Prosecutors push S.C. lawmakers for tougher anti-gang laws
COLUMBIA, S.C. (WRDW/WAGT) - Law enforcement and prosecutors are calling on South Carolina lawmakers to give them more tools to go after the criminals running drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and retail theft operations.
Proposals at the State House would give them the ability to put the people responsible for these crimes behind bars for decades.
Bills filed in the state Senate — one by Sen. Greg Hembree, R – Horry, and the other by Sen. Tom Young, R – Aiken — would enact an anti-racketeering, or RICO, statute in South Carolina, something dozens of other states already have.
Prosecutors told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee this is a tool they need to crack down on gang violence.
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“We have the resources. We have the crime. We have the issues. We don’t have the tools,” 14th Circuit Solicitor Duffie Stone said.
Stone said the tools they currently have to go after gangs aren’t cutting it.
“What we have as a gang statute currently is five-year penalties for enticing somebody to get into a gang and a five-year penalty for keeping them from leaving a gang,” he explained. “I bet that hasn’t been used a half-a-dozen times since it was ed.”
The two bills would expand what qualifies as a gang and criminal gang activity to cast a wider net and would add a RICO statute to state code.
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One of the legislation’s sponsors said he filed it after hearing from SLED Chief Mark Keel.
“He said that one of the reasons why we have these gangs coming into our state from Georgia and North Carolina is because law enforcement does not have the tools in the toolbox to prosecute the criminal street gangs like exist in our border states,” Young said.
Prosecutors said this would allow them to go after more sophisticated criminal enterprises and to try entire gangs in court at once instead of individual one at a time.
That is what they have to do now, and Stone said in many instances, as they are prosecuting individual , the gang has already replaced them with someone new.
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“If you think in of crime, and you think in of what we’re dealing with, if there is an organizational component to it, this allows us to get to it,” Stone said.
South Carolina’s chief prosecutor said this change is needed to get to the root cause and not just the symptoms of organized criminal activity.
“The racketeering provisions that are being advocated for are very much needed. That goes after the white-collar component, the business side of the criminal gang activity. The violent stuff you see on the streets, that’s good, and we need to go after that. But we need to go after the broader enterprise,” Attorney General Alan Wilson said.
The legislation would also add extra penalties for adults who entice minors into ing gangs.
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A sergeant with the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department told senators this would help them crack down on a growing problem they are seeing now, with more kids and teens being recruited into gangs.
This legislation recently earned its first approval, advancing out of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, and still needs to clear several more votes to reach the governor’s desk.
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