YOUTH: The Return of the Gang

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Some gangs, like the Twelfth and Wallace corner and the Twelfth and Poplar, are perpetual enemies simply because they are immediate neighbors. Other gangs "pull with" each other, living in peace side by side and making common cause against more distant gangs. North Philadelphia's Valley gang is in fact a giant entente of corners boasting nearly 1,000 members.

Some gangs are simply natural aggressors. The Norris Avenue corner is such a group of "crazies." Though the gang is small in number, each Norris is reputed to have two or three "bodies" under his belt. "Getting a body"—shooting someone in another gang—is the surest way a younger member has of "getting a rep" and climbing in the corner hierarchy. If he survives, by age 17 he is already an elder in the gang world and can gracefully step down from active combat in order to permit those coming up to do the corner's fighting and earn, in turn, their "reps." Serving a term in jail also boosts a member's reputation, and many gangs exploit that fact as a means of getting the youngest members to take the blame for the crimes of older boys—knowing a 14-year-old is likely to be treated more leniently in courts.

Gangs are an old, established ghetto institution in Philadelphia; indeed some of them claim an identity that goes back 40 years, and some have been at war with the same opponent for as long as 30 years. But the advent of guns in large quantities in the late '60s changed the character of corner warfare and sent the hazards and the casualties zooming. Oddly enough, the guns have also served to reduce the scale of the actual combat, and all out melees between two gangs—West Side Story style—are now rare.

Modern Corners. A car with two or three gang members might come cruising down a street past a group of rivals and suddenly a shot is fired into the cluster. The car speeds off, leaving a 16-year-old lying on the sidewalk. Or a sniper's bullet from a rooftop a block away may have the same result. Plans for revenge are made, and a single assassin is often sent out to get a body in return. Such guerrilla-style warfare is, of course, far more difficult for the police to anticipate and stop than the old-style, large-scale rumbles.

To cope with the modern corners, the police have set up a special force, known as Gang Control, that is composed of 71 men and women. They work in two-officer teams, each team concentrating on a particularly active gang and trying to get close enough to the gang's leaders to sense when real trouble is brewing. "We turn the block every half-hour," explained one Gang Control officer, but "it only takes a few seconds to start a flare-up." The city has made one attempt to rid the gangs of their guns by offering a moratorium on weapons' arrests—but the attempt failed dismally. The teen-agers simply did not believe the offer was honest. "As soon as you walk in the door," said one leader, "they'll bust you."