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Gang-related graffiti generally is the first indication that gang members have moved into a neighborhood.   Photo by Jeff Cook

Driving from his Milan home to his Rock Island office, state Rep. Joel Brunsvold (D-72, Milan) can see gang graffiti almost every day. Picking up the local newspapers, he can read stories about gang problems and even interviews with gang members in Rock Island. And talking to police, he can hear startling statistics on gang crimes in this city of 40,000 residents: there were 46 gang-related drive-by shootings in Rock Island alone last year, 140 in the larger Quad-Cities area. And those were just the ones reported to police. And yet gangs are not something Brunsvold comes across himself, or hears about from his constituents. "To be honest, it is occurring in very isolated areas," he says. "There tend to be incidents that generate a lot of press coverage, and I know they're out there. But do I see it? No. Do I hear about it moving into schools? Not much. Every once in a while there will be a shooting, and then all of a sudden the citizens get outraged. "We've had gangs for a long time," he says. "Because of a certain socioeconomic situation, some people turn to them. Some kids have been shot and killed. But it's gang members killing gang members. What do you do about that? That's a very, very difficult question."

Indeed, it's a question that has stymied lawmakers and law enforcers alike, and it seems no answer is imminent. But in the meantime, what worries people like Capt. Richard Kozak, who heads the gang crimes unit for the Illinois State Police, is that people will continue to perceive gang activity as limited to certain pockets of neighborhoods and affecting only the people who live or hang around there. Gang problems once were limited to specfic geographic areas and socioeconomic classes, he says, but it is naive to think they will stay contained within such boundaries.

"People lull themselves into a false sense of security by thinking this is a minority problem," he says. "There is definitely movement into different social groups and neighborhoods. To dismiss them as limited to certain places or people means letting them seep into your own street, and then trying to do something about it after it's too late."

Notwithstanding Brunsvold's experience, other local officials in the area say gangs have spread into every part of the city and the larger Quad-Cities region. "There are no boundaries for them," says Rock Island Police Chief Anthony Scott.

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"We have gang members from all racial and economic backgrounds, and all types of neighborhoods." "The assumption it's primarily young minorities isn't true anymore here," agrees the city's mayor, Mark Schwiebert. That fact is obvious to Investigator Chuck Hauman of the Rock Island police force, who spends a good part of his work day at Rock Island High School and says he knows middle-class white students who have joined gangs. "It's gotten to the point that I know of upper-class students at the school who are getting into it," he says. To Kozak, the slow migration of gangs into middle-class communities makes sense. "We have a very mobile society," he says. "We can document that Chicago gangs have set up outgrowths in 34 other states; Chicago police say they've moved into all 50 states. Now, you tell me — if they're going to go all the way to Alaska, is it realistic to think they're not going to go into a middle-class neighborhood right here in Illinois?"

Police investigate the site of a Rock Island shooting last year that left 15-year-old Eric Harvard dead and another youth injured. The Rock Island Police Department recently joined other local police agencies as well as state and federal law enforcement officers on a task force dedicated to fighting gang crime.   Photo by Jeff Cook

Betty Major-Rose learned the hard way that gangs know no neighborhood boundaries. Her 17-year-old daughter was killed by a gang member near their former home in Chicago's upscale Lincoln Park community. "I tried to run away from gangs, but you can't really do that," says Major-Rose, who founded the group Parents Against Gangs and now gives presentations on gang awareness. She has since moved further north in Chicago, to Rogers Park. "It doesn't matter if you're living in a nice neighborhood in the Chicago area or anywhere in the state. You can't assume they're too far away to affect your family."

Throughout Illinois, people in medium-sized cities like Rockford, Decatur and Carbondale are beginning to recognize this. In Springfield, the murder late last year of 14-year-old Harold Page III in a stairwell at an elementary school brought to light the fact that even middle-class white kids have become involved in gangs in the capital city (although police contend Page's death was not itself gang-related).

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In Monmouth, about 60 miles south of the Quad Cities, signs are starting to show gang infiltration for the first time, says Warren County State's Atty. Greg McClintock. In one case, gang members broke the jaw of a new recruit as part of an initiation process, he says. In other, separate incidents, youths with ties to gang members shot an elderly man during a robbery and stabbed another person in a Hardee's restaurant.

And a survey of school districts outside Cook County revealed gangs' growing presence in suburban and downstate schools. The survey of 223 districts by the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools found that between 1989 and 1992, the number of students suspended for gang-related activities rose 150 percent, to 168 from 44. The number of females included in the figure jumped to 37 from just one. Six months into this school year at Rock Island High School, about 18 students with gang ties had been arrested for fighting on school property.

Even small cities and towns have started contending with gang problems, some working almost feverishly to fight the first vestiges of gangs. Harvard, III., a city of 6,000 that sits near the Wisconsin border, has passed such strict anti-gang ordinances since gang graffiti started surfacing recently that "we're not even sure if they're all legal," says Mark McDon-ald, spokesman for the Illinois State Police. "We've got zero tolerance," says Harvard Mayor Bill LeFew. "We don't allow any gang colors at all. No gang graffiti. We've got our public works department open 24 hours a day, seven days a week to clean up any graffiti immediately. Violation of curfew laws is a $500 fine. Vandalism using spray paint is a $500 fine. We've probably got 15 pages of ordinances just dealing with gangs."

People in the Quad Cities sympathize with communities trying to keep gangs out. In fact, they probably wish they still were at that stage. "We've talked to people in Galesburg and Quincy, and they're starting to see gangs from around us moving down there," says Detective Richard Ryck-eghem of Moline, who is part of a group that makes gang awareness presentations to other cities.

"What they're talking about are problems we had here a year, two, three years ago," says Ryckeghem. "They're seeing the graffiti, the gang colors and symbols, people showing up in their cities who have been tied to gangs here."

Now the problems in the Quad Cities are much more aggravated. Police roughly estimate 2,200 gang members live in the area now. As their numbers have grown, so has violence, says Ryckeghem. Gang members have started using guns to settle disputes even in crowds, such as on busy streets or at parties.

In one frequently cited instance, a group of teenagers on their way to play basketball was fired upon by gang members from a porch across the street. Fifteen-year-old Eric Harvard, a well-liked Rock Island High School student who was known for his artistic talent, was killed. In two other cases, young people without gang ties were killed outside of separate Rock Island parties by people identified as gang members. In one case, a teenage girl died; in another, a young Navy veteran.

Within the city of Rock Island, there were nine homicides during 1993. Sheriff Mike Grchan says county and city police departments are only now beginning to classify gang-related crimes separately from others, but that he believes almost all of last year's murders were committed by gang members. "I'd say they've definitely had an influence as their numbers have gotten bigger," he says. "The number of homicides around here [for the entire county] were zero to four a year for the last 20 years or so."

These rising numbers seem capable of making any community leader shudder. And they leave those in Rock Island and the surrounding Quad Cities to answer: How did the situation get to this point?

Gangs first were identified in Rock Island nearly a decade ago, appearing in visible but small numbers in 1986 and then exploding with the boom of crack cocaine in the area in 1988, says Sgt. Jeff Chisholm of the Rock Island County sheriff's department. Their roots lie in Chicago, 170 miles to the east. Sitting along Interstate 80, the area became a stopping point between Chicago and Des Moines and points further west. As a fairly populated region, it was viewed as a good market for drug sales and recruitment of new gang members. What's more, says Detective Ryckeghem, if you draw a four-hour radius around Rock Island, you find it sits in the middle of several large cities — Chicago, Omaha, St. Louis, Des Moines, Milwaukee and Indianapolis. "It's a hub of all those areas, and a good place to come and meet," he says. Those factors help account for the genesis of gangs there. Why membership grew and thrived is debated. Some say it was because law enforcement agencies in the region were too territorial; they didn't share information and manpower in ways that allowed officers to move as easily between individual municipalities as could gang members. With the Quad Cities spanning two counties and two states, jurisdictional problems were common; Rock Island officers couldn't easily follow gang members into next-door Moline or Davenport, Iowa, across the Mississippi River. "There was no concerted effort to work together," says Ryckeghem.

Harvard, III., a city of 6,000 that sits near the Wisconsin border, has passed such strict anti-gang ordinances since gang graffiti started surfacing recently that 'we're not even sure if they're all legal'

Others say the East Moline Correctional Center played a significant role in gang development and longevity. "I think when inmates get out they tend to hang around and stay in the area and become part of the problem," says Sen. Denny Jacobs (D-14, East Moline). Ryckeghem agrees, adding that because the center is a discharge point for inmates, their families sometimes move to the area to wait for them. Professor Irving A. Spergel of the University of Chicago, a noted gang expert who has studied them since the 1950s, thinks this assessment makes sense. "We've seen that happen in other cities too, like Joliet,"

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What just about everyone seems to agree on is that widespread initial denial of a real gang problem in the community slowed responses at first and allowed gangs to gain a strong foothold. 'There was heavy, heavy denial from everybody '

he says. "The prisoners' associates actually will come and settle nearby so they can keep in close communication with them." Another aggravating factor, says Spergel, involves dwindling job opportunities for people without much education. "It used to be that as gang members got older, out of their teens, they'd leave gangs to take decent-paying jobs," he says. "Now there's no jobs for people like that." Mayor Schwiebert has seen that theory in practice; he says the region's loss of manufacturing jobs has contributed to the number of young people joining gangs. "The changing economy has displaced thousands of industrial jobs that provided career opportunities," he says. "When you look for career alternatives, the economic benefits of gang involvement may look good." What just about everyone seems to agree on is that widespread initial denial of a real gang problem in the community slowed responses at first and allowed gangs to gain a strong foothold. "There was heavy, heavy denial from everybody," says Ryckeghem. "They said these were misguided bands of youth with misguided intentions they'd outgrow. When we started to realize violent crimes were being committed by gang members — about the first part of 1990 — everybody started to wake up." Once those wake-up calls were heard, area cities and counties began working together sharing

information, and police began giving gang awareness presentations to churches, PTA groups — wherever they were wanted. The Rock Island police force assigned officers to the local high school and housing authority to head off problems there. And, most recently, Chisholm joined other area officers on an FBI-run task force that is trying to target gang leaders and pursue federal charges against them that are more stringent than state charges. It's all part of an effort, he says, to "make this an unattractive place for them to operate."

While it once was enough to say gang activities were concentrated in certain parts of the region, Grchan says gang activity has spread into neighborhoods you wouldn't expect. "Traditionally it's been the lower socioe-conomic area, minority residents lured into gangs; now white males are the fastest-growing sector of gangs," he says.

There's no defined reason for the spread, says Chisholm, adding that the increase of middle- and upper-income kids joining gangs has captured the attention of a whole new group of people. "These families are devastated and people in the communities are angry, whereas a year earlier they couldn't have cared less because they thought it wouldn't happen to them. I used to think the middle- or upper-income kids who joined were from dysfunctional families, since they didn't join for economic reasons. I don't believe that anymore. There are some kids we just can't explain why they're in. Some of them just think it's a neat thing to do."

"There are a lot of middle-class and well-to-do kids in these gangs," adds Ryckeghem. "One kid whose car is getting shot up all the time comes from a family with a six-figure income. It's not a majority of the kids, but they're certainly well-represented."

Kozak recognizes this as part of a pattern he has seen in Chicago and knows occurs in other big cities. The gangs start as a way to make money by selling drugs, he says, or as a social group, a way for young people to find an identity. Then they spread among schools. "There's interaction between schools, so students in the middle- and upper-income areas form their own groups as a need for defense," says Kozak, adding that this is a phenomenon that dates back decades, to when he was growing up in Chicago. "Some [middle-class gang members] may have started out as opportunists, burglars, home invaders, then moved into the dope market because they know otherwise others will move into their community. [Others] want to form the alliances in white neighborhoods to bring drugs out into the white neighborhoods."

Now that people admit gangs are thriving in Rock Island and the surrounding areas, affecting all neighborhoods, the question is what to do about it — something that big-city police have tried to answer for decades. It seems there is no sure solution.

Approaches vary: Some say gang crimes should carry stiffer penalties and longer prison sentences. Members of the Quad-Cities task force hope the involvement of federal agents will help prosecutions go more smoothly and result in stiffer sentences. "Using really good prosecution may get the attention of gang leaders and show them this is not a good place for them to be," says Anthony Scott, the Rock Island police chief. But Spergel and Kozak are quick to point out that while major gang leaders already are serving time, they seem to have little trouble communicating with and overseeing operations of members who are still outside prison walls.

Organized sports activities, which have been tried as a way to keep potential gang members busy, aren't the answer either, they say. "One response that was tried with suburban Chicago gangs was starting midnight basketball tournaments," Kozak says. "That was effective maybe for a week because it was just that — basketball. There were no social workers there to help figure out what these kids and their families needed, no job counselors to follow up with jobs needed."

There may not be easy answers, he says, as gangs' lures likely lie in such deep societal problems as eroding family structures and limited economic opportunities. But the dangers they present to their members and the public compel police to put up a fight, he says.

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Gangs use graffiti as a way to mark their "turf." In Rock Island, this graffiti can be seen on the sides of businesses, on bridges, and covering walls and garage doors in alleys of residential neighborhoods.Photo by Jeff Cook

"I'm a believer in communication. But traditionally there have been distances between police and social services," Kozak says. "I'm a 28-year veteran of police work, and I've learned we can't deal with gangs by ourselves. Cops have to get rid of the John Wayne attitude." The closest thing to an answer that he can recommend is a combined approach from people in schools, social service agencies, police departments and job training — an approach Spergel endorses as well. They say a combination of job training in fields that pay above minimum wage, literacy tutoring, strict law enforcement, athletic activities, substance-abuse treatment and counseling may be the only way to convince potential or active gang members that a "straight" lifestyle makes sense for them.

That's a tall order for any community. And even if all these services become available to a potential gang member, will they likely keep him or her from joining?

"I think it will," says Kozak of the state police. "If you can get them going in a common direction, you have a better chance than nothing." Rock Island Mayor Mark Schwiebert, who recently set up a local coalition of this type, agrees.

His city's experience so far suggests additional approaches as well. Overcoming denial of gang problems and encouraging many sectors of the community to work together seem key elements before solutions can be broached; police alone shouldn't be expected to shoulder the entire gang burden. The constant and universal need for decent-paying jobs in a community is crucial as well.

A potentially controversial approach hinted at by the Quad-Cities' situation is to discourage building prisons in populated areas — an idea that would almost surely be fought by people who want to reap job opportunities that accompany prison construction and operation.

Although multipronged approaches may sound promising, the fact is that no community has found a proven formula for curtailing gang activity or recruitment.

Against that backdrop, people in Rock Island have worked long and hard to develop an approach they think will work after watching a painful trend develop in their own streets. Officers and public officials have had to track gangs' crimes, comfort gangs' victims and watch local kids become part of them. Now they're working hard to make their area unattractive for gangs. The intended consequence, if they're tough enough, may come true: gangs may be pushed out. But from everything they've learned about the tenacity of these groups, it seems the unintended outcome may well be that gang members simply move their operations — and the accompanying problems — down the highway .

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