Social Network Intelligence Analysis to Combat Street Gang Violence

In this paper we introduce the Organization, Relationship, and Contact Analyzer (ORCA) that is designed to aide intelligence analysis for law enforcement operations against violent street gangs. ORCA is designed to address several police analytical needs concerning street gangs using new techniques in social network analysis. Specifically, it can determine "degree of membership" for individuals who do not admit to membership in a street gang, quickly identify sets of influential individuals (under the tipping model), and identify criminal ecosystems by decomposing gangs into sub-groups. We describe this software and the design decisions considered in building an intelligence analysis tool created specifically for countering violent street gangs as well as provide results based on conducting analysis on real-world police data provided by a major American metropolitan police department who is partnering with us and currently deploying this system for real-world use

Assessing New York City's Youth Gun Violence Crisis: Crews - Volume III - Responding to the Problem: Coordinating a Continuum of Services

The success or failure of community strategies to address the youth gun violence crisis is often attributed in part to how well the problem is understood and diagnosed. With support from The New York Community Trust, the Crime Commission has undertaken an analysis of youth gun violence and crew activity -- violent turf rivalries among less-organized, smaller and normally younger groups than traditional gangs -- in select New York City communities. Our initial findings from available data, existing research and interviews with stakeholders are presented in a series of papers titled, Assessing New York City's Youth Gun Violence Crisis: Crews

Early Identification of Violent Criminal Gang Members

Gang violence is a major problem in the United States accounting for a large fraction of homicides and other violent crime. In this paper, we study the problem of early identification of violent gang members. Our approach relies on modified centrality measures that take into account additional data of the individuals in the social network of co-arrestees which together with other arrest metadata provide a rich set of features for a classification algorithm. We show our approach obtains high precision and recall (0.89 and 0.78 respectively) in the case where the entire network is known and out-performs current approaches used by law-enforcement to the problem in the case where the network is discovered overtime by virtue of new arrests - mimicking real-world law-enforcement operations. Operational issues are also discussed as we are preparing to leverage this method in an operational environment.Comment: SIGKDD 201

Are the Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street Gangs a Threat to Our National Security

This study focuses on the two predominantly Latino gangs, Mara Salvatrucha (aka MS-13), and the 18th Street Gang, operating on the streets of communities across America. This study is significant because it will provide information about how these violent gangs operate in ways that can inform and alert both civilian society and government agencies concerning optimal responses to the problems created by these gangs. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of documentary evidence and governmental statistics about the Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street Gang, this study developed several conclusive findings on the negative effects of these groups in the United States. The Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street Gang are becoming transnational criminal organizations, given the fact that they originated in Central America and Mexico and have since expanded their operations abroad. Despite efforts by national and international law enforcement to curtail these gangs’ criminal behaviors, they maintain their ties with their gang associates in these countries. Moreover, gang members engage in criminal activities that were highly organized. They also moved through networks that continued to gain sophistication. Drug trafficking, gun running, violence, robbery, extortion are some of the heinous crimes committed by these groups. These gangs disturb peace and order in the community, destroy personal property and endanger the lives of citizens. These two gangs may establish an organized criminal enterprise capable of coordinating illegal activities across national borders. Nonetheless, with complete disregard to the laws of this land, including immigration laws, these groups are considered a threat to the security of the country, but this level is considered comparable to any highly organized street gang that supports its activities with criminal enterprises. In sum, the dangers posed by Mara Salvatrucha and the 18th Street Gang, as well as other comparable criminal organizations should not be underestimated.José A. Ortiz Jr.Skelton, David TGrosskopf, Edmund WDeVere D. WoodsMaster of ScienceDepartment of Criminology and Criminal JusticeCunningham Memorial library, Terre Haute, Indiana State University.201205MastersTitle from document title page. Document formatted into pages: contains 74p. : ill. Includes reference page

Armed violence and poverty in El Salvador: a mini case study for the Armed Violence and Poverty Initiative

YesThis report on El Salvador is one of 13 case studies (all of the case studies can be found at www.bradford.ac.uk/cics). This research draws upon secondary data sources including existing research studies, reports and evaluations commissioned by operational agencies, and early warning and survey data where this has been available. These secondary sources have been complemented by interviews with government officers, aid policymakers and practitioners, researchers and members of the local population. The analysis and opinions expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views or policy of DFID or the UK government

Finding Street Gang Members on Twitter

Most street gang members use Twitter to intimidate others, to present outrageous images and statements to the world, and to share recent illegal activities. Their tweets may thus be useful to law enforcement agencies to discover clues about recent crimes or to anticipate ones that may occur. Finding these posts, however, requires a method to discover gang member Twitter profiles. This is a challenging task since gang members represent a very small population of the 320 million Twitter users. This paper studies the problem of automatically finding gang members on Twitter. It outlines a process to curate one of the largest sets of verifiable gang member profiles that have ever been studied. A review of these profiles establishes differences in the language, images, YouTube links, and emojis gang members use compared to the rest of the Twitter population. Features from this review are used to train a series of supervised classifiers. Our classifier achieves a promising F1 score with a low false positive rate.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, Published as a full paper at 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2016

BALAS Y BARRIOS: AN ANALYSIS OF U.S. DOMESTIC AND REGIONAL ANTI-GANG POLICIES FROM A HUMAN SECURITY PERSPECTIVE

Threats to human security from transnational organized crime (TOC) and gangs have increased since the 1990s in the Americas. The United States implemented the Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime, the U.S. Strategy to Combat the Threat of Criminal Gangs from Central America and Mexico, and the Mérida Initiative in response. This thesis employs a multi-goal policy to evaluate how effectively U.S. policy responses achieved desired outcomes. For comparison, this thesis analyzes the Canadian gang violence strategy, examining what has worked and what has not worked. Findings demonstrate that law enforcement tactics prioritized within the U.S. strategy result in outputs, but they fail to impact gang violence outcomes. Prevention programs, on the other hand, both in Canadian and U.S. strategies, are effective in reducing gang crime and violence but are under-resourced and undervalued in U.S. endeavors. This thesis proposes that a comprehensive approach is better aligned with current expert gang research and more effective in producing desired outcomes. Recommendations include funding the Juvenile Justice Reform Act and rebalancing Mérida funding to support United States Agency for International Development prevention programs; integrating federal, state, and local partnerships through a community coalition council through the Department of Justice; evaluating the Treasury’s TOC designation status; and supporting complementary prevention and rehabilitation.Civilian, Department of Homeland SecurityApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

FROM MAFIA TO VIOLENT EXTREMIST: EXAMINING THE APPLICATION OF THE RICO ACT TO ANTIFA

Factions within Antifa were responsible for criminal activity during the social injustice protests of 2020 in the United States, leading to some arrests. Despite the economic destruction caused nationally during the protests and Antifa’s continual involvement in criminal acts, not much has been done to hold the group accountable. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act offers one potential option to address Antifa. This thesis explores how the RICO statute has been applied to criminal enterprises similar to Antifa and how it might be applied to prosecute Antifa. This thesis uses a combination of two qualitative research methods: legal analysis and case studies. The legal analysis focuses on the RICO Act’s application to non-economic enterprises and the related First Amendment issues involved when the act is applied to protest groups. The case studies focus on the successful application of the RICO Act to other types of criminal enterprises such as criminal street gangs, white supremacist groups, and other non-traditional criminal enterprises. This thesis finds that the RICO Act’s use for non-traditional criminal enterprises has withstood legal challenges, making it a viable option for combating Antifa.Civilian, Los Angeles County Sheriff's DepartmentApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited