While more deaths in Utah in 2017 are attributable to gang violence than last year, the director of the Salt Lake Area Gang Project said that’s not his biggest end-of-the-year takeaway.
Instead, Lt. Mike Shoenfeld said he’s more worried because recently it seems gang members are younger than they used to be and are notably more violent — even if the violence isn’t always fatal.
“We’ve had some pretty horrific and heinous, egregious crimes committed by gang members over the last year that I think have really shaken our conscience a little bit as a society, because we just weren’t seeing that much violence in the past few years,” Shoenfeld said.