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Appellant was indicted in the City of Hampton for, inter alia, one count of gang participation.
At trial, Police Detective E.C. Sales testified as “an expert in the identification of gangs and gang members here in the City of Hampton.”
He explained that “the Bloods” are a nationally known gang that originated on the West Coast and that “the Bloods have several different sets of gangs that fall under the Bloods, just like Gangster Disciples or Vice Lords do.”
He testified further that there are also “homegrown sets that rep Blood.”
He also explained the “homegrown sets that rep Blood” are influenced, among other things, by music and information available on the internet.
Detective Sales described “beefs or disagreements” between rival gangs such as the Bloods and the Crips. He also testified on direct that “here in Hampton, since there’s not a whole lot of organization with our Blood gangs, or even our Crip gangs, they tend to beef amongst each other. Um, so you’ll have Bloods fighting with Bloods.”
The evidence established that when the attack on the victim occurred, appellant belonged to a gang called the 36th Street Bang Squad.
Detective Sales said he first learned about the 36th Street Bang Squad in 2005 and that it was one of his duties with the police department’s gang unit to track its members.
By speaking with people and befriending them on the internet social networking website MySpace, Sales was able to determine that the 36th Street Bang Squad adopted various symbols and ideologies associated with the national Bloods gang.
These adopted symbols included the colors black, red, and green; the Cincinnati Reds hat bearing a “C,” considered by the gang to stand for Compton, California, where the Bloods gang originated; wearing red and black beads, particularly rosaries or other religious beads because they were less likely to be taken away in jail; using certain Swahili greetings and words used by the Bloods; and using various hand signs used by the Bloods.
Detective Sales specifically described the 36th Street Bang Squad “guys as being affiliated with the Bloods, not a nationally known Blood set, but a homegrown set using the same ideologies, verbiage and symbols used to rep Blood.”
Sales testified about numerous photographs of appellant, which included other apparent 36th Street Bang Squad members and showed them wearing Bloods gang colors and symbols and “throwing up” various gang hand signals.
He testified that the Cincinnati Reds “C” hat is one of the hats that a lot of the Bloods typically wear around our city.
Not everybody that wears this hat is a Blood, but typically, the gang members that I’ve come into contact with have been wearing this hat, and several individuals affiliated with the 36th Street Bang Squad wear this same hat.
The testimony in Phillips concerning the interrelationship between subsets of the Bloods gang in Portsmouth also provides a relevant contrast to the evidence in the instant case about the relationship between the relevant subsets of the Bloods gang in Hampton.
In Phillips, two sets of Bloods, the Bounty Hunter Bloods and the Nine Tek Gangsters, “claimed” the Cradock area of Portsmouth. The two groups were based on different sides of the Cradock area but “operated in conjunction most of the time.”
The Commonwealth’s expert in Phillips testified that although each set had a separate hierarchy of gang officers, lower ranking members of both sets responded to orders from higher ranking members of either set.
Floyd Taybron, s/k/a Floyd L. Taybron v. Commonwealth of Virginia. Court of Appeals of Virginia. From the Circuit Court of the City of Hampton. Opinion by Judge Larry G. Elder. January 11, 2011
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