The Boston Police Department’s gang database lists 160 gangs and more than 5,300 gang members.
Info. from Boston Police Dept. gang database raises questions
Hyde Park resident Domingos DaRosa, who owns a landscaping company, was dropping tools off at his mother’s Dorchester home on June 27, 2018 when he and his brother were shot by an unknown assailant. Grazed in the leg, he threw his brother over his shoulder, carried him to his landscaping truck and sped him to Boston Medical Center.
The next day, he was annoyed but not surprised when news outlets reported Boston police referring to the shooting as “gang-related.” DaRosa, who has never been a member of a gang, is nevertheless used to the label. He grew up with family on Wendover Street in Dorchester and was often told by police that he was a member of a gang.
“Every time I got stopped, it was the same thing,” he recalls. “‘You’re from Wendover.’ It was an excuse to stop me for no reason.”
He and his cousins played basketball together and hung out in a neighborhood many would describe as crime-infested, DaRosa said. But gang activity?
“We all hung out at the Daniel Marr Boy’s Club,” he recalls. “We played basketball at Clifford Park or Ronan Park. We never had issues with anyone.”
DaRosa, who is making his second run for an at-large city council seat, thinks the Boston Police Department’s Youth Violence Strike Force, commonly referred to as the gang unit, uses too broad a definition of what a gang is. The BPD’s gang database lists more than 5,300 people either active or inactive in 160 gangs, 100 of which are active. Information on the database obtained by the ACLU of Massachusetts suggests Boston police may have an overly expansive definition of what a gang is and who’s in a gang.
As a WBUR reporter noted last
week, in Chicago, a city whose gang database came under fire for
inaccuracies in recent years, just 59 gangs are listed. Given that
Chicago has a population four times that of Boston, the figure of 160
gangs for Boston strains credibility, said attorney and Cornell Law
School professor Carl Williams.
“That’s outrageous,” Williams said.
Part
of the discrepancy could be explained by Boston Police Department’s
Rule 335, which gives a broad official description in of what
constitutes a gang:
“A
group of three or more individuals, whether formal or informal, who has
a common name or common identifying signs or colors or symbols or
frequent a specific area or location and may claim it as their territory
and has members or associates who, individually or collectively engage
or have engaged in criminal activity which may involve incidents of
targeting rival gang members and/or being targeted by rival gangs.”
DaRosa
says that he and his cousins did not engage in criminal activity as a
group nor consider themselves a gang, but under the BPD definition,
individual acts by DaRosa or any of his cousins could have qualified
them as a gang.
Yet, DaRosa notes, white kids aren’t subjected to the same level of scrutiny.
“The
kids in Neponset are not considered a gang, but they’re outside
drinking and smoking in Garvey Park every night,” he said. “It’s because
they’re white kids. They’ll be 50 or 60 of them at any time after 6
p.m.”
Blacks account for 75 percent of the 5,300 names in BPD’s database, according to information BPD shared with the ACLU.
Non-black Latinos make up 14 percent and whites 2.3 percent. Just 26 people in the database are female.
Blacks
make up about 23 percent of the city’s population. There are roughly
230,000 males living in Boston between the ages of 10 and 54 years old,
according to information from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2013-2017
American Community Survey. If 23 percent of them are black, that would
equal roughly 53,000 black males in that age group. Of the 5,300 people
in the BPD gang database, 75 percent, or approximately 3,975 of them are
black males. That means that as many as 8 percent of black males
between the ages of 10 and 54 living in Boston could be listed in the
city’s gang database.
Those
whose names are entered into the database typically are not notified
that they are on the list. There’s no system for appealing such a
designation or having one’s name removed, although the consequences of
being listed can be dire. In 2018, a student at East Boston high school
was taken into custody by federal immigration officials and deported
after a police officer listed him as a gang member in an incident
report.
Teens who are
U.S. citizens have complained of increased harassment from police after
they have been incorrectly listed as gang members by members of the
Youth Violence Strike Force.
“When
you have police driving around the neighborhood who aren’t from here,
they think onein-ten kids is in a gang,” says attorney Carl Williams.
“That’s why they’re doing stop-and-frisk. If you stop enough people,
even if it’s one or two in a hundred who have contraband, it’s a
terrible return rate, but the police feel justified.”
DaRosa
says his son, who graduated from Boston College High School and was
accepted to Bentley College, is treated like a gang member.
“The cops stop him and harass him any time they see him walking or driving,” he said.
The gang unit
The
Youth Violence Strike Force is considered a prestigious assignment for
officers, according to a police officer who spoke on the condition of
anonymity.
“Specialized
units are given more credit for the work they do than do regular
patrolmen,” said the police source. “Usually, you get priority when
opportunities for promotion come up.”
Eight
members of the unit received three-day suspensions for drinking alcohol
while on duty recently following a December 31, 2017 incident where a
ninth officer, Domenic Columbo, slammed his pickup truck into a car,
leaving a passenger with a severe brain injury.