Gangs Spreading In The Military

[wessex19]

(CBS) U.S. Army Sgt. Juwan Johnson got a hero's welcome while home on leave in June of 2004.

"Not only did I love my son - but my god - I liked the man he was becoming," his mother, Stephanie Cockrell, remembers.

But that trip home was the last time his family saw him alive.

When Johnson died, he wasn't in a war zone, he was in Germany.

"He had finished his term in Iraq," his mother said. "I talked to him the day before his death. He said, 'Mom, I'm in the process of discharging out. I'll be out in two weeks'."

On July 3, 2005, Sgt. Johnson went to a park not far from his base in Germany to be initiated into the 'Gangster Disciples,' a notorious Chicago-based street gang. He was beaten by eight other soldiers in a "jump-in" - an initiation rite common to many gangs.

"My son never spoke of joining a gang," Cockrell told CBS News correspondent Thalia Assuras.

Johnson died that night from his injuries. His son, Juwan Jr., was born five months later.

"I feel like I didn't prepare him enough to deal with this and I should have," his mother said. "But how would I have known there were gangs in the military? I could have had that talk with him."

Evidence of gang culture and gang activity in the military is increasing so much an FBI report calls it "a threat to law enforcement and national security." The signs are chilling: Marines in gang attire on Parris Island; paratroopers flashing gang hand signs at a nightclub near Ft. Bragg; infantrymen showing-off gang tattoos at Ft. Hood.

"It's obvious that many of these people do not give up their gang affiliations," said Hunter Glass, a retired police detective in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the home of Ft. Bragg and the 82nd Airborne. He monitors gang activity at the base and across the military.

"If we weren't in the middle of fighting a war, yes, I think the military would have a lot more control over this issue," Glass said. "But with a war going on, I think it's very difficult to do."

Gang activity clues are appearing in Iraq and Afghanistan, too. Gang graffiti is sprayed on blast walls – even on Humvees. Kilroy – the doodle made famous by U.S. soldiers in World War II – is here, but so is the star emblem of the Gangster Disciples.

The soldier who took photos if the graffiti told CBS News that he's been warned he's as good as dead if he ever returns to Iraq.

"We represent America – our demographics are the same – so the same problems that America contends with we often times contend with," said Colonel Gene Smith of the Army's Office of the Provost Marshal.

The U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command reported 61 gang investigations and incidents last year, compared to just 9 in 2004. But army officials point out less than 1 percent of all its criminal investigations are gang related.

"We must remember that there are a million people in the army community," Smith said, "And these small numbers are not reflective of a tremendous, pervasive, rampant problem."

The rise in gang activity coincides with the increase in recruits with records. Since 2003, 125,000 recruits with criminal histories have been granted what are known as "moral waivers" for felonies including robbery and assault.

A hidden-camera investigation by CBS Denver station KCNC found one military recruiter was quick to offer the waiver option even when asked, "Does it matter that i was in a gang or anything?" That is well within military regulations.

"You may have had some gang activity in your past and everything ... OK ... but that in itself does not disqualify...," the recruiter said.

Military regulations disqualify members of hate groups from enlisting, but there is no specific ban on members of street gangs. Sgt. Juwan Johnson's family says such a prohibition is long overdue.

"Just maybe we can save someone else's child ... somebody else's husband ... somebody else's father," his mother said. "I would have loved to have seen him with his child, I really would have -- that part is hard, that part is hard."

This month a military court sentenced two of Juwan Johnson's attackers to prison.

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[Tigs2]

Wow! Just finished watching 'Americas Hardest Gangs'!To scarey to comment:eek:

[Blacksheep]

I'm reminded of the General who was watching special forces practicing for a raid on a German radar station on a cliff top in France. In capturing the station and making off with its vital parts and manuals they needed to kill the sentries swiftly and silently, break into the building without tripping the alarms, blow a safe and kidnap two operators. The General turned to their C.O. and said "We're teaching thousands of our chaps advanced burglary, murder, safe cracking and kidnapping, Lord help us when the war is over and they return to civilian life!"

[wessex19]

another interesting comment I heard the other night on CBS online was that currently the US Army recruits on average 1 in 10 with a criminal record.

[BRASSEMUP]

You should have a good look around PRB in Gutersloh, Mate and "what you looking at" are the new Ranks. Glad i'm a civvie.:}

[Al R]

1 in 6 at Waterloo were sprung from jail to fight.

I don't have an issue with cons fighting for us, most infanteers have always been drawn from dissadvantaged backgrounds. Its how they're treated once they're in thats the important thing. That moulds them and changes them. Many young lads joining up nowadays don't have male role models and they need it.. they need to be able to give and receive respect, to work damned hard for the first time and to feel a sense of genuine accomplishment. I wonder if the military gives them that anymore?

We train them so hard that they want to be in our gang, thats the idea anyway. It could be that these kids for whatever reason, they just don't feel that sense of affinity and they look elsewhere. Idle minds devils work etc.

[Brain Potter]

American military personnel have to wear their PT when 'off-duty' at a certain Middle-East base. I heard that this policy was to stop the wearing of gang-colours.

[Pontius Navigator]

I'm reminded of the General who was watching special forces practicing for a raid on a German radar station on a cliff top in France. In capturing the station and making off with its vital parts and manuals they needed to kill the sentries swiftly and silently, break into the building without tripping the alarms, blow a safe and kidnap two operators. The General turned to their C.O. and said "We're teaching thousands of our chaps advanced burglary, murder, safe cracking and kidnapping, Lord help us when the war is over and they return to civilian life!"

Blacksheep, I remember this was a very real fear in England too. All thse commando trained to kill with a rabbit punch.

More recently we had a presentation by a little old chap who brought some of the misappropriated kit with him - a Fairbairn dagger, a spring cosh similar to the modern police truncheon, knuckle dusters etc. He said he just hoped he was not stopped by the police on the way home.

Knuckledusters were a regular feature of London's East End gangland in the 50s.

We are also good friends of an ex-RM Commando who was in Naval Party 22. He rose to become a Chief Inspector of Police. A kinder man you could never hope to meet.

[GreenKnight121]

It's not the training the veterans received in the service that is a threat to society, its the attitudes they have when they re-enter civilian life.

Most of these attitudes are the same ones they entered the military with, but which have not been "reprogrammed" by the military.

A great part of this comes from the changes in the allowed training culture and methods... which have been greatly altered in the last 20 years.

When I experienced USMC basic training in 1981, a great deal of effort was expended to change our attitudes toward each other and society... we were "broken down, then built up" to respect "God (as each individual viewed the Divine), then Country, then the society and people we are tasked to protect, then each other, and lastly ourselves".

I saw a documentary 3-4 years ago on USMC basic training that had been filmed in ~2000.

Immediately obvious were the emphasis on doing nothing that "might damage the individual's self-esteem and sense of self-worth"... and the almost total elimination of any form of negative reinforcement outside of additional exercise. :yuk:

They were provided with little reason to STOP thinking and acting like they did "in the hood", and not much more reason to start thinking "like Marines". :ugh::mad:

[Re-Heat]

However, Greenknight121, crime rates both in the US and many Western countries has fallen dramatically since the 1980s - though there are many supposed reasons, might one of those be that ex-mil people are no longer "beaten down" then "built back up", in such a manner that they are no longer able to deal with any non-institutionalised life?

I doubt the current gang problem is any different from any other gang problem experienced by the mil in the last 100 years: the pertinent point is that they have neglected to tackle the problem as they are too busy bogged down in too many frontline battles...

[GreenKnight121]

If you would bother to research facts, you would find that the vast majority of ex-servicemen have NEVER been a part of the "crime wave"... and that there has been NO reduction in "crime by veterans" either.

The decrease in crime has been driven primarily by factors that are unrelated to the military, or military service, or military veterans in any way.

[F34NZ]

Agree with GreenKnight. Surveys in the US have strongly suggested that the bulk of the reduction in crime during the nineties was down to a combination of improved law enforcement, as pioneered by Bratten in NY - and lately LA - and rampant job creation. The increased risk of detection and several years in the soap-on-a-rope club made even menial work more lucrative in all senses to the non-hardened crim. If you have access to The Economist's online edit the reports will be archived in there.

[reynoldsno1]

crime rates both in the US and many Western countries has fallen dramatically since the 1980s
there is also a school of thought that puts this down to Roe vs Wade (in the US) and the general relaxing of abortion laws worldwide generally - i.e. that many potential crims are now not being born....:ooh:

[Samuel]

"I'm reminded of the General who was watching special forces practicing for a raid on a German radar station on a cliff top in France".

That would have been the Bruneval raid, and believe it or not, I have an old mate here in NZ, Tom,ex-Seaforth Highlander, who was one of those parachuted in. They had an RAF Radar guy with them, a Flt Sgt Cox, and Tom confirmed when I asked him that they did indeed have orders to shoot Cox rather than let him be captured!

Tom subsequently returned to his regiment and went ashore on D-day, and carried on all the way to Germany. He is a wonderful man, now in his 80s of course, and the only hooliganism he shows today is when he gets into my Single Malt on Anzac Day!

[TheInquisitor]

crime rates both in the US and many Western countries has fallen dramatically since the 1980s
Bollox (partially).

Crime rates have fallen in the US because they started putting more people in jail. When they run out of space, they simply build more jails.

Crime rates in the UK have soared because we have stopped putting people in jail; instead we give them ASBOs or 'supervision' orders or community 'service' (but only after their 20th offence). And when we run out of jail spaces, we let them out early!!!!!

Surely this kind of thing cannot be tolerated in a military organisation? At the first sign of 'gang affiliation', no matter how small, the individual concerned should be immediately dismissed! What if a certain gang decided that they didn't want to follow a particular order? That is the next step we are looking at here. Under the UCMJ, the Federal Govt can pretty much do what it likes with it's servicemen, or so an American friend told me. I cannot accept that their hands are tied!

[Re-Heat]

Crime rates have in fact collapsed in the UK as well, despite us locking up fewer people.

[Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!]

The irony of the first post (unless I misunderstood it) is not that he was killed by a gang in the way we know it, ie "give us your wallet. oh we might as well kill you anyway" rather he was killed by a gang he was trying to join. :ugh:

[stevef]

It's nothing new - thirty years back all the SWOs had their own gang!

[Shack37]

It's only a name change.
Didn't they used to be known as Flights, Sqns, Wings etc?
I'll just collect me hoody and be off:cool:

[Rocket2]

"Crime rates have in fact collapsed in the UK as well, despite us locking up fewer people" That's because it's against human rights to charge someone with a crime or it's too expensive, simple no charge, nothing on the stats sheet, no/low crime rate:ugh:
"thirty years back all the SWOs had their own gang" yeah at Brawdy when the RAF took it over it was called his wife!:mad:

[TheInquisitor]

Crime rates have in fact collapsed in the UK as well, despite us locking up fewer people.

According to who, exactly? Utter nonesense, my friend. You must live in a little bubble somewhere - crime is out of control in the UK, violent crime in particular.

[Re-Heat]

http://www.crimestatistics.org.uk/output/Page54.asp

[Wiley]

"I'm reminded of the General who was watching special forces practicing for a raid on a German radar station on a cliff top in France".Some would say that there is some evidence that that General's attitude was not unique to him alone. I read the (perhaps that should be 'a') book about the unit that carried out the glider assault on (was it?) Pegasus Bridge on D Day. They were very highly trained men, the WW2 equivalent of today's Special Forces. However, after the successful assault, rather than withdraw them to be used in some other coup de main operation where their special skills might have had some effect, the Powers That Be left them in the front line over the next few months until battlefield attrition killed off almost all of them.

The author implied rather heavily that the decision to leave them in the front line grinder came from very high up from traditional Generals who weren't happy with the establishment and use of elite units. (There was similar resistance within the RAF to the Pathfinders and elite squadrons like 617.)

The Israelis in their early days allowed misplaced egalitarianism and national pride to override commonsense when some Generals (or, far more likely, Generals who were more politicians than soldiers), maintained that they could use any soldiers plucked straight from the ranks with no extra training for special ops “because all Israeli soldiers are superb soldiers”. After two or three unmitigated disasters, they went to the other extreme and established very highly trained and unapologetically elite special forces.

***

Many of us seem to think that soldiers having problems re-establishing themselves in ‘normal’ society after a war, (especially those who have seen major combat), is something that occurred only after Vietnam and wars since then. A brief look at history will show that this has always been a problem to the civilian societies who trained these men to be expert in skills no normal society wants its citizens to possess.

After the American Civil War, (and, no doubt, the previous wars against the British), the US Government had the Frontier. Many will be familiar with the ‘Buffalo Soldiers’, the black units established to fight the Indians on the frontier – and just as importantly, get as many blacks as possible with military training and skills (and ‘attitude’) the hell out of the cities. They did exactly the same with many ex-Confederate soldiers and their own veterans. Kevin Costner’s excellent film ‘Dances with Wolves’ touched on this in part.

Regarding the Brits, after WW1, where do you think the Black and Tans came from? Using this often brutal force against the Irish was a classic ‘win-win’ situation for the British Government. While they were cracking Irish heads (and often far worse), they weren’t causing problems as unemployed (and all too often unemployable) on the streets of English cities.

The Australians after WW1, quite fearful of the returned soldiers as a political force that might threaten the status quo], established the Soldier Settlement Scheme, where returned servicemen were given remote (and too small) parcels of land to farm, (many if not most of them untenable – the so-called ‘heartbreak plots’). But it was incredibly successful from the politicians’ perspective, for it dissipated a large proportion of the returned men into isolated individuals rather than have them remain a cohesive group, as they may have done had they all remained in the cities and towns.

After WW2, the Russians had the Gulags. Many of their front line soldiers were sent to the Gulags on trumped up charges because Stalin was terrified of the returning soldiers, especially those who’d fought as partisans and had been ‘contaminated’ by contact with the West.

There was an excellent book written back in the 50s about a Para from the Arnhem landing who went seriously off the rails after the war, written from the perspective of his officer from the war years, who tries (unsuccessfully) to rescue him from the peacetime ‘system’.

Nicholas Monsarrat's excellent ‘The Ship that Died of Shame’ showed quite well the difficulty young men who had carried enormous responsibilities in the war had in fitting into civilian society for which they were ill-equipped and virtually unqualified.

I have little doubt that a proportion of the fellows coming back from Iraq and the ’Stan won’t have just as much difficulty fitting in to a society that, (if the current story of the Nimbys fighting to keep the ‘common soldiery’ from ‘contaminating and devaluing’ their leafy suburb is anything to go by), is on the whole totally unappreciative of what they have gone through.

Who could blame them? The soldiers, I mean, NOT the ***ing Nimbys.

[parabellum]

Unfortunately and for a long time now there has been that pathetic element in th Army, in particular, who despise what they describe as elite units. Almost to a man these sad creatures are the ones that tried and failed to join the SAS, (selection), the Parachute Brigade, (P Company) or basic flying training at Middle Wallop, if not Biggin Hill before that.
Having failed they return to the comfort of the unit they left and spend the rest of their career doing their best to belittle anyone or any unit that isn't just bog standard and open to anyone.

[Maple 01]

According to who, exactly? Utter nonesense, my friend. You must live in a little bubble somewhere - crime is out of control in the UK, violent crime in particular.
Really? And what data are you basing your analysis on - the Daily Hate?
I prefer to work of Crime and Disorder Reduction partnership data, or stuff drawn from the national Crime Survey which, in my area, shows a year-on year fall in serious crime since 2003. Unfortunately there's no point presenting the data here because it will be automatically dismissed by those who want to believe everything was wonderful in the past - what's that Blur album - Modern Life is Rubbish?

[The Helpful Stacker]

People seem to mix a rise in crime with a rise in reporting of crime.

Overall crime rates are falling but criminal activity is better reported these days (especially violent crime, if it bleeds it leads) so the public perception is that because you see more crime on the stupid box then it must be worse now than the good old days.

[Pierre Argh]

All this is rightly worrying... but equally of concern is where are the SNCOs/Officers, who are supposed to have their fingers on the pulse and manage/lead these reprobates?

Don't give me the excuse "there's a war on", surely all the more reason to keep control of your troops and lkeep them a efficient fighting force, focused on the team and fighting the right foe (at the right time).

[parabellum]

Not sure if this is 'on' or 'off' thread now.

Hardly a gang but definitely a case of split loyalty.

In Aden mid sixties, we were a close unit, unaccompanied, so mess life was all.
A small group became members of a local 'lodge' of the RAOB, (Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes), known as 'The Buffs'. They decided their club house was more important than the mess and proceeded to regularly remove pint glasses, (paid for by mess members), to furnish their bar. The theft was noticed and brought to the attention of the mess committee who read the riot act, loyalty to one's mess had to be absolute, any thing else came way, way back.
All would have been well had these characters taken it on the nose but instead they then set about using their various positions to try and disrupt the future of those they deemed responsible for uncovering their mis- deeds. A very unpleasant time that upset a good mess through misguided loyalty. Hope it doesn't happen today.