themarshallproject | If you thought violent biker gangs were a relic of the Altamont era, Sunday’s shootout at a Waco, Texas restaurant might have come as a shock. A long simmering beef
between the Bandidos and Cossacks boiled over into gunfire. When police
arrived at the scene, gang members shot at them, too, leaving nine
bikers dead, 18 people injured, and 170 suspects in police custody. Over
100 weapons have been confiscated.
The scale of this incident dwarfs a typical urban gang confrontation, says Harold Pollack, co-director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab
and an expert on gangs and guns. We talked to Pollack about why biker
gang violence typically gets so little attention. He believes the Waco
incident confounds our expectations regarding the race and geographic
location of people who perpetrate crime, causing us to see biker gangs
as more of a “curiosity” than a threat.
How does the shootout in Waco differ from the gang violence you study in Chicago?
I have never encountered a gang incident in
Chicago remotely like this. The number of perpetrators involved — not to
mention the nine deaths — far exceed the typical urban gang-related
shooting. Maybe there was some gang incident in Chicago like this
decades ago. But this sort of pitched battle? I’ve never heard of
anything like it. If these biker gang members were non-white, I think
this would cause a national freak out.
One of the shocking parts of this incident
is that after the police arrived, there was a gunfight between the gang
members and the authorities.
Urban gangs and criminal organizations very rarely
get into gun battles with police. They certainly have access to
powerful weaponry. Police around the country periodically capture large
caches of AR-15s and other weapons in cities. Yet when they break down
the door to a gang safe house or a drug location in a city, whatever
weapons might be piled on a mattress in the adjoining room are left
where they are. They aren’t picked up and used to attack the police. The
people who do attack police are typically cornered individuals or
people with serious mental health problems.
These biker gangs have a long history in organized crime. They began
with restless, traumatized veterans returning home after World War II.
Today, biker gangs still act as a sort of private militia that police
can’t always control, patrolling festivals and other events. Why don’t we pay more attention to them?
Geography may be part of the answer. There are not
a lot of outlaw biker gangs in gentrifying Brooklyn and other key media
centers. Of course, the number of deaths is lower overall with these
groups. You don’t have the daily deluge of homicides the way we would in
Chicago. But I do think that our views about urban crime are so framed
by race and inequality in a variety of ways. When criminal activity
seems unrelated to these factors, it doesn’t hit our national dopamine
receptors in quite the same way. People tend to view these motorcycle
gangs as a kind of curiosity.
