Ganging Up - Identifying Gang Members

[Dazzler]

Ganging up 
By Sarah Etter, News Reporter 
02/12/2007 

 This week, Corrections.com reporter Sarah Etter gets some insight from a renowned gang identification expert. Next week, she’ll review an expert gang identification unit at the Florida Department of Corrections.

Running drugs. Aggravated assaults. Conspiracies. Murders.

This can be a regular day for any prison gang, from the lethal Aryan Brotherhood to the ubiquitous Mexican Mafia, and these security threat groups mean problems for corrections facilities. Identifying STG members can help curtail their activity before these groups become too powerful to control.

Officials can combat this problem right at intake by reading an inmate’s skin and noting suspicious tattoos, which could signal gang membership. Offenders can then be questioned about their affiliations and housed accordingly.

Yet, the tattoos are becoming trickier and trickier to decipher. According to Bill Riley, executive board member of the National Major Gang Task Force, keeping current on the language of gang ink is half the battle.

Riley has been identifying gang members for more than 23 years at different correctional agencies and offers training seminars about the fine art of deciphering inmate ink.

Corrections.com: Why is it so crucial for corrections agencies to identify gang members?

Riley: The main reason is housing. Some correctional institutions have policies to make sure rival gangs aren’t housed together, because if you knowingly put two rival gang members together, there is a certain amount of [legal] negligence on behalf of the agency. If you house rival gangs together and don’t know who they are, and something occurs, are you negligent? Should you have known? Was there information available? These are questions all corrections agencies deal with, but one way to handle the problem is to do the best job you can at identifying gang members on the front end and then keeping them separate.

CC: How did you start reading gang tattoos?

Riley: When I worked as a CO, I read them for my own curiosity and as a way of knowing who the really bad guys were. Everyone in prison is a bad guy to some degree, but some are worse than others. Let’s say there is a guy in prison for theft. Well, theft doesn’t seem so bad in comparison to other inmates, but he might have done a sentence in another state or earlier in his prison career for a much more violent crime. Sometimes, his immediate crime is not an indicator of what he is all about. But if you learn how to read the tattoos, you know who the gang members are and the general types of crimes they are involved with. Typically they are involved in drug trafficking, violence, and assaults.

CC: What do the tattoos tell you?

Riley: Each gang is different. After you see so many tattoos, you have to learn how to figure out what they are. Tattoos fall into basic categories. The categories are alpha, numeric, symbolic or pictorial or a combination of those three. Street gangs tend to have alpha and numeric tattoos. If you see someone with an ABC or 123 tattoo, there is a potential there for that individual to be in a street gang.

Once you start building on that, you see some of these guys start using symbols or pictures. One Californian gang uses a cluster of grapes for the Grape Street Gang. If you see a cluster of grapes, that’s the first gang that should pop into your mind. There’s also a Hispanic gang called the White Fence Gang, so if you see a picket fence tattoo and the guy is Hispanic and you find out he’s from Los Angeles, you might have a gang member on your hands. This is how you learn to read another language. You see a guy with the picket fence tattoo and then on his arm he has the letters WF – that’s an alpha tattoo, so it doesn’t take much to understand they are the same gang tattoo, just in different ways.

CC: Are there regional differences for gang tattoos?

Riley: The Midwestern gangs have a tendency to use symbolic or pictorial gangs slightly more. They do it more often than West Coast. West Coast gangs tend to use alpha and numeric more so than the Midwest. These are just my observations from the Northwest. If you go to Los Angeles or Chicago, my observation might be totally off. But where I’m at, that’s what I’ve seen.

CC: You’ve interviewed hundreds of gang members to get to the bottom of their affiliations, rivalries and crimes. What’s that like?

Riley: Gang members have sense, perception and feelings. If you speak to them as if they are evil people, they won’t talk. They are street survivors. They pick up on attitude. If I’m sitting across from one and I call him all sorts of names and I don’t give him any respect and then ask him to give me information, the chances of him giving me what I want are remote. So I talk to them like they are individuals. I don’t disrespect or judge them. When I’m talking to them, I tell them what I know about the gang history, too. It makes it a lot harder for them to try and lie to me if they know I have a background in this.

I very seldom ask suspected gang members a question that could be answered with a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. That’s pretty important because if they give me a ‘No’ answer, the interview is pretty much over. If I think they are lying about their involvement with a gang, I tell them, “Well, this tattoo on your back left shoulder tells me you’re in this gang.” After that, they usually start talking.

CC: What else should officials be aware of?

Riley: A lot of tattooing is ongoing. So just because an inmate is identified [as a gang member] when they first come in doesn’t mean they won’t add to what they already have, which is considered ongoing gang involvement. If you have one tattoo when you come in, and then you leave with two new ones, that shows your gang persona is still active. Whether you are totally active or not, that’s subjective but it still shows your gang persona is there. That’s where COs can help on a daily basis. If you’re on a shift and you notice what looks like a gang tattoo, just make sure you let someone know. Each agency has its own procedures, but make sure that information gets to someone.

By checking out when an inmate has added new tattoos, you can create a timeline. If they say they are no longer part of a gang, you can prove they are. I don’t mind playing hardball with them; when they try and lie to me, I don’t take it. I may be old but I’m not stupid. That’s what I tell them.

Bill Riley is currently working on a book of gang tattoos, which should be released by the end of this year, for the National Major Gang Task Force.

 

[Dazzler]

[Editor’s Note: Last week, Corrections.com reporter Sarah Etter spoke with National Major Gang Task Force executive board member Bill Riley about identifying gangs through their body ink, Ganging Up, 2/12/07. This week, she focuses on Florida’s strategy in managing these security threat groups.]

STG Storms by Sarah Etter

Each morning, Carter Hickman and Dwight White fill their cups to the brim with coffee and get to work. Tucked away in an office, they tirelessly research, identify and index gang tattoos, migration, hand symbols and slang words. They spend their day conducting interviews, planning housing arrangements and keeping Florida current on the activities of street and prison gangs and white supremacy groups.

Hickman is a prime intelligence analyst, and White a security threat group coordinator, two of the gang go-to-guys at the Florida Department of Corrections Security Threat Intelligence Unit.

“We both just try to keep abreast of the ever-changing gang culture,” White says. “If you don’t try to keep up with it, it will get away from you very quickly. The gang culture changes language, symbols and more. There is something new on the streets every day.”

The STIU began in the late 90s, after FLDOC officials realized that increasing prison violence could be traced back to gang rivalries. Once the unit was established, Hickman and White became teammates. White spends his days buried in photographs of gang tattoos and symbols. Hickman studies incident reports and pieces together suspected gang-related violence.

“My primary concern is monitoring gangs. I locate the members, document trends in our prisons and keep an eye on violent altercations that could be gang related,” Hickman explains. “We just spend our days tracking gangs on a daily basis.”

These insatiable STIU investigators have another weapon in their arsenal. The FLDOCs’ Security Threat Operational Review Management System, or STORMS, is a computer program based on an idea by Hickman.

“The STORMS system is our primary gang database. It has a points system that identifies gang members. If an inmate has a gang tattoo, they get five points automatically. If an inmate admits they are in a gang, they get another five points. Once they hit ten points, they are a known gang member,” he explains.

STORMS accumulates information on suspected and confirmed gang members throughout the FLDOC and makes the info available at all facilities. It keeps track of the tattoos, confessions, rivalries and violence that could be STG-related. Once an inmate is identified as a gang member, their information is kept in the system for life, even if they are released.

“This system is just invaluable. It offers profiles of every known gang. It’s just an amazing analytical tool that is adept at keeping this information organized and keeping us in touch with the gang culture,” explains White.

Each morning, incident reports and gang-related information are entered into STORMS by COs who serve as STIU coordinators at each FLDOC facility. The coordinators, trained by Hickman and White, keep track of suspected and known gang members. If they have trouble identifying a certain tattoo or hand symbol that has been reported, they send digital pictures along to the STIU for further review.

Once Hickman and Carter have compiled STG information, they write monthly intelligence reports, which are sent across the state. The duo also compose country-wide STG briefs that land on the desks of law enforcement officials, corrections administrators, lawyers, doctors and judges.

Although this monthly report is classified, Hickman says it offers a glimpse into current gang activity, like the recent national rise of the MS-13 gang.

Keeping tabs on STGs can reduce violence rates, especially when it comes to housing. Hickman and White are in charge of maintaining a delicate balance of STG populations in each facility. According to White, housing STG members must be a well-documented and well-planned undertaking.

“Prisons are always set up on racial balances, like black and white counts,” White says. “But we have to balance out the set counts. If we have a Latin King problem [at a facility] and we look at STORMS and see that the facility has more Latin Kings than another gang that suggests an imbalance between the gangs is causing violence. We’re basically checks and balances for the whole thing.”

The FLDOC currently has more than one thousand different gangs identified in the STORMS database.

White says these groups are constantly changing and shifting, much like gang culture.

“This culture isn’t going to go away,” White says. “If you don’t stay on top of it, it just passes right by you. And we’re the guys that stay on top of it.”

 

[dancer]

I learned everything I know about gangs from the FLDOC web site.  They have a section on gangs, including Chicago street gangs,  with what the symbols are for each gang. 

[JDsMom]

Excellent articles Dazz!!!!!!!