Social Media's Influence On Gang Violence

Social media can cause violence among people, which can affect the neighborhood in which they live in. Specifically, social media has opened the door for cyber banging. Both NPR (National Public Radio) and the co-director of Metro Chicago YMCA’s Youth Safety and Violence Prevention program, Eddie Bocanegra, report the evidence of how social media influences gang violence. As a result, this has caused the Chicago police, Professor Desmond Patton, and Professor Henry Liebermann to come up with solutions to reduce the amount of gang violence in neighborhoods. To begin, NPR interviews Jaime on how social media influences gang violence. Jaime is a seventeen year old teenager who has been involved in a gang for two years. At the YMCA of Metro Chicago, he shows NPR a video on his Facebook page and mentions how social media is what gang members use to sell themselves to the public. Additionally, Jaime also mentions how a person becoming known in a video gets killed by a rival gang. The news about that person killed can be passed through social media. As a result, there would be a counterattack against the rival gang who killed that person. Finally, Eddie Bocanegra discusses how social media can be used for other gang-related situations and how social media can …show more content…
The Chicago police are working with schools to reduce the amount of gang violence in neighborhoods. Desmond Patton, a professor at Columbia University, suggests how researchers can try to decode the messages sent online by gang members to protect the children of their neighborhood. Additionally, Patton also conducts the “Internet banging study”. In that study, Patton interviews gang members ages 14 – 24 to understand how their use of social media relates to violence in the