By Geoff Mulvihill, The Associated Press
CAMDEN, N.J. (AP) - Just a few blocks from the store where Stacy Hornsby sells sneakers and hats, a daytime slaying - part of a surge in murders statewide - claimed the life of one of her closest friends last spring.
Hornsby, 33, said Robert Williams was an innocent victim of broad-daylight street violence on April 25 in the neighborhood that’s known locally as “Polacktown.” Stephen Moore, who was 16 at the time of the shooting, has been charged but remains at large.
Though the suspect was a young man who allegedly used a gun in a crime in an area known for drugs, Hornsby is certain her friend’s death had nothing to do with what state officials call a growing and troubling trend. A statewide rise in gang activity accounted for about one-fourth of the increase in homicides in New Jersey between 2002 and 2003, Attorney General Peter Harvey said this week.
“Camden is a mess,” said Hornsby, who’s lived in the city her whole life and has a job where many of her customers are young men. “But there’s no gangs.”
Maybe not in the traditional Bloods and Crips sense, authorities say, but Camden and other New Jersey cities now may be home to a different breed of criminal organization.
It’s been 12 years now since the Sons of Malcolm X, a violent gang that authorities said required committing a homicide to gain admission, was broken up.
“Since the Sons of Malcolm X were basically dismantled, it seems to be much more of a freelance or loosely knit network,” said Bill Shralow, a spokesman for the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office. “There seems to be more of a corporate structure - not a traditional gang structure.”
Shralow said one practical difference between the two types of groups is that the smaller drug operations are mostly entrepreneurial and lack the loyalty that goes with membership in the larger gangs.
But to Harvey, those groups are as troublesome as the national gangs he says are setting up crime operations in New Jersey.
“Some of them are `super gangs’ - the Crips, the Bloods and Latin Kings - and some of them are groups of young adults who have joined together to participate in organized criminal behavior that is protected by gun violence,” Harvey said.
Jon’a Meyer, a criminal justice professor at Rutgers University’s Camden campus, said gangs of any ilk are particularly troubling because they inspire deep levels of fear in residents and because they teach young members, almost in a formal way, how to be a criminal.
In Essex County, Acting Prosecutor Paula T. Dow said she’s seeing a rise in gang activity in the form of large operations, small operations and among young people who are “wannabe” gang members.
She said it’s harder to find jurors willing to sit in gang-related trials and that witnesses in gang cases frequently recant their testimony out of fear of retribution.
“We work harder, we try to get them more protection earlier, we house witnesses in hotels and we have outreach programs for our victim witnesses,” Dow said.
Gangs both large and small have been expanding from cities into the suburbs and now operate in all 21 counties in New Jersey, Harvey said.
He’s launched an initiative aimed at curtailing the growth with the help of parents, whom he wants to teach about signs of gang activity, such as graffiti, tattoos, unexplained spending money and wearing gang colors.
“Parents have to be educated, and we’re going to try to do that, about signs of gang activity so they can take control of children’s lives before they are too far gone.”