Las Vegas Sun

February 12, 2012

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Hundreds turn out for anti-gang walk-a-thon

Funds raised will help provide training books for parents

By Kyle B. Hansen (contact)

Saturday, Sept. 12, 2009 | 3:49 p.m.

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Beyond the Sun

The Southern Nevada Community Gang Task Force held a walk-a-thon Saturday morning to raise funds for its gang prevention efforts throughout the Las Vegas Valley.

About 200 people attended the event at the Clark County Government Center Amphitheater. Each participant donated $10 and before taking on a one-mile course around the amphitheater.

The task force, which is made up of 14 law enforcement agencies and more than 120 community organizations, is completely funded through donations rather than through the county or participating agencies.

“We don’t have it in our budget to do these kinds of things, particularly now,” said Metro Police Deputy Chief Jim Owens, who is the chairman of the task force. “We’d love to be able to write into our budget and help them out, but right now we just don’t have the extra funds to do that.”

The funds from the walk-a-thon will go towards printing the group’s parent training handbook, which accompanies a training class to help parents recognize signs that their children are getting involved in a gang.

“This book teaches them what to look for, how to tell if your kid’s getting involved in this kind of activity and then they can call … to get some support and divert the kid out of gang life,” Owens said.

“We don’t have money to print these things, so we’re trying to get some money to print more copies of this that we can spread out among the community,” he said.

The raised funds will go towards printing the updated fourth edition of the handbook.

The task force has three focus areas: prevention, intervention and suppression of gang activity, said Jerry Simon, a gang specialist with the Clark County Department of Juvenile Justice.

But prevention is the most important of the three, he said.

“If you can nip it in the bud, then we don’t have to spend a lot of money we don’t have right now,” Simon said.

Law enforcement agencies here know of 11,000 gang members and associates in about 500 gangs, he said, but there are likely at least twice that many people involved with gangs.

And many of the gangs are recruiting children who are only in the third or fourth grades, Simon said.

“That’s right here in Clark County,” he said. “I’m not talking about another state.”

It’s important to help children get away from gangs while they are young, Simon said.

“If we get to them by the fifth or sixth grade, we have a 65 to 70 percent chance of turning that child around,” he said.

And gangs are all over the valley, Simon and others said.

“Gangs are everywhere,” said Kevin Child, the co-chair of the task force’s prevention subcommittee. “They’re not just in one quadrant of the city, they’re everywhere.”

Child is a Las Vegas Realtor who got involved with the gang task force because he thought it was important to improve the community.

“Metro can only do so much,” he said. “We’re all one big neighborhood in Las Vegas. You have to give back to the community.”

Owens said prevention is the key because it’s easier to keep a child out of a gang than it is to get them out of one.

It is also important for law enforcement agencies to work with community groups in preventing children from joining gangs because going after the gang leaders does not stop the problems, he said.

“We pretty much figured out we can’t arrest our way out of this,” Owens said.

And gangs are not just a problem for police, they are a problem for all of society, he said.

“As long as it’s acceptable for kids to be members of gangs and for go out and commit crimes and people turn a blind eye, they’re going to keep doing it,” he said. “But we recognize that just throwing them in jail, that takes some of the most violent off for a little while, but it doesn’t stop them.”

Since the task force was established in 2001, it has helped at least 83 people leave gangs, Simon said.

“And we believe that every person that leaves a gang influences four or five other people to do the same.”

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