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Police Tell Parents To Check Social Media For Clues About Youth Crews

 Assistant Commissioner of the Juvenile Justice Division of the NYPD Kevin O'Connor talks about youth crews during a community crime forum held in South Jamaica earlier this week.
Assistant Commissioner of the Juvenile Justice Division of the NYPD Kevin O'Connor talks about youth crews during a community crime forum held in South Jamaica earlier this week.
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DNAinfo.com/Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska

QUEENS — Parents are being asked to monitor social media in an effort to curb youth crews.

Gangs are increasingly using social media including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter to exchange information and brag about feuds, police said during a community meeting in South Jamaica earlier this week.

“We need to have a discussion with our young people about what they are posting on Facebook and other sites,” said Assistant Commissioner of the NYPD's Juvenile Justice Division, Kevin O'Connor, during a community crime forum held at High School For Law Enforcement and Public Safety on Guy Brewer Boulevard.

He said police have identified about 370 youth crews throughout the city, including more than two dozen in South Queens.

O'Connor presented pictures and selfies that crew members had posted on social media with guns.

"It’s about bragging," O'Connor said. 

He also said some fights intensify because members name and threaten one another on social media.

He cited an example of a girl who posted a photo of herself in an ambulance after she was in a fight with two other girls and bragged about beating one of them up.

Her rival's boyfriend, who belonged to another crew, saw the post and in turn threatened to hurt her. 

Crews, unlike bigger and more traditional gangs such as Bloods, Crips and Latin Kings, are mostly related to a specific geographical location. They include members as young as 8 years old, officials said. 

Local youth often form alliances for safety — to protect themselves from other groups who fight people from their area, police said. 

“You live here, I live there and that’s our beef, that’s all it is,” O’Connor said.

O'Connor said that young people often have multiple social media accounts — one for family and others for friends, so parents should look beyond what their children post on pages immediately accessible to them.

Parents should also look for specific terms and tags, O'Connor said. For example, posts about conflicts and threats are usually followed by the letter “K.”

Crew members also use words such as “squad” and “team," and include group names such as Snow, EBK (Everybody Killa) or Woodcity. 

Some groups, like the Snow gang in South Queens, even have their own t-shirts.

O’Connor said that crew members also use more old-fashioned ways to show their affiliations, including graffiti, tags on schoolbags, notebooks in which they use a whiteout to write messages, and tattoos.