Racial attacks like the ones behind the arrest of 32 suspects in Denver are part of a trend spreading across the country, gang experts said Saturday.Not exactly a new trend perhaps, I recall seeing similar vids in Us "true crimes" shows years ago already (with tapes camescope, here we're most probably talking cellphones).
Incidentally, there is a famous and very similar example, one notable being in Sweden, 2004, quite a few Youths (somali, I seem to recall?, including a famous professional soccer player) were caught for basically the same thing : as part of an investigation on a rape case, police found copies of a vid that was being circulated for entertainement value, which showed two (white) teens being kicked in the head (resulting in one being brain-damaged), after they got beaten up, having made the mistake of complaining about an act of petty vandalism the group was doing for fun.
As part of the trend, black gang members videotape the assaults in trendy tourist districts and sell them on the underground market as entertainment.
"They knock a young white guy out with one blow to see if his knees will wobble and surround them and take their money," said the Rev. Leon Kelly, who runs a Denver gang-prevention program. "It's a joke."
Denver police announced the 32 arrests Friday after a months-long undercover investigation into what authorities said were racially motivated assaults and robberies in Denver, including in the Lower Downtown entertainment district. They seek the arrests of three more suspects.
Kelly said he has been warning gang members for months that for the $20 they snatch from someone, they could do 20 years in prison.
"There's always consequences," he said. "They've been targeting each other for years. Once it starts venturing out of the 'hood, it becomes a major issue."
Denver police Lt. Matt Murray said that the same day Chief Gerry Whitman announced the arrests, a national TV program profiled a similar gang-fueled onslaught in Minneapolis.
From somali Youths.
"We're not the only city having something like this happen," Murray said.
Several months ago, Kelly said, he got a copy of a videotape recorded in West Palm Beach, Fla. Gang members surrounded a white couple at a club. One of them told the others to hold on.
"He said, 'Let me get this camera on.' It's a staged thing," Kelly said.
The gang members crave the notoriety of having their one-punch knockouts recorded on tape and sold on the black market. They'll rewind the tapes and watch them over and over, he said. When they watch the videos and see a big punch landed and gang members at the scene start laughing, they'll all break out laughing, said Kelly, who heads the Open Door Youth Gang Alternatives center.
"They think it's so cool to see someone get beaten up like that," he said.
The tapes get taken from town to town. Gang members mimic what they see, Kelly said.
In Denver, groups of four or five black men would approach a victim late at night or early in the morning and taunt a man with racial slurs, Whitman has said. Gang members have broken victims' noses and shattered eye sockets, he said.
A task force including Denver cops, FBI agents and prosecutors from District Attorney Mitch Morrissey's office identified 26 incidents since July in which the gangs assaulted or robbed white or Latino men. The offenders took wallets, iPods, cash and other small items. Most of the suspects admitted they belonged to either the Rollin' 60s Crips gang or the Black Gangster Disciples gang.
Murray disagreed with Kelly that police only aggressively pursued the gangs after they started targeting whites. "If a group of white supremacists were targeting blacks, we would go after them," he said.
Though robbery is a predominant motivation of the gang members, it is more complicated than that, Kelly said.
"Some of the same black kids have been beating their own people down," he said. "Violence is violence. This is a trend. A lot of my kids are frustrated because they think the system doesn't care."
Kelly said he worked with many of the boys and young men arrested in the sting, trying to steer them toward jobs and school. But they often can't see beyond immediate needs of getting money for buying food, clothes or drugs to get high on, he said. They don't think they'll get caught and justify what they're doing as just a game.
It breaks Kelly's heart, he said. He said he has known many of the gang members who were arrested since they were innocent kids in elementary school.
"Moms are grieving because they feel like they've lost their kids to this behavior," Kelly said.
The arrests will hopefully serve a new purpose, he said. "This will confirm to these kids that there is a consequence."
Police are hoping other victims will come forward to help them solve a number of unreported robberies and assaults. The incidents were seen by witnesses or cameras, but no victims have come forward.