Gangs recruit new members via Internet, officials say

SANDY — Parents frequently give their children, especially those in junior high and high school, lots of warnings.

When they are at school, they are warned to stay away from drugs and gangs. When they are on a computer, they are warned about predators and not giving out too much personal information.

But should parents also be worried about gangs in cyberspace?

That's one of the issues being discussed this week at the 19th annual Utah Gang Conference ending Friday at the South Towne Exposition Center.

On MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, there are plenty of pages and videos of gangsters from the "red" and "blue" teams. But even though there are media articles dating back to 1996 that talk about gangs recruiting new members on the Internet, officials say it's an area that is still relatively new to them and the prevalence of gang recruitment on the Web is still unknown.

A 2007 survey from the iSAFE group printed in the Journal of Adolescent Health found 25 percent of gang members used the Internet an average of four hours per week while 45 percent of them gained access to the Internet from community centers.

But maybe the most telling statistic was 70 percent of gang members reported making friends online was easier than in the real world. Likewise, among students in grades 5-12 who participated in the survey but were not gang members, 27 percent reported it was easier to feel accepted in online groups than groups at school.

Chris Przemieniecki and Mario Hesse, both assistant professors of criminal justice, have been studying how gang members use cyberspace to recruit and get messages to other gang members.

At the conference Thursday, they said they still needed to collect more data before coming up with any definitive statistics or solutions. But they noted regardless of whether gang members were actively recruiting, just their presence could spark interest from "posers" or "wannabe" gangsters.

Whereas some students may not approach a gang member in school, they aren't as afraid of talking to them on the Internet.

The two men have created their own MySpace account, posing as a Blood gang member in an effort to study the situation, and they have befriended other gang members.

"We don't know a lot about gang members online. We're just collecting data," said Przemieniecki, who said the study is in its "embryonic" phase.

An educator from Vernal who attended Thursday's workshop echoed the concerns about young people being potential targets of gang recruitment online, noting that he found one of his kindergartners with her own MySpace page.