5,000 people who are either gang members or have ties to street gangs are living in the Tulsa area, police estimate. Among those numbers are new members who are recruited between the ages of 9 and 13, said Sgt. Sean Larkin, head of the Tulsa Police Department's Gang Unit. Most new members are "jumped in," a brutal ritual in which a person is beaten by members to show how tough the recruit is, he said.
Once in a gang, members gain status by the number of crimes they commit, with little concern about being arrested and sentenced to prison. "The street term for it is 'the game,' " Larkin said. "Some of them accept it and the consequences of it, but they still choose to do it. And they understand that they have the opportunity to make fast and easy money." Deputy Laura Hanley, who records crime statistics for the Gang Unit, said the "bottom line" of why gangs exist "is to facilitate the sale of illegal narcotics." The distribution of drugs remains the primary way gangs make money, but they also gain access to it through burglaries and robberies, police say.
Larkin said the number of known gang members in the Tulsa area is slightly higher than 10 years ago — a rise he attributed to improved methods by police of identifying and documenting people who are connected to gangs. Tulsa police classify people as "certified" gang members when they are known to be actively involved in criminal gang activity, Larkin said. People are classified as "associates" when they have ties to at least one gang in the area but are not believed to have been initiated into a gang. The suburbs are seeing an increase in gang activity, said Larkin, noting that his 14-member unit recently worked two cases involving gangs in Owasso and Broken Arrow. The 5,000 estimate of people affiliated with gangs in the Tulsa area is comparable with estimates in cities of similar size and is about 1,000 fewer than the number of gang members or affiliates in the Oklahoma City area, according to numbers provided by the Oklahoma City Police Department. Nationwide, gangs commit approximately 50 percent of the crimes in cities with populations comparable with Tulsa's, Larkin said, but he estimated that the percentage is probably less in the Tulsa area. Preliminary crime statistics completed by the Police Department from Jan. 1 to Nov. 1 show six homicides in Tulsa in which both the suspects and the victims were known gang members, he said. That number does not include cases in which a gang member shot and killed someone who was not in a gang.
A police report titled "Tulsa Area Gangs Summary 2007" showed that 17 out of 64 homicides in the city last year "involved victims and/or suspects that have some type of gang association." Hanley said that on average, approximately 20 percent of Tulsa's homicides involve suspects and/or victims who have ties to a gang.
In other violent crimes for the first 10 months of 2008, police reported 74 gang-related cases involving shooting with intent to kill, two gang-related cases of pointing a deadly weapon and 23 gang-related cases of assault with a deadly weapon.
In all of last year, police reported 97 cases of shooting with intent to kill, six incidents of pointing a deadly weapon and 30 cases of assault with a deadly weapon that were attributed to gang members, according to the 2007 gang summary report.
Many of the shootings and assaults are committed against rival gang members.
"If you are keeping yourself out of that lifestyle, the chances of having something happen to you are severely reduced," Larkin said. Much of the violence is "retaliation shootings," which occur when a gang member shoots someone in a rival gang because the person feels "disrespected," he said.
Police are seeing an increasing number of females joining gangs, he said. Female recruits function as "facilitators" because they often have jobs and can obtain homes more easily than male gang members with criminal records.
"They have the apartments and houses where gang members hide out," Larkin said.
Another trend is "hybrid gangs," which are two or more gangs working together, usually in some criminal activity. Parents can play an active role in preventing and combating much of the violence that is linked to gangs, Larkin said. "Parents need to take an interest in the kids' lives and set examples for them," he said. "The kids need to be pushed to participate in other activities, such as Boy Scouts and sports. These type of activities offer the kids something else to do besides being out on the streets with the gang."
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