What is the racial and ethnic composition of youth gangs?
STEP 2: The Reality of Gangs The National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC) is an anti-crime organization. You may be familiar with NCPC’s mascot, McGruff the Crime Dog, who says, “Take a bite out of crime.” NCPC has created an excellent pamphlet called “The Reality of Gangs,” which provides answers to the following questions. When you click on this link, it will open a PDF file on your computer which you can read to answer the questions. Your teacher might decide to print out this pamphlet for you to read on paper instead.
According to the 2001 National Youth Gang Survey (NYGS) respondents, nearly half (49 percent) of all gang members are Hispanic/Latino, 34 percent are African American/black, 10 percent are Caucasian/white, 6 percent are Asian, and the remainder are of some other race/ethnicity (Egley et al., forthcoming). However, the racial composition of gangs varies considerably by locality. The newest gang-problem areas (i.e., emergence within the past decade) report, on average, a larger proportion of Caucasian/white gang members than any other racial/ethnic group (Howell, Egley, and Gleason, 2002). In short, the demographic composition of gangs is an extension of the characteristics of the larger community. Is female gang involvement increasing? Youth gang membership among girls is much more common (Moore and Hagedorn, 2001) and is documented more widely by law enforcement (Egley et al., forthcoming) than in the past. It has been estimated that between one-fourth and one-third of all youth gang m
