cases, ecstasy was
the sole drug mentioned. Similarly, the serious psychological affects
of cocaine are well documented. And the rebuttal list goes on.

Chettleburgh states that those who choose policing as a career do so
for the authority and sense of power that the position confers. This
paints police officers with a broad blue brush, when the truth across
this nation is quite the contrary. To say that policing, as a rule,
does not attract "empathetic, analytical, problem-solving types" is
patently wrong, and flies in the face of the work done by highly
educated police personnel across Canada.

Outside of Ottawa, there is little mention in Young Thugs of community
mobilization initiatives; certainly none in the context of the largest
city in Canada and the brunt of much of the author's oft-misplaced
criticism.

It would be far too easy to dismiss this work for its naive
assumptions. I highly commend Chettleburgh for audacity and ingenuity
of thought. Sections concerning gangsta rap and the media, the tragedy
of aboriginal youth and female gangs are very compelling and
provocative.

If the function of this book is to stimulate controversy, it has done
so in spades. If it is to provide a meaningful road map for future
action in the struggle against gangs, it falls somewhat short of its
goal. Yet, this is still a worthwhile book because it performs the No.
1 task in any intelligent discourse: It dares to posit premises that
many would not.