
It supports US Department of Justice strategic objectives 2.2 (to reduce the threat, incidence, and prevalence of violent crime) and 2.4 (to reduce the threat, trafficking, use, and related violence of illegal drugs). The 2011 NGTA enhances and builds on the gang-related trends and criminal threats identified in the 2009 assessment. The National Gang Intelligence Center (NGIC) prepared the 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment (NGTA) to examine emerging gang trends and threats posed by criminal gangs to communities throughout the United States. The FBI and NGIC recommend contacting state and local law enforcement agencies for more information related to specific gang activity.

These numbers are not used by the FBI or NGIC to rank jurisdictions on gang activity. The FBI and the NGIC do not recommend that jurisdictions use the estimated gang membership totals as exact counts for the numbers of gang members. Consequently, these rankings lead to simplistic and or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with residents. These rankings, however, do not provide insight into the many variables that mold the crime in a particular town, city, county, state, region, or other jurisdiction. This maintains consistency with the 2009 NGTA report’s maps on gang activity.ĭuring the years the NGTA is published, many entities-news media, tourism agencies, and other groups with an interest in crime in our nation - use reported figures to compile rankings of cities and counties. After further review of these estimates, the maps originally provided in 2011 NGTA were revised to show state-level representation of gang activity per capita and by law enforcement officers. These estimates do not affect the qualitative findings of the 2011 NGTA and were used primarily to create the maps highlighting gang activity nationally.

The data used to calculate street gangs and outlaw motorcycle gang estimates nationwide in the report are derived primarily from NDIC’s National Drug Threat Survey. Based on these estimates, geospatial maps were prepared to visually display the reporting jurisdictions. Likewise, these estimates may not capture gang membership in jurisdictions that may have underreported or that declined to report.

The estimates were provided on a voluntary basis and may include estimates of gang members as well as gang associates. An overview of how these numbers were collected is described within the Scope and Methodology Section of the NGTA. The gang estimates presented in the 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment (NGTA) represent the collection of data provided by the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) through the National Drug Threat Survey, Bureau of Prisons, State Correctional Facilities, and National Gang Intelligence Center (NGIC) law enforcement partners. 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment – Emerging Trends
