Police department appoints gang suppression officer
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on July 11, 2016 1:46 PM
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News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
Walter Howard, who was recently selected to become a gang suppression officer for the Goldsboro Police Department, stands in the front yard of a house on Olivia Lane that has been repeatedly tagged with graffiti Friday afternoon.
Goldsboro Police Department officer Walter Howard has been selected to become the department's first-ever gang suppression officer.
Howard is currently working on a proposal for the policies and procedures he would use to gather intelligence on gangs in the city, which would allow him to investigate gangs in the area on a full-time basis.
Also included in Howard's efforts is a push to develop a full-time gang suppression unit, which would consist of multiple officers working to curb Goldsboro's gang issue.
"I wrote a proposal to the administration here in Goldsboro with my concerns about which direction the department should move in," Howard said of how the gang suppression officer position came into being. "They got back up with me and asked me if I would be interested in moving forward with the proposal."
Howard has 14 years of law enforcement experience, most of which was spent with the Lenoir County Sheriff's Office.
"While I was at the Lenoir County Sheriff's Office, I was a sergeant over the community crime reduction unit," Howard said. "We worked collaboratively with the Kinston Police Department and their gang unit. We went through advanced gang investigator training, we went to gang conferences, and we went through gang intelligence training to be able to assist them in the issues they were having."
While the policy for how Howard will operate as a gang suppression officer is not yet approved, he said the state of North Carolina requires two out of 12 total criteria to be met for someone to be classified as a gang member.
Howard said he is proposing the Goldsboro Police Department require three of the 12 criteria to classify someone as a gang member, which resembles the same policy enacted by the Kinston, Raleigh and Greenville police departments.
Among the criteria to identify someone as a gang member are whether or not the person self-admits to being a gang member, dresses in gang member clothing, uses gang signs and has gang-related tattoos.
Howard said crimes are marked as gang related based on who is involved, and not inherently on the nature of the crime itself.
"You see a few individuals on camera and you can develop them as being part of a certain group or having a set affiliation with that gang, and then you can determine what individual group was a part of that crime. That is most important, is knowing the leader of the gang and knowing the process from the bottom to the top about who is involved," Howard said.
Howard said he noticed the need for a gang suppression officer in Goldsboro when he began at the police department and saw tagging -- spray painting buildings or walls with gang signs -- and the violence going on in the city.
Howard said he hopes his work in gang suppression will be able to aid the police department's investigators in solving cases. He hopes to focus on identifying gang members, knowing the aliases the gang members go by and identifying which areas of the city gangs operate the most heavily in.
"There's certain areas that are affected. There's certain groups that are not getting along with each other," Howard said.
Howard said he will focus on the elements of prevention, suppression and intervention to curb gang activity in the city.
"The main focus is steering the youth away from gang activity, gang related activity and criminal activity all together," Howard said.
"And then there's intervention for the ones that are in it that don't think they can get out. It's important to let them know there's a way out. And of course, suppression of the activity going on -- flooding those streets and getting that information out to let them know we're going to take a stand against it."