Florida Gang Reduction Strategy 2008 - 2012

10
The Strategy
Focus of the Effort to Defeat Gangs
Criminal gangs are the enemy of an ordered society.
Defeating them necessitates identifying the
key to their survival, appeal, and effectiveness. It
is the premise of this strategy that the strength of
criminal gangs in Florida is their ability to attract a
continual stream of young recruits to their ranks.
Denied that strength, gangs will dry up, lose their
capacity to generate replacements and finally
cease their criminal activity.
The strategy, therefore, focuses its efforts toward
making gang membership and gang activity less
desirable for the youth of this state and turning
at-risk youth away from gangs and toward things
that will make them productive members of society.
This strength of the gang system derives from
its ability to cultivate zealous, aggressive members
who seek to establish their reputation within the
gang. Without that ability, the destructive capacity
of the gang is gradually eroded and eventually
dissipates completely. The gang itself becomes
discredited and is seen in its pernicious reality – a
collection of criminals devoid of social conscience,
lacking any semblance of dignity and driven only
by the petty, selfish interests of their leaders.
Consequently, the prevention/intervention portion
of the strategy must not only work to engage
at-risk youths and gang members in alternative,
constructive and educational activities and social
settings, it must also aim at taking away the appeal
of the gang. Denied the constant flow of new
recruits, the gang will disintegrate. Eventually,
the gang will cease to hold any attraction at all
and become ineffectual.
At the same time the prevention/intervention efforts
are underway, there must be a coordinated law
enforcement effort targeting the leaders of certain
gangs for prosecution, disrupting gang meetings and
activities and cutting off the supply of guns, other
weapons and sources of income. Since many of Florida’s
gang leaders come out of state prison, it is also
essential that a special effort be made to intervene
with gang members in prison with the objective of
educating, training and making as many of them
Florida Gang Reduction Strategy
as possible constructive and contributing citizens
of society upon re-entry. By doing so, some of the
experienced gang leadership can be eliminated. In
most cases this will contribute significantly to the
decline and ultimate demise of the gang from which
they came.
The end state of this strategy is a Florida where
criminal gang activity is minimal to non-existent and
where gangs are no longer perceived as a desired
option for our youth, but rather as the undesirable
criminal organizations they represent. This strategy
aims to minimize gang membership and reduce
crime committed by gangs to an insignificant percent
of total crime in all 67 of Florida’s counties.
Prevention/Intervention
Objectives:
Objective 1: Expose Florida’s gangs and their
activities for their violent and
destructive reality.
Objective 2: Educate youth, parents and other
mentoring adults to help Florida’s
youth reject gang involvement.
Objective 3: Mobilize communities to repel
gang appeal to Florida’s youth.
Objective 4: Provide effective prevention/intervention
programs for those youth
who are the most likely targets of
gang recruitment and identified
young gang members
Objective 5: Encourage and assist with the
creation of positive extracurricular
activities and workforce development
programs for Florida’s
at-risk youth.
Objective 6: Support existing and new community
groups/coalitions that take a
stand against criminal gangs.
Prevention is essential to the success of the strategy.
The most effective and least costly way to
stop the growth and reduce the number of criminal
gangs and gang members in Florida is to convince
youth never to join a gang in the first place.
The first three prevention/intervention objectives
are aimed at taking away the appeal of gangs to