California is the home of the original “gangsta paradise” which was exported nationally.

As such, a large study of the gang membership in California secondary schools helps to understand the scope of the overall gang problem, and by proxy how to reduce gun violence.

Take-aways

• 4% of surveyed students claimed to be gang members.
• The rates are skewed by race and align with National Gang Center demographics.

Big Sample, Biggish Problem

Surveying 667,610 secondary students constitutes a large study, and thus the resulting numbers should be solid approximations… despite a possible self-reporting bias.

The study ¹ covered 57 of 58 California counties over two years. They polled 667,610 secondary students in grades 7, 9 and 11, and after the few who dropped out of the survey or were for other reasons disqualified, about 31% of the enrolled population were sampled. Quite impressive.

The weakness of the study, though, was that students had to self-identify as to whether they were/were-not gang members. There are likely reporting biases, in that some students will “brag” that they are gang members when they are not, and some gang members are reluctant to admit membership if they think the survey is traceable to them.

This limitation is somewhat balanced by the sheer size of the study, so we present it with the cautious suggestion that these should be treated as ballpark estimates.

8.4% Are Gang Members

Over eight percent of the student body claim to be a gang member. But the question asked was a bit vague for Gun Facts’ taste. It read, “Do you consider yourself a member of a gang?”

We know that there are “gang affiliates,” individuals who associate with gangs but have not been officially inducted. The question could have been abused or misunderstood by secondary school students who hang out with gang members but don’t participate in sanctioned gang activities.

Still, being a close associate may be a narrow distinction in terms of juvenile crime, including acquiring street guns and committing felonies.

Race Is A Factor

As much as we at Gun Facts loathe discussing race, it is statistically significant in violent crime, most specifically in regard to street gangs.

We are not alone in this observation. The National Gang Center composed statistical profiles of gang members in the USA, and certain races were amazingly over-represented.

The same holds true for California secondary school students. This chart shows, for each race, the percent of the total student population the race represents in schools (red bars) and the percent of gang members within their race. Latinos in secondary schools outnumbered blacks by nearly 8:1, but blacks were 27% more likely to be in a gang.

For guns and violence, this tendency is acutely important. There have been long-standing wars (in the literal sense) between rival black street gangs. While a black gang member might commit violence against non-black gang members, gun play between certain black gangs (notably the Crips and Bloods) is automatic. Hence, the more likely a black male teen is to associate with a gang, the more likely they are to murder or be murdered, primarily by another black.

Grades and Slides

Surprisingly, perhaps, gang membership drops off in the higher grades.

The National Gang Center tells us that active street gang recruitment starts at age 14. In California, they start a bit earlier and gang “membership” remains high until teens approach graduation age, when it declines.

Sadly, the California Department of Education website was broken during our investigation and the data files for dropout rates were unavailable. But we can reasonably expect the following about gang members in secondary school:

• Some drop out of school.
• Some are incarcerated.
• Some are dead.

Thus the 2% decline between grades 9 and 11 might just be an aberration, and the higher rate of non-gang members is a function of fewer gang members still being in school at all.

Where?

The paper did one questionable bit of analysis.

They clustered the California counties into regions, often amalgamating rural and urban counites. The result was a fairly even level of gang membership among the regions.

This impression, of course, is nonsense.

Part of the National Gang Center’s demographic analysis clearly showed gang presence is higher in metropolitan areas and nearly nonexistent in rural ones.

When we look at gun homicides of gang-age teens by county in California, we see quite a different story.

Homicide rates for this age group is sharply higher for regions emanating from Los Angeles and the corridor between Alameda County (Oakland, a gang-heavy town) and Sacramento (less gang-heavy, but significant). The counties in white had homicide rates so low the CDC classified their calculations to be “unreliable”; and the gray zone numbers were so low the CDC “suppressed” the data for victim privacy purposes.

Cali’s Condition

California is not unique. As we explored in our Top 15 Murder Counties analysis, gang activity and associated homicides cluster in metro areas, agreeing with the National Gang Center’s analysis. California has more major metro areas than other states, so their net gang presence looks large and likely is.

For example, Illinois has Chicago with 2.6 million souls. The next largest is Aurora with a mere 177,500 people. Contrast California starting with Los Angeles at 3.8 million, San Diego at 1.4 million, San Jose with 969,600, San Francisco at 808,900, Fresno housing 454,700, and so on.

The point is that Cali’s 8.4% gang participation rate in secondary schools may be an outlier when compared to other states due to its multiple major metro areas.

But what happens in Los Angeles also happens in Baltimore, Houston, Detroit, Memphis, Saint Louis, Philly …