The study drew on a community ecology approach to help explain the tensions that develop, especially when community members vary in their desires and abilities to control gang-related activities. It highlights some of the ways in which gender, age, education, traditionalism, and level of acculturation may help explain variation in the type and strength of private, parochial and public social control within a community. The article describes the difficulties facing community residents when they try to garner political and economic resources from outside their communities. It is, perhaps, to those political and economic linkages and disconnections that gang researchers and others concerned with crime in poor urban communities should look next. The article urges further research also into the perspectives of adults living and working with the youths. Many adults are former gang members and can shed light on historical shifts in the relationship between the gang, the family and the neighborhood. Notes, references