DNAinfo reporter Emily Frost has written a couple of articles that cover a series of incidents in the upper west side of Manhattan revolving around fights between students. The stories describe prepubescent children as "gang members" without any proof that they're actually in a gang. How does she know' Well, because police told her. In a December 4th piece titled "Gang Members as Young as 11 Behind String of UWS Attacks, Police Say", Frost writes about a handful of episodes in November where she attributes violence to two boys, one of them 11 years old, affiliated with an unnamed "local gang". In a classic example of the media being stenographers for law enforcement, Frost delivers a piece built exclusively off of the word of police sources. Almost every single paragraph ends with 'police sources say', 'police said' or some other variation. I counted at least 13 claims in the article that came strictly from police mouths. But the story, which did try to reach out to some education officials (some of the incidents occurred outside a middle school), didn't include any comments or reactions from residents of the Wise Towers--which is where Frost said two "gang members" were from. DNAinfo is web-based news site started by the founder of Ameritrade 11-year old gang members' I went over to Wise Towers over on west 91st street and spoke with residents there. None of them knew of any gang at Wise Towers or the surrounding area. I spoke to 8 people who actually lived there and they were all baffled at suggestion that there are gang members there--nevermind one as young as 11. One resident who spoke to me said some of the younger kids act up and do have a rivalry with kids from other public housing complexes, but that there was no actual gang. The term "gang" has a very particular meaning in terms of law enforcement and is controversial even in cases with adults who are organized in much more definable ways than 11-year olds. Police departments across the country have enforced gang injunctions, where courts impose sanctions on alleged gang members, and have often faced criticism from legal groups. But can a 6th grader be a gang-banger' The National Institute of Justice describes youth gangs as a group that has "three or more members, generally aged 12-24." Also: Members share an identity, typically linked to a name, and often other symbols. Members view themselves as a gang, and they are recognized by others as a gang. The group has some permanence and a degree of organization. The group is involved in an elevated level of criminal activity. No one at Wise Towers, and in fact in Frost's own piece, could even come up with the name of a gang. One man I spoke to said things are very calm at Wise, especially compared to other housing projects in the city. A woman with him said the only real problems are when youth from other neighborhoods come to the area, but nothing that could be described as gang-related. Caroline, 53, who has lived at Wise Towers since she was 3 years old, told me that while she'd heard of the incident at the middle school, she didn't see any serious crime issues with kids in her building. Her building, which had been traditionally housing older residents, had seen new families move in under Section 8. There were relatively new young people in the buildings, but she didn't think there was a gang. I kind of figured there wasn't a gang issue here. In New York and other urban cities, simply being friends or living in the same building with kids who get into trouble can lead to law enforcement framing you as a gang or crew. Started under former police commissioner Ray Kelly, the NYPD's Operation Crew Cut has targeted thousands of young people, claiming that there are hundreds of 'crews' in the city. That's probably a gross overestimate considering the only ones counting are the cops. The fact that they and prosecutors use social media to build these cases on these young people raises even more questions. More than anything, however, the DNAinfo report really underscored to me the role in criminalization that the media play. Frost, a white reporter and former public radio intern coming over from the west coast and now living in Fort Greene, is not unlike a lot of reporters in the city: covering a neighborhood that they have little knowledge of and relying mostly on official accounts. Police say this, scribble scribble. Police say gangs, what a scoop! Frost and these types of stories aren't outliers. Last year Simone Weichselbaum, for some reason now writing at the Marshall Project (which ironically says it will "create and sustain a sense of urgency about criminal justice in America"), published a Daily News piece calling 8-year old Harlem kids "the gangbangers of tomorrow". This was in the aftermath of police raids in West Harlem which targeted crews, not even real gangs in the traditional sense, that were alleged to have been involved in shootings there. Of course parents were outraged. When I spoke to one furious mother whose son was arrested and kicked in the scrotum during the raid, she was holding up a copy of that Daily News article and calling out Weichselbaum for targeting grade school kids with her so-called journalism (watch the video). Weichselbaum now works for the Marshall Project The biggest problem with Frost's piece is not just that it's bad journalism, it's that it plays into a long term policing strategy of consistently painting young people as gang members so that future raids and indictments will make sense to the public. In West Harlem, where there were over 100 indictments and had many families decrying the raid as a dragnet that took in innocent kids, the media played its role too. In a follow up DNAinfo piece published this week, featured in their "Crime and Mayhem" section, Frost doubled down on the gang assertion and again quoted extensively from police sources. The formula seems consistent: quote cops, sell 'gangs'. The outcome probably doesn't bode well for public housing residents and the kids implicated in these stories, though. While people in public housing may have real and complex stories around crime and how it might intersect with raising a child in a low-income household, criminal justice reporters simply stamp 'gang' on an article and wait for cops to feed them the next story. -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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