On Dec. 17, 2015, high school student Zaevion Dobson died protecting three girls from gunfire. Knoxville Police Department Chief of Police David Rausch later called the shooting gang-related and said Dobson was caught in between violence from rival gangs.
Since then, the Knoxville community rallied against Knoxville’s gangs. KPD is focusing on education and community programs to stop the growth of gangs, pushing for longer sentences for people convicted of gang-related crime and racking individual gang members.
“We go out to the community and schools and try to educate folks on the gangs, because if they can see it, they can let us know what is going on … as far as the front-end, the prevention end, we don’t have the manpower to do that, honestly. We try to do that in schools,” Investigator Jim Quick said, from the KPD Gang/Intelligence Unit.
Most major gangs have a presence in Knoxville, Quick said, and the main way they make their money is through drug trafficking. They are mostly centralized in the inner city but can stretch beyond it. Most violent crime that is linked to gangs do not seem to be caused by the gangs though, Quick said.
“A lot of our gang violence is sparked by something not even involved in a gang. It’s involving females, or drug rip-offs, or ‘somebody owes me money so I’m going to go over there and shoot them up’ or ‘I’ve been in jail, I got this girlfriend and she starts sleeping with somebody else,’” Quick said.
To stop gang-related violence, KPD works to prevent people from joining gangs in the first place through community outreach and education. They offer free training with organizations seeking to sway people away from gangs. Community organizations, like the Boys and Girls Scouts of America and Heal the Land also try to stop the growth of gangs in Knoxville.
“One of the primary goals of the Boy Scouts, or goal, is to help prepare young men and women to have a better future … part of it also is to teach them about communicating, to teach them about self-respect and respecting others and teach them about citizenship,” Anthony Ingram said, the District Director for the Inner-City Knoxville Area for the Boy Scouts.
Gangs offer people purpose and brotherhood in addition to lucrative opportunities to make money, Jim Quick said. They tend to develop in underprivileged communities since gangs offer a chance to pull out of an otherwise dim future.
The programs are designed to keep people distracted from gangs and away from crime. Some of the programs teach skills that people can use throughout their life.
“I actually used some of the skills that I learned while I was scouting to save a young man’s life who was injured. I was at a friend’s house and a young man was clowning around and put his forearm to a glass panel on a door and was bleeding profusely. I was trained in first aid and emergency preparedness … I was able to stop the bleeding and call the other emergency personnel,” Ingram said.
While Knoxville’s gang problem has not changed for better or worse, Quick said that KPD and the public are working together to confront gangs in their neighborhoods and improve the community.
