Boyd Patterson has a vision of a young man a little over a decade from now. He’s 25, graduated from college and an associate at an architecture firm. He’s good at what he does for a living, and his future is bright. Someday, he’ll be designing buildings on his own, and taking the blueprints home to show his children, who will behold what their daddy made with wide-eyed marvel.
Today, that young man is in middle school, and his future is uncertain. His support structure at home is weak, and despite being smart, he’s gotten a few F’s. What’s more, he’s recently fallen into a pattern of negative behavior with some classmates, which provides a refuge from the gang members who daily threaten to beat him up, or abuse his sister, unless he joins their ranks. These things have diminished his bright future to a pinpoint of light surrounded by darkness, and it’s not going to take much more to extinguish it completely and push him into the life of a gang member.
At this point, it’s not even certain he’ll live to be 25, let alone go to college.
Patterson believes that young man is out there, in a Chattanooga middle school, and that there are others like him in the city that stand on the precipice of a devastating choice.
“There’s a kid out there, and this week, something is going to happen that’s the last straw, and he’s going to join a gang. It might be the emptiness that comes with not having a solid family, or the fear that comes with gang members intimidating him, or negative feedback at school, and he’s going to reach a point where he thinks there’s nothing worth saving,” Patterson says.
Patterson believes the young man and those like him are well worth saving. And as the coordinator of Mayor Ron Littlefield’s newly established gang task force, he’ll have the chance. However, he knows the battle is too big for one person, or even one agency, to fight.
“On a Saturday, I got a call about a 14-year-old being shot in the leg. Then I got a call about a homicide. While I was at the scene of the homicide, I got a call about a guy being shot in the arm. So I went to the scene of that shooting, and while I was there, I heard shots being fired from the direction of Woodlawn Apartments,” Patterson says.
No one can say Chattanooga doesn’t have a gang problem. The challenge, then, is deciding how to address it. Patterson believes the answer lies in a coordinated effort by a multi-agency task force that brings together every entity in the city that can touch on the gang issue in any way, shape or form. From the DEA to the ATF, from the district attorney to animal control, and from schools to churches, everyone who can is going to take part in a two-pronged attack.
The first prong will involve reaching out to kids in an effort to prevent them from joining a gang, and attempting to convince older gang members they can do something constructive with their lives.
With gangs targeting kids as early as third grade, Patterson wants schools, rec centers, churches and other agencies to work together to cut off the pipeline that carries kids to gangs. “If we can reach the at-risk kids at their schools, and then continue our outreach at their rec centers, then we’ll have those kids all day long,” Patterson says.
At the outreach level, the city can extend the hand of mercy, before a child who goes to church and is making good grades at school starts down the path to carrying an AK-47 and slinging dope, or before an older gang member who’s desperately looking for a way out becomes irretrievably lost.
Before the task force’s outreach strategy is cast in iron, it will do a massive assessment to identify why Chattanooga’s kids are joining gangs. The evaluation process will involve collecting and analyzing reams of data from schools, the police department, social services and more. This will allow the group to set policy and focus on pulling out the roots of the gang problem.
“Kids join gangs for all kinds of reasons, but we need to find out why our kids are joining gangs. Once we find that out, we’ll be able to set policy. If we learn it’s a jobs-based issue, then that will determine where we spend our time and resources,” Patterson says.
Unfortunately, there will be kids who won’t respond to his team’s outreach efforts and instead choose the gang life, Patterson says. These people will face the second prong of the coordinated attack: suppression.
To date, Chattanooga and Hamilton County law enforcement agencies have not formed a unified front to deal with the gang problem. As gangs emerged, the various agencies responsible for addressing the threat generally acted alone, Patterson says.
“The DEA might run a dope operation against the Gangsta Disciples, while the ATF runs a gun operation against the Tree Top Piru gang, while Chattanooga narcotics pursues Athens Park, while the DA’s office prosecutes a group of Rolling 60’s,” Patterson says.
Under the new model, which is based on the Comprehensive Gang Model method developed at the University of Chicago (see sidebar), these individual agencies will tackle the gang problem together.
“Once this program is up and running, when an act of violence happens, everyone will drill down on that one gang, with the message being that the gang is collectively accountable. If two or three of your guys shoot up the streets, all of the guys in that gang will be responsible.
“So, probation will step up its home visits, there will be increased patrols, narcotics will shut down the drug market in the area, fugitive will move old warrants that match the profiles of the gang members to the top of the pile, child support warrants will get cross referenced with the gang, code enforcement will go out to the gang members’ houses and look for violations, the ATF will run gun traces, federal prosecutors and the DA’s office will work together, and so on. This will happen all at once, immediately following the act of violence,” Patterson says.
It’s an ambitious, logistically complex plan, but Patterson is well suited to lead it. A native of Chattanooga, he worked as a counselor of kids with addictive and psychiatric issues in Douglasville, Ga., in the ’90s. Upon becoming a lawyer, returning to his hometown and learning how to litigate from the attorneys at Campbell & Campbell, he accepted an offer to become a criminal prosecutor in the DA’s office. While his work as a counselor involved taking a multi-pronged approach to the care and treatment of at-risk kids, his nine years with the DA placed him on the front lines of putting criminals behind bars. It’s the combination of experience and skills for which his position calls.
While Patterson believes the task force will have an impact on the gang problem in Chattanooga, he’s not telling anyone the group is going to make the issue go away.
“No program on the planet will take care of all of the gang members and wipe out any chances of gangs ever coming back to Chattanooga. There will always be gangs in some form or fashion.
“We define success as maximizing our chances of getting kids out of gangs, as maximizing our chances of keeping kids from joining a gang in the first place, and as maximizing our chances of incarcerating the gang leaders who won’t respond to our outreach efforts,” Patterson says.
The thing that gives Patterson hope is his belief that the people and the agencies of Chattanooga will come together to fight the problem.
“One person, or one agency, can’t make this program succeed. It’s going to take everyone at an individual level and an agency level coming to the table with what only they can bring. At that point, we’ll have a chance.”
Read a profile of Fred Houser, assistant coordinator of the Chattanooga gang task force, in the February 10 issue of the Hamilton County Herald.