Bit of a long read, but I found it interesting:


From the streets to tweets, the rise of 'internet banging'

Recent research suggests that gang clashes have moved online—and with profound intensity.


If you want to get a real first-hand look at gang culture in Chicago’s South Side, all you need to do is scroll through the Twitter feed of Gahrika Barnes.

The 17-year-old was a known member of the Gangster Disciples, a gang in the Woodlawn neighborhood, who’s suspected by police in multiple shootings.

Under the alias @TyquanAssassin, Barnes tweeted over 27,000 times to her 2,700 followers: boasting about her gang affiliation, posting messages of grief over friends who had been shot by rival gangs and threatening retaliation, and taunting the police. She describes herself in her bio as a “PAID SHOOTA.”

She was murdered on Eberhart Street, mere hours after tweeting the address of her current hangout.

Barnes is a casualty of what Dr. Desmond Patton calls "internet banging." Patton is an associate professor at Columbia University in New York and one of the few academics looking into the language of gang members online. He’s found that social media has only exacerbated tensions between gangs, as the clashes and taunting that were once reserved for the streets have not only moved online but have done so with profound intensity.

In January, Patton published a piece in the Journal of Human Behavior and Development where he described how individuals who are gang-involved “live and narrate their lives on social media.” Their on- and offline worlds collide in a Gordian knot of profiles, personalities, real emotions, and performative identities, often times with devastating consequences. That same month, Chicago’s interim police chief, John Escalante, blamed a rise in murders on the escalation of gang disputes through social media channels.

Patton began looking into the social media language of gang members while doing his Ph.D. research in Chicago, an ideal setting given that a 2012 study by the Chicago Crime Commission found the city had more gangs than any other U.S.


His early fascination with the social media language of rappers and gang members led to a study of over 1,000 tweets posted by Chicago gang members. Patton and his team analyzed not only the tweets but the people who tweeted them and the context that provoked them. This initial analysis was used to create a language resource for social workers and law enforcement officers and helped aid them in the prevention of violence.

As one of the few researchers in this field, Patton dominates the literature, most of which has been published this year. His January article in the academic journal Computers in Human Behavior, titled "Internet banging: New trends in social media, gang violence, masculinity and hip hop," identified historical and cultural threads that have lead to the intersection between social media and gang culture.

For starters, he notes the “relative low cost of smartphones, emergence of social media and SNSs, and increased technological literacy” has led to influx of tech-savvy teens. At the same time, Patton and his co-authors link urban growth and economic disenfranchisement to the rise in gang violence. They argue that the loss of factory jobs in urban areas "affected masculine identity profoundly. Almost overnight, many blue-collar men who embodied the American work ethic became unemployed and disenfranchised, severely damaging many urban men’s self images, and representing an identity shift."

Indeed, since 2000, America has lost over 5 million factory jobs. These losses have directly impacted the Rust Belt, America’s so-called manufacturing heartland, of which Chicago once reigned supreme. Yet, due to many factors including increased automation, free-trade agreements and the transfer of manufacturing plants, factory jobs have been on a slow decline since the 1980s and have, in part, contributed to the poverty of Chicago’s neighborhoods. A New York Times article from May of this year draws a link between the poverty in Chicago’s racially segregated neighborhoods and a lack of affordable housing to the rise in Chicago’s gang-related crime. Another article in Chicago Magazine from 2012 connects the rise of gangs in Chicago to failed fair-housing practices.

Of course, this issue is bigger than Chicago, and it’s impossible to measure the transformative power and growth of social media over the last 10 years. It’s affected every aspect of our lives, and it makes sense that it would have a ripple effect on gang culture and beyond.


“The outcome generated a hip hop identity that, along with unemployment and poor educational opportunities, helps to situate urban males for mass incarceration and poor outcomes, and it is this identity that fuels the behavior we currently see in among African-American men on the Internet,” Patton writes. “In social media, the hip hop identity has found the optimal playground to perpetuate and replicate itself, because of its public nature.”

In another article, also published in Computers in Human Behavior, Patton quotes a violence worker, Mario, who observed gang members travel into rival territory to taunt other gangs online. “[T]hey’ll go on the streets of the group and they’ll take pictures or they’ll take a video and they’ll put it on YouTube or ‘We’re in your neighborhood.’ And Facebook and they’ll take pictures right in the neighborhood like saying, ‘Ha ha,’ laughing, taunting them. And that’s part of a taunt too. Like provoking them, letting them know, you know what we got your guy. He was snoozing.”

In addition to the posturing and threats, Patton notes that grief and trauma play a role, too. It’s a daily cycle playing out in 140-character bursts. You can see it all through Barnes’s tweets and those that were made in the wake of her murder. (Barnes's own account is locked now, but screenshots survive on news stories and sites like Hipwiki, a wiki for hip-hop culture.)


"We know that young people who live in violent context often use social media to communicate their everyday life. A part of that everyday life is the violence and grief and trauma that they experience. They use social media to talk about those things and to cope with it and to get support from other folks as well."

As a result, police in major urban cities are keeping tabs on social media to crack down on gang violence. In 2012, New York police used Facebook posts to track down gang members and arrest them. But Patton says the goal of his research is to prevent violence, not fuel arrests. "Our goal is to create tools that support social workers, and violence outreach workers in doing violence intervention. What we want to do is create a tool that is automatic and is informed by a real-world understanding of language context that can tell a violence outreach worker or a social worker when some challenging activity is happening on social media and they can use their intervention method to work with people around these issues."

In his research for “Sticks, stones and Facebook accounts,” Patton identified the complex nature of using social media to both identify potential violence and to build relationships. He quotes one social worker, Luis, who gave an example of when social media was able to de-escalate violence:

So there’s branches of Warrior Kings, there’s branches of 26. Every branch is a street, right. So it’s like Minerva and 14th might be a branch. Darren and 26th might be another branch. If those two groups are identified in the video, right. And we notice that there’s going to be a conflict between both of the groups we go talk to somebody that we’ve built a relationship with in that group and will have somebody from this side talk to that group that they built a relationship with and try to avoid any conflicts from happening in the future.

Luis said that de-escalation is most effective when social media is used as a gentle reminder of the danger. He noted: “We use a lot of, ‘You guys are putting yourself out there. You guys are being watched by the police. You guys are starting drama that you don’t need.’ A lot of the times when we build relationships with these guys we’ll use family members. Like, ‘Hey you know you’ve got a sick mother and you need to take care of her’ … So you get them to start reflecting on their actions that they might be thinking about in the future like retaliation or anything like that.”

In Barnes's case, the intervention was less successful. The Chicago police, who track gang-member activity online, were aware of the threats on her life and were actively searching for her to keep her safe, but she evaded them. In fact, she bragged on Twitter that she was hiding from the police. She was killed just a few days later.


http://www.dailydot.com/irl/internet-banging/

Your late with this article. It's been posted already.

Helen,

thanks for the article. They glaringly didn't mention "crack" once though. If anything led to the rise of criminal culture in urban life, it was crack. I've read multiple times that, at least in L.A., that gangs were dying down right before crack hit the streets.What crack did was eliminate the entry barriers for people to become drug dealers.
Anybody could become a drug dealer and make money once $5 doses of crack became a big seller.

I always felt that a certain % of people in any setting or socio economic group will seek shortcuts and break the law to make money. That % was pretty small in urban areas before crack. After crack....% of people willing to take the "easy shortcut" to fast money increased greatly. This was back when the jobs were still there, but people didn't want to earn honest money.

You're definitely onto something there. There have been studies about people and rodents too, that show that there is a small percentage that are 'natural born' criminals. The dominance behavioral system. High dominance people/rats fall into this group. If I remember correctly it's about 1 in 20 that are high dominance. (Not all of the 1 in 20 will become criminals, but the pattern of high dominant behavior in the 'born criminal' is fairly clear.)

It's not the whole picture of inborn criminal traits of course, but it's a piece of the puzzle. Another interesting part of these studies also seem to indicate that when you crowd people/rats together more of those 1 in 20 with high dominance will go toward criminality.(Much like the conditions in crowded population centers, which are always hotbeds of crime for numerous reasons.)

Not sure about the jobs being there. South LA shut down a lot of factories in the '60s and '70s. Firestone, Goodyear, US Steel and US Rubber had factories in the south LA region. Perhaps you mean people were turning down service jobs like the airport, Metro rail and bus, etc, which I still find hard to believe. When blue collar jobs shutter and service jobs are all that's available, service jobs aren't easy to get. It's just far worse now with that full time service jobs themselves are disappearing.

Not a chance that gangs were going to die out in LA before crack. Gangs have been ingrained into LA street culture for a century. Crack definitely helped increase violent crime, no doubt about it. Gang actively does die down from time to time, that would be true.

Black gangs were on the steady rise from 70s to the 1980s in LA. Traditional Chicano gangs were at an all time low throughout the 1980s. East LA was nearly taken over by Stoner gangs. Long hair heavy metal listening stoners that preferred fist fights and rumbles over gunplay. Mostly in response to the wild and violent 1970s cholo gang culture.

I would argue that before the crack era, and before the popularity of gangster rap, the gangs were mostly about Tribalism and having a sense of belonging. Fighting against rivals and bonding with your gang brothers. Not about making money. There's always been certain gang members dealing drugs independently but usually not in an organized gang fashion. You simply didn't need to be a gang member to sell dope. Now it's a bit different as many gangs have become more organized as actual criminal organizations.

As for the topic of the thread, Internet banging isn't so new now. But it has definitely become normal with social media and shouldn't come as a big surprise that gangs use social media to communicate too.

Not only can rivals taunt each other but you can also pose as an enemy gang and taunt another rival gang in order to stir things up between two gangs you hate. Gang members will use Facebook, pretend to be a female in order to talk to rivals and find out there location, where they live, what parties they plan to attend, and lots of other info. Lots of online social media tactics are being used in gang warfare today.

I don't know if anyone here remember or knows, but in the early to mid 2000s many Chicano gangs in LA were making official websites promoting their hoods. 18th St, C14 St., Playboys, Mid City Stoners, Florencia, Brown Pride Raza, Pomona etc just to name some off the top of my head. then poof they were gone at once. Likely not a coincidence.

I remember the Clanton and 18th street sites. Both had a ton of photos from the '80s. Clanton's had photos going back to the '40s. My guess is they just let the domains run dry when everyone started using social networking. Most of the pictures on those sites were really old, I'm not sure how many of them law enforcement could have used to prosecute anyone.

18st,C14 and MCS had the best websites. c14 was the best because they had a good history page. I remember someone from 18 hacked Florencia's site and changed everything to pink and rewrote the page saying they're LA's first openly proud gay gang or something like that.

Part of them going away is because of the rise of social networks, from the MySpace days to Facebook and Instagram but also it was just giving too much unwanted attention by the media and police. I don't think the pictures were incriminating or anything but The promotion of the gang outright might've been too much publicity. It started to make the local news and stuff.. even though it still goes on through social media, it's a little different. More so up to the individual if they choose to put themselves out there like that.

Another school of thought is that the sites disappeared around the same time police were being cracked down on for conduct. Maybe cops were running these sites as stings, or because they're just obsessed with gang life and secretly want to be a part of the culture. I know a lot of cops in LA are like that

I've always heard some say this or that site is really a cop site. We know for sure they monitored every gang site. They ran fox11 local news specials showing it.

Stalker of ws C14 st. made the Clantone . Net site and Bandit from MCS made the MCS site. They definitely weren't cops. I don't know who made 18st site or the other ones though.

Police have always monitored gang websites. They should expect that. A lot of cholos use Streetgangs.com too.

When was the Fox11 story? I don't watch much TV but maybe there's an internet link.

The news special was well over 10 years ago. I'm just going off my memory of seeing it at the time. I couldn't find it on YouTube. It may have not even been fox11, I just know fox11 did most of the gang reports.

I've seen FB profiles of different affiliations around my way. Mainly VLs & GDs on display from my area to other spots. You'll confuse the VLs for Bloods with all the red they wear.

People can make a facebook page for their gang. They just have to list it as a company. lol.

Good post, meant to respond sooner.

I read that pre -crack....that Bs and Cs were categorized as teenage gangs because that was the ages that that members were most "active". Banging from 14 to maybe 20/22.
After which, they were still members and repped the neighborhood but took a less active role. They got legit jobs and moved on with their lives.
I get confused about exactly where I read this but it was at least 3 times from books/interviews with monster kody(or his wife), ice t, etc....Guys who were around pre and post crack.

I think the crack trade amped everything up. Kept members active for longer periods.

Does that sound about right to you?

It does make sense. Although the age range for most active gang members is still the same. I know that crack just made the streets more violent and chaotic overall. It also just added another way for gang members to get arrested and do time, making their criminal career last longer.

Gang violence as we know it started in the crack era. The gangs existed beforehand by namesake but they weren't nearly as violent.

This is the original White Fence gang. Notice the ink all over the neck and faces, the bandannas, the wife beaters, and the assault rifles...

That's an old white fence picture going back to almost their beginning days. Find White Fence gang pictures from the 1970s and they won't look like that. The tattoos of today has more to do with the general populations acceptance of tattoos. Guys used to get a few tattoos here and there, usually in places easy to hide. Things have changed. Many well known gangs didn't just start off as regular street gangs anyway. Many started as biker clubs, car clubs, tagging crews,party crews, dance crews, football teams, you name it. So going back to their original pics doesn't prove much.

The crack era increased crime everywhere, especially in LA. Not sure what you mean by "as we know it" because the 1970s was one of the most active and violent times for Chicano gangs. For Bloods and Crips the 1980s and early 90s violence reached its peak. The drug war in general increases crime.

A lot of fist fights, some stabbings, some shootings, but for the most part LA Chicano gangs were about the lowrider scene in the '70s. Gang violence as we know it started in the 80s. It was a direct result of the crack trade and Reaganomics.

Lol everything is political with you. Amazing.

Well you go ahead and think that. My family lived it from the 50s to the 1970s and early 80s. Nobody in their right mind would describe the 1970s just being about the low rider scene. I have family that were killed in that decade and dozens of more friends of the family locked up that did hard time from the gang wars of the 70s.

I'll take your word for it that your family and friends got into more trouble than most people in the 50's, 60's and '70s, but gang violence as we know it is a product of 1980's America. The violence in LA before the crack epidemic was nothing like it was afterward. Not even close. Not to mention the availability of assault weapons in the '80s. The Reagan era was a total game changer for gang life in Los Angeles.

The 50s and 60s weren't as bad as the 70s but there was still a good amount of violence. There were more fist fights and stabbings but The 70s were far worse than the 60s. It wasn't just my family, this was when everything escalated throughout Southern California, from LA to the Inland Empire at least.

You're also conflating Black gangs with Chicano gangs when their origins and timelines are very different. Black gangs in the 70s were more into fist fighting. That's true. The violence steadily increased throughout the 80s for Crips and Bloods. Chicano gangs were less active in many areas, as most of the hardcore gangsters were in prison during the 80s, while the others were either strung out on heroin or went on to work regular jobs. Convicts then started hitting the streets again in the late 80s and 1990s and organizing the gang structures back.

Assault weapons play a role, but they mostly just look cool for pictures and movies. While their use in gang warfare is very real, the vast majority of gang killings are still with regular handguns, and back in the 70s a lot of shotguns.

The gang culture started before the crack era, was steadily rising before it, the violence peaked during the crack era as it did everywhere else, and continued on afterwards. Gangs and gang violence were always part of LA. Violence and crime peak and go up from time to time, but youre trying too hard to make it fit a political narrative. And I'm someone that is against the entire drug war, under Reagan and every other president because I know the destruction it has caused. But to blame that on the overall gang violence would be super dishonest.

I think it's you trying too hard to deny the role that the crack trade and Reaganomics played in LA's gang culture. It was a game changer. It brought military style warfare to the streets of Los Angeles, something that did not exist in the '70s.

No, I never denied that the crack era increased violence. My point was that gangs were not going extinct at all before crack, they were very much active.

Reganomics on the other hand is just a political word. It isn't even real. There's no such thing as that in practice. Reagan, after his tax cut, then began raising taxes every year after, and increased spending and left the country with a big deficit. So yeah Reagans economic policies were bad, but trying to tie bad economic policies as the main reason gangs became violent is a stretch, to say the least. It ignores so many factors. Especially since economic policies were already bad before Reagan was president.

It also takes at least a decade for most street gangs to firmly establish themselves in a particular neighborhood. Crips and Bloods were in their infant years during the 60s and 70s. By the late 80s most of them were fully established. And it is no secret that Black hoods had much more bloody gang wars than Chicano gangs did. It was the case then, and it is the case now. Chicano gang wars in general never reached the level of violence of the Bloods and Crips. So, again, trying conflate the two and tie it all to Reagonomics makes no sense.

Compared to what gangs became in the '80s, they might as well have been extinct in the '70s.

Again, that makes no sense. You make no distinction between Black and Chicano gangs. You ignore the historical context, all just to make it fit neatly into your partisan political narrative.

I wasn't aware that all Chicanos in LA lived in Boyle Heights or unincorporated East LA, because those are the only stats you shared. I suppose you forgot about the San Fernando Valley, the west side (18th street, MS-13), Harbor area. Oh, and not to mention, South Central. (Florencia, South Los). Of course, there's the parts of LA county outside of the city limits, like Compton (Tortilla Flats), Inglewood (a lot of Chicano gangs), Downey, Paramount, Whittier, Hawaiian Gardens. For whatever reason you didn't factor those areas into your small sample size.

Gang violence in Los Angeles went through the roof in the late '80s. If you don't want to believe a devastating drug like crack (and how lucrative it was to dealers, creating a bloody competition), and a president who frequently boasted of not giving a shit about poor people of color had anything to do with it, suit yourself. To me it's just the obvious explanation.