“Gangs have increased by 40 percent since this president was elected.”
-- Newt Gingrich during a round-table discussion July 21 on CNN's "State of the Union"
More than a week after a Florida jury found George Zimmerman not guilty in the shooting death of teenager Trayvon Martin, CNN’s “State of the Union” hosted a round-table discussion of crime and race in America. Among the panelists was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker from Georgia.
“Gangs have increased by 40 percent since this president was elected,” Gingrich said. “There is no federal program to stop it. No one wants to have an honest conversation about it.”
Gingrich had made this point before in an op-ed. He wrote, “Although the president does not acknowledge the gangs’ role as a major cause of the epidemic of violence, the FBI does. The FBI estimated in 2011 that there are roughly 1.4 million active gang members in the U.S., an astonishing 40 percent increase from 2009.”
Gingrich accurately quoted from the FBI study he referred to in the op-ed — the 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment. It states, “Approximately 1.4 million active street, (outlaw motorcycle) and prison gang members, comprising more than 33,000 gangs, are criminally active” in the United States, which “represents a 40 percent increase from an estimated 1 million gang members in 2009.”
Because Gingrich’s 40 percent figure comes from federal statistics, we agree it has some credibility. But we will raise two concerns.
Uncertainty about the statistics
Because gang activity is illegal, it’s difficult to get solid numbers. So the FBI estimated as best it could. To do this, the FBI used a combination of data from a survey of law enforcement agencies by the National Drug Intelligence Center, along with additional interviews with law enforcement officials. The survey randomly sampled roughly 3,000 state and local law enforcement agencies to gauge gang activity in their jurisdictions.
Criminologists warned PolitiFact to be wary of several factors.
- The survey is not just an estimate — it's an estimate of estimates. All surveys are subject to sampling error, but at least many surveys sample something that the respondent will find easy to quantify — such as how many cars he owns.
The survey the FBI used, however, has uncertainty not just about whether the sample was truly random, but also about whether the answers given are actually accurate. The report itself “acknowledges that there may be some duplication or underreporting of gang members” because of how each law enforcement agency measures gang activity.
- The smell test. A jump of 40 percent in just two years is enormous, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University. "If there were really a 40 percent increase in two years, you would see a big impact on crime statistics generally, but we haven't," he said.
- Who counts as a gang member? There's no universal definition. "Actual gang members can deny membership, and wanna-bes can claim membership," said Eugene O'Donnell, a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
- Institutional bias. Local law enforcement officials have an interest in overstating — or at least not understating — the number of gang members in their jurisdiction, since a bigger gang problem can mean more federal assistance, O'Donnell said.
Does Obama deserve blame?
Gingrich said, “Gangs have increased by 40 percent since this president was elected.” If he had said “between 2009 and 2011,” we wouldn’t have addressed the issue of whether he was blaming the president. But Gingrich chose to use Obama’s presidency to mark time.
The Gingrich camp firmly disagrees that he was blaming Obama. They point to previous op-eds as evidence that Gingrich was simply saying that crime issues that inspire a lot of media attention — such as mass shootings and the Martin case — obscure a more far-reaching crime concern, gangs.
“Newt mentioned Obama to make that contrast — in other words, ‘Is a Trayvon Martin-type occurrence really what is most important to be focused on when it comes to the personal safety of African-Americans?’ ” Gingrich spokesman Joe DeSantis said. “After all, the president had just held a press conference to talk about the Martin verdict. Newt did not say that Obama was to blame for the increase in gang violence.”
The Gingrich camp is correct that he has made that argument in previous op-eds, but he didn’t mention it in the CNN discussion. And because a CNN viewer most likely wouldn’t have read Gingrich’s op-eds, we think it’s fair to rate him in part for bringing Obama into the discussion.
There are, in fact, some things an administration can do to bolster law enforcement generally and fight gang activity specifically.
Contrary to Gingrich’s claim that “there is no federal program to stop” gangs, the Justice Department does have an Organized Crime and Gang Section, which was established under Obama in late 2010.
But while federal funding and technical assistance can help, Fox said that “there’s relatively little that the president can do to discourage a 12-year-old from joining a gang.”
Our ruling
Gingrich said “gangs have increased by 40 percent since this president was elected.”
Gingrich deserves credit for using statistics from a credible federal agency, but it’s important to note that methodological difficulties make it hard for anyone, even the FBI, to determine how many gang members there are in the US. Criminologists express skepticism about whether gang membership could have jumped 40 percent in just two years, saying that broader crime statistics don’t show any sign of it.
In addition, despite the Gingrich camp’s insistence that he did not mean to blame Obama for the rise in gang membership, we think a reasonable viewer of the discussion could have made such an inference. On balance, we rate the claim Half True.
