Posted on Tue, Nov. 14, 2006

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Legislation sought to fight gangs

By ADAM BEAM

abeam@thestate.com

South Carolina will never successfully fight gangs if law enforcement agencies can’t agree on what a gang is, USC researchers told a group of residents and police at an anti-gang summit Monday morning.

University of South Carolina professor Michael Smith said databases and intelligence-gathering are useless unless everyone is “working from the same sheet of music.”

“We’ve got to begin moving toward some common understanding of what we’re talking about,” he said at the Anti-Gang and Youth Violence Prevention Summit at the Clarion Town House.

To do that, South Carolina needs legislation to define gangs so law enforcement agencies can reliably track gang activity.

Columbia Mayor Bob Coble said gang legislation will be the city’s top priority for the upcoming legislative session.

“The time has come and gone for gang legislation,” Coble said. “Gangs are emerging each year more and more as a critical issue.”

Gang legislation has stalled for several years in the Legislature because of concerns that innocent people will be targeted by law enforcement.

“I think it’s overkill and overly aggressive,” said Lonnie Randolph Jr., president of the S.C. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “Crime is crime. I don’t care who commits it.”

The State Law Enforcement Division uses the FBI’s definition of a gang to track South Carolina gang members through a federal database. The list has about 1,100 names on it.

But Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said there are about 1,100 gang members in Columbia alone.

“It’s totally useless unless everybody participates in it,” Lott said.

Several residents commented during a breakout session Monday that the gang legislation violates the Constitution by unfairly targeting some people.

But Smith said 35 states have gang legislation that has been tested by the court system.

“It is doable,” he said. “The various stakeholders need to be able to agree on how to define a gang.”