Texas Gang Assessment, "Tango Blast" tops numbers

Chivis Martinez for Borderland Beat material from DPS Texas Gang Assessment

Tango Blast 19,000 members in Texas

Texas Gang Threat Assessment, which was developed to provide a broad overview and update of gang activity in Texas.

“This report provides an overview of gangs operating in Texas, which gives law enforcement important information to help protect our communities from these violent organizations,” said DPS Director Steven McCraw. “Gangs and their associates remain a significant threat to public safety in our state, not only because of their penchant for violence and criminal activity, but also their relationships with other criminal organizations, such as Mexican cartels.”

The Texas Gang Threat Assessment is based on the collaboration between multiple law enforcement and criminal justice agencies across the state and nation, whose contributions were essential in creating this comprehensive overview of gang activity in Texas.

What is the differences between Gang Tiers?

The state’s latest assessment was released 6 weeks ago, with gangs like Tango Blast, MS-13, the Mexican Mafia and the Latin Kings all ranking as tier 1 gangs. The assessment is based in part on the number of members in the gang, their level of violence and criminal activities, along with their relationship with Mexican crime cartels.

The state of Texas ranks Barrio Azteca, the Crips and Bloods, along with the Bandidos, as tier 2 gangs.

In recent years, Barrio Azteca has fallen from being a tier 1 gang to tier 2 because of a weakening threat, its relationship with the deteriorating Juarez Drug Cartel and the encroachment of the Sinaloa Cartel in the Borderland.

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Executive Summary

The key investigative judgments of this assessment are:

• Gangs remain a significant threat to public safety in Texas.
• Gangs in Texas continue their involvement in organized criminal activity throughout the state, committing violence and maintaining relationships with dangerous Transnational Criminal Organizations.
• We assess that as many as 100,000 gang members are in Texas.

The most significant gangs in Texas are:

• Tango Blast and associated Tango cliques (estimated 19,000 members),
• Latin Kings (estimated 1,300 members),
• Texas Mexican Mafia (estimated 4,100 members),
• and Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) (estimated 500 members).

Tango

These Tier 1 gangs pose the greatest gang threat potential based on their cartel relationships, high levels of transnational criminal activity, level of committed violence, and overall statewide strength and presence.

Violence is often inseparable from gang activity.

Whether protecting criminal assets and territory, carrying out contractual obligations, initiating new members, or targeting other members, gang member violence places Texas citizens ina perilous position.

More than half of all tier-ranked gang members incarcerated within Texas Department of Criminal Justice prisons are serving sentences for violent crimes, including;

• robbery (23 percent),
• homicide (16 percent),
• assaultive offenses (14 percent),
• and sexual assault (6 percent)

Cartel and gang relationships remain steady.

Mexican cartels and Texas gangs work together to distribute drugs throughout the state, smuggle illegal aliens across the border, and  procure and move weapons to Mexico. Cartels sometimes reach out to gang members to commit violent crimes on both sides of the border. The relationships between certain gangs and cartels fluctuate based on cartel structures and cell alignments, gang alignment with specific cartels, threats or coercion, and familial ties. As long as illicit cross-border crimes are profitable, the relationship between cartels and gangs will continue.

 Partnerships between gangs continue across the state.

 Law enforcement reporting throughout Texas shows members of different, and sometimes opposing, gangs will work together to fulfill common criminal objectives. These collaborations are frequently a result of familial and neighborhood ties, hybrid gang memberships, and temporary mutually beneficial agreements. In addition, some violent rivalries remain in place in Texas, mostly between street gangs in concentrated areas, such as the Texas Chicano Brotherhood and Tri-City Bombers in the Rio Grande Valley. Other examples include the rivalry between the Bandidos Outlaw Motorcycle Gang and Cossacks Motorcycle Club, which contributed to the May 2015 shooting in Waco that killed nine people. Their conflicts can result in the injury or death of innocent citizens,  particularly during violent altercations in public, such as drive-by shootings.

Gang members actively use social media to communicate, boast, and recruit.

 The  popularity of social media has not been lost on gang members, especially with younger generations. Gangs use social networking and video-sharing websites as platforms to brag, recruit, and antagonize rival gang members, while mobile messaging applications are used by gang members to communicate. These include encrypted messaging platforms whose use by gang members challenges law enforcement agencies’ ability to investigate and collect criminal intelligence information.

Read full report below:

  TX Gang Threat Assessment 2017. July 25 by Chivis Martinez on Scribd