I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.
May 15, 1997
By Devlyn Brooks
Staff Writer
American Indian gang activity is on the rise across the state, and at an even higher pace in the Twin Cities, three Minneapolis police officers who work in an Indian neighborhood told a group of parents gathered at a "non-violence" informational meeting Wednesday.
The seminar, "Parents for Non-Violence," was held at the Bemidji Middle School and was sponsored by the Bemidji Indian Education Program. The group was mostly Indian parents, as well.
The officers, who have visited other Indian reservations throughout the state giving the same presentation as Wednesday's, discussed how to identify beginning gang behaviors and also the importance of identifying the behaviors early.
Parents viewed slides on different gang symbols, gang clothing and information on several different gangs Minneapolis police are encountering. Officer Bill Blake said there are four main gangs prevalent on their beats -- the Chicago-based Vice Lord Nation and the Disciples Nation, and the Los Angeles-based Bloods and the Crips. He said the Native Mob, an American Indian faction of the Vice Lords, is growing fast among Indian communities, even in rural Minnesota.
According to Blake and Sgt. Frank Smith, also of the Minneapolis Police Department, Indian gang members are transporting the gang culture back to outstate Minnesota communities when they move.
Sometimes it is as simple as when the youths' parents move back to reservations, and the kids introduce the gang culture to other kids from the reservation. Or, Smith said, sometimes after committing a violent crime in the Cities, the gang member will move back to their home reservation to "lie low." One such member was just recently captured in Cass Lake, he said.
Blake told parents it was typical -- as some Bemidji parents said it was here -- for rural Minnesota communities to want to label youthful offenders who have committed gang activity crimes only as "gang wannabes." But, he added that is a dangerous assumption because the fringe-level involvement activities, as the Minneapolis Police Department calls them, often lead to more escalated gang activities.
One of the main fringe-level activities is graffiti, Smith said. On the officers' trips to speaking engagements through northern Minnesota reservations, they are seeing ever-increasing amounts of graffiti, which is identical to that used to mark "turf" in the Twin Cities.
"It's important to get rid of graffiti right away," Black said. "It (only) leads to an escalation of gang activity."
He said often gangs will spray paint over rival gangs' graffiti, or territory markings, resulting in gang wars that could have been stopped if the graffiti had been removed.
"Those individuals involved in gang activity are either going to prison, going to kill someone or even be killed," Blake said, as he stood in front of a slide picturing the bloody clothes of a murdered gang member. "This is why we're out here, because we're seeing way too much of this," he said, pointing to the slide.
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