It’s also unclear whether the gains in New York will be durable. Gang-suppression efforts in other parts of the country rarely show long-term success, in part because teenagers in poor, racially segregated communities will continue to face the challenges of insecurity and hopelessness that drive youth violence.

Through the New York Police Department’s use of conspiracy cases, these raids cover a wide range of behaviors that are not acts of violence, like marijuana possession. This approach misunderstands the nature of gangs and the dense social networks inhabited by these young people targeted for prosecution. Despite overheated rhetoric from the police, politicians and the media, there is often very little evidence in these conspiracy cases of an organized hierarchical structure to these alleged gangs, which instead are often loose affiliations without purpose beyond socializing and seeking mutual safety.

Most of the raids in New York have been concentrated in and around public housing developments, where teenagers have little choice but to develop continuing relationships, even if those acquaintances are involved in violence. The police claim that because these young people spend time together in a park, were previously arrested together and are seen together in Facebook posts, they are in a well-defined gang engaged in ongoing crime and violence. But that is much too simplistic.

Prosecutors rely heavily on these conspiracy charges, not because they involve true criminal enterprises but because they can be used as leverage against defendants. State conspiracy and federal RICO anti-racketeering statutes allow prosecutors to threaten decades of prison time based merely on evidence of associations and potentially unrelated low-level criminal charges from the past.

The gang designation also usually makes defendants ineligible for bail, giving them a stronger incentive to provide evidence against others or take a plea deal. In many cases, the only evidence against a defendant accused of violence is the testimony of someone in jail hoping to avoid prosecution. Many young people have complained to their public defenders that during questioning, the police have pressured them to hand over social media passwords, even when they have not been charged with a crime and in the absence of a parent or legal representative.

Many of the defendants in the New York City cases are jailed before trial for long periods of time and face possibly decades in prison, even though a vast majority of them are not being accused of actual involvement in violence. That leaves their families to choose either getting evicted from public housing or agreeing that their child will be banned from their home forever. Communities are undermined as young people are forced to testify against their neighbors to avoid prosecution.