By Tim Potter, The Wichita (Kansas) Eagle
Wichita police will host at least one community meeting next month to discuss ongoing gang activity.
It’s not because of any recent spurt in gang crimes, said Lt. John Speer, who heads the police gang unit. Gang violence continues to be down from a decade ago, Speer said Friday.
Although four of the 28 homicides this year are gang-related, that percentage was higher in years past, he said.
Still, he said, Police Chief Norman Williams expects his officers to be proactive about the street gangs that came to Wichita in the late 1980s and continue to exact a toll.
The message to residents at the meeting will be: “This is what we know” about the problem. “Tell us what you think because we as police cannot do this alone,” Speer said.
The meeting or meetings have yet to be scheduled but will take place before Thanksgiving.
Addressing gangs requires recognizing underlying factors.
“The main thing,” Speer said, “is the need for acceptance” in a world where many young people lack family support, encounter abuse, have problems at school and suffer from low income.
Over the years, police interviews of gang members suspected in crimes have revealed a common, disturbing response from teens as young as 14, Speer said. It begins with a detective telling the teen he will die or go to prison if he stays in a gang.
The boy’s response: “I’m ready to die.”
“When we have teenagers at that age who are ready to die... we need to look at the bigger picture within our community,” Speer said. If they don’t value their own lives, they will not value the lives of others.
“There is an underlying tragedy here,” he said. “Since 1989 over a third of our homicides have been gang- related. That number should be alarming to everybody in our community.”