Chattanooga police officers

Contributed photo

Two years after the Chattanooga Police Department formed a crime suppression unit tasked with targeting gangs, officers have discovered their best tool in getting gangs off the street — the federal court system.

Criminals who have compiled laundry lists of crimes, including aggravated assaults, burglaries and drug charges, don’t get off easily in federal court, where parole isn’t available, the way they do in state court.

“They’ve continued to build that criminal history,” said Lt. Edwin McPherson, commander of the department’s fugitive, crime suppression and auto theft units. “Now their backgrounds have come back to haunt them.”

Career criminals can enter the federal system after they’ve wracked up multiple convictions in state court.

“It’s kind of like all those two- to six- month stints they did in jail have turned into a minimum of five years to life,” said Sgt. Todd Royval, the crime suppression unit’s supervisor.

In a roundup earlier this month, police arrested 47 known gang members from Chattanooga and surrounding counties. Without such sweeps and the support of the U.S. attorney’s office, as well as other federal, state and local agencies, police say they’d be fighting a battle they wouldn’t win.

“It’s totally keeping control of it,” Sgt. Royval said. “I think if we didn’t do the roundups and we didn’t get the people we got, things would be worse.”

Tennessee Eastern District U.S. Attorney James “Russ” Dedrick said that the stiffer punishments and penalties given in federal court help keep gangs off the streets.

“Federal law calls for enhanced punishment of repeat offenders who are involved in drug crimes or who have convictions of multiple offenses at the state level,” he said.

But the roundups make identifying gang members more difficult. Gang members who used to boast of their affiliations no longer proclaim them; any association with a gang can tack time onto a prison sentence.

“It’s finally just catching up that the police are paying attention and documenting the potential for them to go to federal prison for lengthy sentences,” said Investigator Rusty Morrison with the crime suppression unit.

So police turn to other tactics to identify members. Officers notice the colors people wear, the areas where they hang out, the people with whom they associate and the symbols and signs found on their persons.

Then they document it, compiling a list of known gang members in the city. Officers have documented more than 630 gang members, and say authorities in other cities and counties, including Nashville, will often call to find out about a member or his nickname.

About 1 million gang members belonging to more than 20,000 gangs nationwide are criminally active, according to a September 2008 report from the National Gang Intelligence Center. The number of gang members serving time in federal prison was not immediately known by the National Gang Center.

The crime suppression unit targets gangs in less obvious but equally important ways. Officers educate schools, community groups, neighborhood associations, churches and parents about ways to identify gang members. They maintain contact with school resource officers. And they teach patrol officers what to look for at a crime scene to determine if the act was gang-related.

So while it may appear that the number of gang-related crimes has increased, police say it’s simply better reporting of statistics.

And most Chattanooga residents won’t directly be affected by gang violence.

“You don’t see some hard-working guy getting his door kicked in,” said Investigator Kevin Trussell with the crime suppression unit. “You see some drug dealer getting his door kicked in because they know what (money, drugs) is in that house.”