Opinion

Rise of the girl gangs

When teen hoop star Tayshana Murphy was chased and shot dead by gang members in her project in Morningside Heights in September, few knew her death was a double tragedy.

Despite being one of the city’s best high-school basketball players and a likely WNBA draft pick, Murphy had been drawn into a deadly street crew and was killed because of a rivalry with another gang.

Cops now have revealed that Murphy was caught in a troubling new trend: good girls recruited by neighborhood gangs into lives of violence, where carrying weapons and committing crimes is as commonplace as shooting a free throw.

Sister gangs are popping up all over Manhattan, Brooklyn and The Bronx with names such as the Harlem Hiltons, Hood Barbies, Billion Dolla Beauties, Gun Clappin Divas and 2 Gurl Gunnas, police say.

They brawl, flash box cutters, stash guns for male gangbangers and act as ambush bait, luring boy members of rival crews to house parties for revenge beatdowns.

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“Some of these kids really can’t walk more than two or three blocks from their own territory,” said a gang investigator.

There’s no doubt about the danger they pose.

Bronx prosecutors are preparing to try another young woman, Raven Walker, 16, for murder after she allegedly stabbed to death a teenage boy during a gang fight on Gunther Avenue in June 2010.

The mother of the victim, Rashawn Birthright, 17, claimed her son’s death was “part of a gang initiation.”

Youth counselors say it’s increasingly difficult for female teens like Murphy and Walker to resist joining all-girl sets.

“The mom is working three jobs and comes home at 11 at night, so they’re not being raised by anybody but the streets and their friends,” says Karim Chapman, a supervisor with Operation Snug, a youth program that employs ex-gang members to teach teens peace.

“These girl crews are forming for protection and a sense of identity.”

‘They are in this because of the boys,” says Chuck Berkley, a Harlem youth mentor and community activist who spent 20 years in the NYPD, five of them as an undercover detective assigned to drug and gun investigations.

“I think they’re doing it for the excitement, but they’re just as dangerous as the guys,” he adds. “About 95% of them carry knives. Their favorite is the box cutter. They’ll hold a gun for a male gangbanger, but they generally won’t shoot.”

Such was the case with Africa Owes, 17, who became a cause célèbre in the spring when she was charged with gang conspiracy. Though not a gang member herself, Owes was recorded talking to her boyfriend, Jaquan “Jay Cash” Layne, in Rikers, and agreeing to ferry guns to Layne’s brother. Both Laynes were members of a gang called the 137th Street Crew.

After the Abyssinian Baptist Church agreed to post her bail and Rep. Charlie Rangel argued her case, Owes was allowed to go free, as long as she finished high school and stayed out of trouble.

Jay Cash, meanwhile, was sentenced to 20 years to life on Tuesday, with the judge bemoaning the “pools of blood on the blocks” of Harlem caused by gangs and guns.

Edward Talty, who runs the homicide and gang bureau at the Bronx DA’s office, said female cohorts are useful to male gangs because they generally fly under law-enforcement radar.

“There’s nothing like a young girl to hold guns or drugs — nobody searches them and they generally don’t have records,” he says.

Often, they work in tandem with boy crews from the same area.

The Gun Clappin Divas, for example, act as an auxiliary to the Gun Clappin Goonies, a drug-and-gun gang that operates out of the Martin Luther King Towers on West 115th Street and Lenox Avenue. The crew is also known as Addicted to Green.

Some have members in more than one neighborhood. There are sets of the Hood Barbies in Harlem and in Canarsie, Brooklyn, where a group of about 10 members proudly boast of their affiliation on Facebook.

Besides fighting and holding onto drugs and guns, the women also are useful to warring boy gangs as beatdown bait, one expert says.

“Sometimes the guys will recruit a girl gang to meet rival boys and lure them to another borough. They’ll invite them to a house party, and two or three will go. The guys think they’re going to have a good time, and then they get ambushed.”

Ironically, many of the girl gangsters “are actually doing really well in school,” says one cop. “That’s the crazy thing about it. They’re just caught up with the wrong people.”

“These kids have no reason to be part of a gang,” Chapman adds. “It’s mainly just, ‘I’m here. Recognize my boundaries.’ ”

Police say Murphy, 18, was a member of two gangs — 3 Staccs, a toughened band of boys from the Grant Houses that included her brother, and a companion cadre of girls.

When not in classes at Murry Bergtraum High School for Business Careers or leading her basketball team in assists, Murphy — a tomboy nicknamed “Chicken” because of her bow legs — battled gangster girls from the nearby Manhattanville projects or joined her brother’s crew in their fights with rival Make it Happen Boyz, they say.

“She was running with a crew and robbing people,” says a community leader who knew her. “She would hang with the girls and join the boys. ”

The extent of the problem of girl gangs is hard to measure, but at a community meeting in Harlem last month aimed at reducing gang violence, NYPD Assistant Commissioner Kevin O’Connor handed out a list of 45 separate youth crews in north Manhattan, 10 of them all-female.

These small, unaffiliated wolfpacks are not part of established gangs like the Bloods, Crips or Latin Kings. They are particular to one building or block and have as few as a dozen or so members.

“They just clique up together and eventually they turn into the Gunna Girls,” Chapman says. “These girls are becoming even more active than some of the guys.”

Disputes often blow up over seemingly trivial insults, which get broadcast and magnified with inflammatory posts on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, investigators say.

“That’s why we track those sites closely,” says one gang detective. “The girls are always posting — and it’s mostly about who did what and when.”

Cops say there have been a number of frightening street battles involving all-girl crews.

Early last month, a posse of half a dozen members of the 2 Gurl Gunnas from East Harlem went looking for a rival gang they targeted over a Facebook insult — and showed up in force outside the Bread & Roses Integrated Arts High School on Edgecombe Avenue and West 136th Street.

“The group came over and was watching for them,” says a community leader familiar with the beef. “They had knives and were ready to go.”

A member of the targeted gang got wind of the situation and bolted.

Chapman and his Snug team members rushed over, intervened and diffused the conflict.

“We engaged them,” he says. “One of them had a knife and I said, ‘You’re going to get arrested if you keep up with that.’ Sometimes we utilize a situation like that to have a platform to talk with them. ”

Another melee erupted in July outside the Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts on West 114th Street.

“It was a big brawl,” says one source. “The girls were like 14, 15 years old.”

Tayshana Murphy, 18, was a promising basketball star until she was killed earlier this fall, caught up in the crew wars of New York City.

Tayshana Murphy, 18, was a promising basketball star until she was killed earlier this fall, caught up in the crew wars of New York City. (Kendall Rodriguez)

Africa Owes was arrested for agreeing to carry guns for her boyfriend, Jaquan Layne. Gang members say women are searched less often by the police.f

Africa Owes was arrested for agreeing to carry guns for her boyfriend, Jaquan Layne. Gang members say women are searched less often by the police.f (Steven Hirsch)

(Steven Hirsch)

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