Gang violence among gang members is a life style choice. For children involved in gang violence it’s much more problematic. An adult who freely chooses to make their living on the street is a bit less unnerving as the lifestyle can lead there. When an innocent person is shot during gang violence, it is much more newsworthy.
I would also like to stop gang violence but this often means “throwing the book” at gang members, which is often disliked by many activists.
I myself live in a safe area of a major city, and there are gang murders in my neighborhood occasionally. It makes my relatives and friends ask how I can live here. But a grown man shot in his car at 3am over a drug deal doesn’t make me feel that less unsafe, and I have kids here
"Gang violence among gang members is a life style choice. For children involved in gang violence it’s much more problematic."
Gang membership is skewed younger and often includes "children" (depends on definition) 14+. Makes it a little tricky about lifestyle choice when dealing with minors.
The problem with "throwing the book" at gang members is that it doesn't work.
Nobody joining a gang is making a rational reckoning of the risk/reward of getting caught by the police, partly because they don't plan to get caught and partly because the much larger risk is getting killed.
And the people getting arrested and prosecuted are primarily not the people calling the shots or driving recruitment of new members.
The best way to put a dent in gang violence is to disrupt gang recruiting, and one of the better ways to do that is to improve societal safety nets so joining a gang is less attractive.
> "The problem with "throwing the book" at gang members is that it doesn't work."
Then how would you explain El-Salvador? They went from the homicide capital of the world in 2015 to the 8th safest place in the world [1] in less than a decade. And "all" that they did was dramatically bumped up the penalties for gang membership, round up gang members, and threw them in militarized prisons as opposed to the typical gang reinforcement retreats. Crime dramatically plummeted and you ended up with a president with an approval rating upwards of 90%.
From my perspective in modern times we've trialed both soft and hard systems on crime. The soft systems in general have had very poor results except in places that already had no issues with crime (e.g. Norway), whereas the hard systems have demonstrated phenomenally positive outcomes. Places like the US have a major problem with things like privatized prisons that create a commercial incentive for incarceration, but I think these are tangential to the topic.
That entire article is about whether people "feel" safe. It doesn't seem to have any stats on whether or not they are actually safe.
But back to the actual thread: the majority of gang violence is against other gangs. This is unlike other high-crime areas (for example, places with high rates of carjacking) where criminals are targeting people just moving through the area.
Here [1] is their homicide rate. Overall criminality has declined proportionally as well. The numbers continue to decline as well. In 2025 it looks like they're looking at an overall homicide rate of ~1.3.
I think perceptions of criminality is a very important metric because it controls for the possibility of numbers being juked. If everybody thinks crime is going up, but the numbers say it's going down, then it's possible there's some sort of collective delusion. But it's also possible that the numbers are being juked, or that various biases (like declines in rates of reporting) are driving a numeric decline in crime even as crime rates climb.
Not really. In modern times I think we are increasingly missing the point of why we started collecting all of these data to begin with. And that's to aim at giving everybody a more pleasant life. And that is going to be determined solely by their own subjective experience and perception.
Of course you're right that subjective experience will be biased, but it will usually be biased in a relatively fixed way. And so changes in this overtime create arguably the most valuable measurement that exists. Like during the previous administration, trying to brow beat people into believing that the economy was awesome because 'look at these totally-not-fake numbers' was just so dystopic.
So for example, we tend to overestimate threats rather than underestimate them. Yet in El Salvador we now have the overwhelming majority of people (at the 8th highest rate in the world) say they feel safe walking alone at night. That is just an extremely informative datum. I'd also add that people's actions are based on their perceptions. Gallup hits on this in a reasonable way in that survey linked earlier:
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"In our uncertain world, it’s not enough to make sure that people are safe. They also need to feel safe. When people feel safe, they devote time and energy to learning opportunities and to their relationships with their families, communities and workplaces.
Feeling safe fosters trust in these relationships. This trust forms a foundation for collaboration, cooperation and social development, which makes communities more resilient to challenges such as natural disasters, economic downturns, political conflicts or health crises like the recent pandemic."
Sure, throwing the book doesn't get you 100%. But am I supposed to believe that increasing the penalty for doing the wrong thing doesn't decrease the frequency of the wrong thing? Having everyone you know in your crime circle being in jail vs. roaming free certainly has an effect on your decisions to join/stay.
Probability of punishment seems to matter more than severity of punishment. This follows from economic and game theoretic models and is backed up by empirical studies.
It turns out that when your big worries are "not being able to afford rent and food" and then "getting shot", the difference between 5 years and 20 years in jail, or the difference between a 10% likelihood or 50% likelihood that you get caught don't really factor into the decision-making process.
This sounds great until you’re minding your own business in your house while these people engage in gun battles out in the street and you or your kids catch one of the strays.
If you google this you will find plenty of examples that made the news, and not all of them do.
Here is an article including two such examples. One kid was sitting down eating dinner and the other was sitting in a car. They were both shot totally incidentally during shootouts they had nothing to do with.
People are injured by celebratory fire all the time. That said, getting hit by a stray bullet of any sort is very very rare, which is the reason the stories stick in your head. Children get killed and injured (or injure others) by playing with unsecured guns as well.
The fact is that if there are guns around, there is a little bit of danger especially if they are loaded. Stricter gun laws tend to produce less gun violence and accidents.
That doesn't move mortality numbers much though. It's something like 50 deaths per year from stray bullets, vs 20,000+ homicides, vs 40,000 ish fatal car accident deaths.
That homicides make the news much more than car accidents, and stray bullets make the news at all, is kinda the point of the article.
It is theoretically possible but in the 20+ years I’ve lived here there has never been an innocent bystander killed, and maybe 5 murders I can remember. I live in a wealthy enclave of a major city. I’m just a city guy, I’m not concerned
I would also like to stop gang violence but this often means “throwing the book” at gang members, which is often disliked by many activists.
I myself live in a safe area of a major city, and there are gang murders in my neighborhood occasionally. It makes my relatives and friends ask how I can live here. But a grown man shot in his car at 3am over a drug deal doesn’t make me feel that less unsafe, and I have kids here