Slaying raises alarm over gang activity in Portsmouth

PORTSMOUTH

The slaying last month of a 50-year-old pizza delivery man in Churchland had already heightened worries about public safety in the city.

The news that police believe one of the teenagers arrested is a member of a gang called YNIC pushed another panic button.

At a meeting earlier this month, School Board member Keith Nance Sr. said he is concerned about YNIC members at Churchland Middle School.

"I guess everybody was treating it as a poseur type gang and didn't really realize the extent to which they were a gang," he said.

More recently, a Churchland resident showed up at a community meeting and asked city leaders what they planned to do about gangs. Tracey Williams said she didn't hear an answer.

For Detective Ken Gavin, there may be an advantage to the elevated concern.

As chairman of the gang task force, it's his job to coordinate efforts to track and dismantle gangs - and to discourage juveniles from joining. Often it's the parents who don't believe their children are in gangs when police try to enlist their aid, he said.

"It's the thing of 'Not my son' or 'Not my child.' Or 'It's just a neighborhood thing; it's not a gang,' " he said.

But when that neighborhood thing leads to robberies and assaults, even murder, that's a criminal street gang, he said.

The biggest mistake people make is thinking that it's not gangs, but "just a bunch of wannabes," he said.

"I think looking at this particular case with the pizza delivery driver is a classic example," Gavin said.

The victim, Robert Kiesewetter, was robbed and killed while making a delivery in the Edgefield Apartments area. Police have arrested two teenagers, a 17-year-old juvenile and Jamal Minggia, 18, a Cavalier Manor resident. Both were charged with murder, robbery and firearms charges.

When police searched Minggia's house, they recovered a sawed-off shotgun, an assault rifle and three other firearms, according to the search warrant. They also found gang-related items, Gavin said. It will be up to the commonwealth's attorney to decide whether to prosecute Minggia on criminal gang charges, he said.

State law makes criminal street gang participation a Class 5 felony, punishable by up to five years. If a gang member is 18 or older and knows juveniles are involved, it is a Class 4 felony, punishable by up to 10 years.

But gang charges can be hard to prove in court. Commonwealth's Attorney Earle C. Mobley said his office vigorously prosecutes gang members who commit crimes.

"The bulk of them are showing up in juvenile court," he said.

In Portsmouth, about 90 percent of gang members are juveniles, mostly middle to high school age, Gavin said. Some are as young as 9, and 10 percent are girls, he said.

The evolution of gangs here is different from what happened years ago in cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles, he said. Most of those developed around specific crimes such as drug distribution, Gavin said.

It happened in reverse here.

"We saw a lot of groups popping up, claiming to be Bloods gangs or Crips gangs and Gangster Disciples. And they weren't into any crimes," he said.

But eventually, they want "street credibility" and do that by instilling fear, he said.

Gavin doesn't have statistics. The department's records system was not designed to identify gang-related crime, but a committee is working to correct that, he said. He hopes that in the future, resources will be expanded to fight the problem.

There are about 35 people on the task force, including police and probation officers, prosecutors, and representatives of the commonwealth attorney's office. One goal is to go after grants to pay for more prevention programs and expand manpower.

Within the police department, Gavin and another detective make up the gang and intelligence unit. They have trained about 20 other officers as gang specialists.

Gavin counts about 35 gangs that have influence in the city. Some come from neighboring cities but have members who have been arrested in Portsmouth, he said. Homegrown subsets of the Bloods are still the most prevalent here - somewhere between 10 and 15 gangs, he said. But it goes in spurts, he said.

The YNIC gang, which is affiliated with the Crips, is the larger of the homegrown gangs, he said.

Police have identified 25 members. But those are "confirmed" members, he said. The actual number is probably two to three times higher. Members are known to wear black beads, blue bandanas and sport New York Yankees hats and clothes because of the "NY" logo, he said. YNIC is a reference, with a racial slur, for young blacks in charge.

That gang and others can be found all over the city. The communities of Cradock, Cavalier Manor and parts of Churchland have been hardest hit.

Ted Lamb, neighborhood watch coordinator in Cradock, said at one time the neighborhood was seeing a lot of burglaries committed by juveniles, which he suspects were types of initiations. So far this year, the neighborhood has seen a drop in crime, which Lamb attributes to the efforts of residents, police and the Sheriff's Office, which has put deputies on Cradock's streets.

Joe Wright, a longtime neighborhood crime-fighter, realized the gang problem had arrived in Cavalier Manor when graffiti started popping up everywhere. The rumors are scary, Wright said. They hear a goal of YNIC is to kill a police officer.

Wright said it's time for the city to expand its gang unit before things get out of hand.

Janie Bryant, (757) 446-2453, janie.bryant@pilotonline.com