redditbrowserman

I'm a cop in an area with a heavy amount of street gang activity. We have prostitution rings, hard drug trafficking, and frequent violent crimes. Its gotten to the point where the high school is one of the more dangerous places to be, as so many of the kids are recruited at a young age. It's not uncommon to see gang tattoos on 16 year olds in my town.

We also have a very small biker gang presence, like 2 patched members and 3 prospects of a 1%er gang. (honestly not sure which one, I'm told they are affiliated with the hells angels)

Our gang unit seems to be focusing most of their efforts on countering the biker gang problem, and very little effort on the extremely large street gang problem by comparison. Sure, they ID street gang members and keep a database of them, but most of their time is spent on recon for the biker club.

I'm a financial and fraud crimes detective, who sometimes works cybercrimes, so my experience with street level crimes is limited, however even in my two years on patrol, and year in property crimes investigations, most of our problems stemmed from the street gangs. I literally didn't even know we had a 1%er gang in the area until recently.

My question to you, is are they right to devote so much energy to the biker gang? What is it you guys do that concerns us so much? I'm not asking you to incriminate yourself, I just want to know why there is so much effort put into such a seemingly small group of people, and a look from the other perspective would be interesting.

A good point. Eliminate the easier problem before tackling the harder one, sound logic I suppose, in theory at least.

Thanks for taking the time to reply, stay safe out there.