A teenager strutting down the street after a night basketball game, proudly wearing his team's red sweats and his number, 13, could be more than a symbol of school pride.
He unknowingly could be a gangster's moving target.Red has signified Bloods gang affiliation since the late 1960s, said detective Rich Montanez of the Salt Lake Area Gang Project. The number 13, first designated by the southern-turf Mexican Mafia formed in Southern California in 1910, is used by gangs today.
"If you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, you can get shot," Montanez said Friday at the 1997 Utah Gang Conference.
Increased violent gang activity is grabbing the attention of Salt Lake County residents.
A recent survey conducted for Salt Lake County shows gangs as the No. 1 problem needing immediate attention. In the Dan Jones & Associates poll, more than 60 percent of respondents cited gangs and 56 percent cited juvenile crime as the most urgent problem. The error margin is plus or minus 4 percent.
Such community fears and increased crime are driving many communities to push for school uniforms.
"Yes, there are gang problems in your school," Nibley Park Elementary principal Jane Larsen said at the conference Thursday. "This (uniforms) is called prevention."
The Salt Lake public school was Utah's first to implement uniforms. While the majority of parents voted for the voluntary policy, it has met fierce opposition. Similar measures at Magna and Bountiful schools have failed.
Uniforms - khaki pants, white collared shirts and blue sweaters, vests or jackets - have quelled gang problems at Nibley, Larsen said.
Last year, vandalism and graffiti damages amounted to $7,000; this year's tab was $700. Fights and discipline slips are down 50 percent.
Blue-clad Crips and Bloods colors perhaps are the most widely discernible gang markers, but there are others. Those affiliated with Brown Pride gangs wear brown clothing and bandanas just above their eyes, Montanez said.
Many sport lifestyle tattoos: three dots for "my crazy life," drama masks for "smile now, cry later," or teardrop tattoos for five years in prison or drive-by shootings, he said. Many also wear long, military-style fabric belts, often scribed with gang initials.
Baggy clothing also is a gang style must, but not all wearers are gang members. And teachers, administrators and parents need to understand the latest gang style to understand what children are doing, said Keith Todd, senior counselor at the Weber Basin Job Corps Center, a federally funded alternative job training and education program.
Job Corps, where some 240 youths ages 16-24 live and learn together, surveys students twice a year on the latest gang fads.
"We must have an agreed-upon dress code or we wouldn't survive," Todd said. "The kids know what's safe."
Students there cannot wear jackets with Raiders, Kings and Sox logos or baggy pants. They also cannot wear sport caps with the bills upturned, sideways or backward. Montanez says gangs in Chicago in the 1940s showed affiliations in clothing worn to one side or the other, or with one pant leg rolled up.
Writing on the inside of the bill, where gang members often scribe names, is also prohibited at Job Corps.
Granite High School also attempts to keep parents and teachers current with gang style, said principal Diane Hesleph. The school conducts teacher workshops and sends letters to parents explaining annual dress code revisions.
Clothing depicting criminal activity or violence - shirts with "187," meaning "cop killer" - are not tolerated at Granite High, nor are sagging jeans, bandanas and hanging belts.
Still, gangs often circumvent the purpose of uniforms and dress codes through continuing style innovations, Hesleph said.
"Teachers need to be educated on what they're looking at," she said. "Unless you know what you're looking at, they get past you."