By Seanna Adcox
The Associated Press
COLUMBIA, S.C. — The gangs start recruiting in elementary school.
During brief, brutal initiation rituals, boys looking to join up are stomped and punched for 30 seconds. Experts say girls who want in get cut with knives or razors, or have sex with male gang members.
With at least 340 gangs in South Carolina, students sporting gang colors in schools and gang-related arrests on the rise, officials and anti-gang activists on Tuesday applauded a new slate of measures aimed at prosecuting gang members and curbing their ability to recruit new blood.
“It’s really sad we’re here. Yet the tragic reality is that gang activity is real,” Gov. Mark Sanford said at a ceremony where he signed the measure into law. “It’s a real reminder of how there’s good and evil in this world.”
The new law gives the state grand jury the ability to subpoena gang members and investigate gang activity. It also allows law enforcement to seize gang property and creates a statewide database of gang members. New crimes make it illegal for a gang member to threaten anyone into joining or remaining in a gang, or to threaten a witness.
The law was overwhelmingly approved during the legislative session after nine years of defeats, largely because few legislators thought gangs were a problem in this largely rural state. Increasing gang-related arrests and escalating evidence of gang crime helped to finally ease its passage.
“Each legislator had to see for himself that the problem affected their community,” said Sen. Jake Knotts, R-West Columbia, a retired law enforcement officer who first introduced the idea in 1998.
Knotts’ efforts received a boost last fall with the release of a University of South Carolina study that found gangs are spreading from South Carolina cities into rural areas and that police have been slow to acknowledge the growing problem. The study recommended that legislators pass comprehensive gang control laws, as most other states have.
The anti-gang measure became a key component of an anti-crime package drafted by a Senate study panel, created last August in response to rising violent crime in South Carolina cities.
“Law enforcement can now nip the gang-menace in the bud,” said Knotts, a panel member, who spoke with The Associated Press from a convention in Puerto Rico on Tuesday.
Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said the bill won’t make gangs go away, but it will help.
There are at least 340 gangs in South Carolina with 2,000 known members, said State Law Enforcement Chief Robert Stewart. He expects the numbers to grow much larger as law enforcement begins collecting information for the gang database.
A Columbia Police Department gang task force has arrested more than 300 gang members since it formed less than three years ago, said Chief Dean Crisp. Just last month, Columbia officers arrested 16 members of the Bloods gang, he said.
“You can go into different schools and know what gangs they’re in if you know gang colors,” said the Rev. Michelle Thompson, a manager of A Better Way’s Project G.O. Gang Out in Columbia, a nonprofit program that seeks to keep youth out of gangs or help them get out.
Thompson applauded the new penalties for gang intimidation and said they could act as a deterrent. But she said anti-gang measures also should include education, mentoring and social programs to teach hardened youth how to cope outside a gang and give them reasons for leaving that way of life. Otherwise, even prison time won’t change their gang involvement, she said.
“The prison system is not a good reformation place,” she said. “It can’t be all about incarceration.”