Each year, Durham's Impact Team, working in coordination with the Durham Police Department's Gang Unit, is dispatched to sites throughout the city to remove gang graffiti from public buildings, roads and billboards.
But gang graffiti seen across the city is only the most visible sign of Durham's continuing gang problem-one that the city is working actively to address.
At every level, from the Durham Public School system to City Council, public officials cited a continuing need to address the persistence of a gang problem in the Bull City.
Captain Ray Taylor, head of the special operations division of the DPD, said he estimates there are approximately 30 active gangs in Durham with 800 known members, ranging in size from small neighborhood units to larger gangs with national associations.
"The biggest gang we have in Durham is affiliated with the Bloods," Taylor said, speaking of the notorious Los Angeles-based organization. "But there's different sets within that... and most of those are neighborhood-affiliated."
Amy Elliott-the director of A New Day, an alternative school for children who have criminal records-said her students' level and danger of gang involvement could be traced on a broad spectrum.
"Some kids are just in a clique or a posse," she said. "I've had others [involved in gangs] who had to be taken out of Durham because they were in danger of being killed."
The growth of gangs in Durham has prompted school administrators, city officials and community leaders to take measures to curb both gang violence and membership.
"We certainly do have-and I think every high school in the state right now has-concerns over young people in gangs," said John Colclough, principal of Northern High School in Durham. "I think the best thing we've done is to address the problem of gangs and acknowledged their presence."
Gangs are recognized as an issue for Durham Public Schools in the Student Code of Conduct, which defines a gang as "any ongoing organization, association, or group of three or more persons... having as one of its primary activities the commission of criminal acts" and expressly forbids the display of any clothing or symbols "which may be evidence of membership or affiliation in any gang."
Some high schools, including Northern, take a proactive approach in combatting gangs, offering workshops for teachers that instruct them on how to identify gang-related signs and behavior, Colclough said.
Teachers are instructed to look for indications such as the wearing of a single color or color combinations, gang symbols that could be used in communication among members or graffiti on backpacks and notebooks.
"I believe [the workshops] are very helpful in giving especially 'new' teachers an awareness of what it is all about," Amy Daw, a performing arts teacher at Northern, wrote in an e-mail.
A number of prevention and intervention programs have also resulted in response to gang activity in the area, such as Durham Companions, the DPD's Gang Resistance Education and Training Unit, and Elliot's A New Day.
Elliot, however, said the mere presence of such programs is not enough.
"People always say more, more, more," she said. "What I think we should be saying is better, better, better. There's no easy solution to this problem."
Some city officials, nonetheless, said they believe the city has made progress in its efforts.
"The City Council has continued to fund our gang unit and provided it with resources to combat gangs on the street," said council member Mike Woodard. "The police department has continued to do a lot more awareness programs through Project Safe Neighborhood and other community interaction programs.... And of course we've continued to improve our police team efforts."
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