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Expert: Territory-Wide Response Needed to Stamp Out Gangs

Local gang expert LaVelle Campbell Sr. breaks down the facts about gang violence.Off the top of his head, local gang expert LaVelle Campbell Sr. said there’s about 11 gangs in the territory, from the Bloods and Crips to the Latin Kings, and a recent addition called New Breed, whose members, he said, are basically paid hitmen.
Campbell spoke Tuesday during an anti-gang conference held at Bertha C. Boschulte Junior High. With the threat of gang violence building, dozens of local officials put their heads together this week to see what they can do to stamp it out.
Campbell continued that each group is marked by different colors, symbols and types of clothing, and the evidence of that is plastered throughout the majority of local schools, from the walls of bathrooms to graffiti tagging the chain-link fences securing each campus. Campbell said Tuesday that he’s confiscated such paraphernalia — including a bevy of weapons — from young men and women ranging in age from six to those in their 20s.
Looking out over an audience dotted with the faces of law enforcement officials, local school principals and even Gov. John deJongh Jr., Campbell said he recently pulled two knives off a first-grader who brought them to school in order to kill a kid he got into a fight with the day before. The audience gasped when Campbell recounted his story, but the tough former school monitor responded only by saying, "Yeah, that’s right, now you all are seeing what I’ve been talking about."
For the past few years, Campbell has been trying to teach the community about the realities of gang violence. And on Tuesday, the second day in a weeklong territory-wide anti-gang conference, he said that the message is really starting to catch on.
The comprehensive conference is put on by the V.I. Anti-Gang Committee, a collaboration of agencies including the U.S. Attorney’s Office, V.I. Police Department, Project Safe Neighborhoods, Education and Crime Stoppers USVI, among others. The first few sessions, spanning Monday and Tuesday, were conducted on St. Thomas, while the rest will be divided up during the rest of the week between St. John and St. Croix.
On Monday, Campbell along with local and national gang experts Sgt. L. Louis Jordan, Sgt. Christopher Hill and Leroy Contee Sr. trained and certified 72 local law enforcement officers, along with counselors from Human Services and Education, in gang awareness — an intense course that touched on everything from the basic signs and symbols to safe responses.
"I saw a lot of good come out of the first conference last year," Campbell said later. "So next year, because of this one, I expect there to be even more."
Building some hope for the young people so that they don’t have to turn to gangs for love is one of the key responses, many speakers said during the conference. While some differed on the methodology, all agreed that increased parental involvement and using teachers as a front line defense should be at the top of the list.
"We can’t arrest our way out of this problem," U.S. Attorney Ronald Sharpe, Tuesday’s keynote speaker, said. "It’s going to depend on a multi-faceted approach. We’ve got to develop more non-traditional crime fighters."
That means people who build hope instead of hate, he added later, as he talked about a program in California called "Summer Night Lights," in which law enforcement officers turn gang hot spots into areas for youth activities.
"It’s time for unprecedented community-wide cooperation," Sharpe said.
But for community members to really rally behind that movement, they need to realize what’s going wrong, and change their approach to certain issues, Cira Burke, the district’s director of Intervention Services, said later.
Compounding the problem are socio-economic factors, such as poverty and the absence of fathers in the household, Burke said, adding that once again, teen pregnancy rates are also on the rise.
"The best strategy is for the teachers and parents to work together," Burke concluded.
Backing her up, deJongh said it’s also time to stop giving parents a free pass.
"Parents have responsibility for their children, that’s the bottom line," he said, adding that without their parents around, children begin to feel a loss of family and turn to gangs to fill their desire to be part of something.
But one of the advantages that the territory has is that the local gangs are just beginning to build, which still gives the community time to infiltrate and weed them out.
That means giving students a reason to stay in school, by engaging them with technology that they find interesting and by not being afraid to "push the envelope ourselves."
"And we have to break down the notion that we can’t back down from people that we know," the governor added. "Those are the tough decisions that we now have to make."
A new documentary by Lambert Media Group on the prevalence of gangs in the territory was also featured during the conference, which wrapped on St. Thomas Tuesday night with sessions for parents and their children, along with the announcement of this year’s Speak Your Peace contest winners. (Listen to AnuMaat Davis-Kahina’s poem, "End the Violence," by clicking here.)
This year’s contest challenged students throughout the territory to compose a poem with an anti-violence message. This year’s winners are:
-Majestik Estrada-Petersen, a second-grader at Gladys Abraham Elementary School;
-M’Kayla M. Mike, a fifth-grader at Leonard Dober Elementary School;
-Emiah Douglas, a seventh-grader at Addelita Cancryn Jr. High School;
-D’mari Creque, an 11th-grader at Charlotte Amalie High School;
-Braxton Lansiqout, a fifth-grader at the Good Hope School on St. Croix; and
– AnuMaat Davis-Kahina, from the Per Ankh Institute.
The conference continues 5 p.m. Wednesday at the Westin Resort on St. John, and 10 a.m. Thursday on St. Croix with another training session at the UVI Great Hall Building. The conference finishes up at 6 p.m. Friday with a public session at the Gov. Juan F. Luis Hospital Cardiac Center conference room.

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