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House Speaker Busch wants officials in the same gang
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The Sunday Capital reported this morning that House Speaker Michael Busch (D-Annapolis) was starting to get some work in on legislation to combat the growing presence of gangs, with an emphasis on breaking down the walls between law-enforcement and school officials. Busch said that the schools have been set up to be a safe haven for gangs. As it stands right now, schools cannot tell police of known gang members, and police cannot tells schools about juveniles arrested for incidents off of school property.
The catalyst in all of this was the beating death of 14-year-old Christopher Jones. Jones was on his bike near his Crofton neighborhood when he was attacked. Anne Arundel County Police investigated possible gang ties related to the incident. WJLA-TV (Channel 7) reported that Jones along with his attackers, 16-year-old Javel George and an unidentified 14-year-old boy, had affiliations with neighborhood gangs.
Anti-gang laws were passed in 2007, however one might assume that no one had as much knowledge on the subject then as they do now. When WJZ-TV (Channel 13) did a report on street gangs in the state of Maryland around the same time, the estimate of more than 315 gangs in the state was considered a conservative estimate because some of the counties at the time did not know how many gangs they were dealing with. Anne Arundel in the report had an estimated 10-15 gangs operating in the county, however the number of actual gang members were unknown.
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