Gang Activity In West Texas? You’ll Be Surprised Who’s Here.

With crime being well documented in the city of Amarillo, one has to wonder what the epicenter of it is. A lot of it is truthfully just random crimes that are committed by singular individuals.

However, one of the things we have to look at is gang activity in the city. It's not something that gets a whole lot of attention it seems, but it's something that we should all be aware of.

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We dug up the Texas Gang Threat Assessment and took a deeper look into which gang sets are typically found in the Northwest Texas region, which is what we're classified as here in Amarillo. For a lot of us, we know gangs exist, but we don't really know which sets are prominent in the area.

On top of all that, we don't typically know a whole lot about each of these sets, the bad blood between certain sets, etc., but this at least gives us an idea of the ones typically found in the region.

The most significant gangs in this region consist of some you may not even realize exist. There are multiple sets of Crips and Bloods found in the region, and those names are among some of the most recognizable gang sets in the country.

Others that are significant in the region are ones you may not have heard of. These gangs consist of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, Aryan Circle, and the West Texas Tangos.

The ones that really surprised me here was the Aryan gangs. It's not something you hear a lot about, if anything truthfully. The highest number of reports for these Aryan groups come out of Lubbock and Wichita Counties, so they're pretty close to Amarillo. You have to believe they leak into our city as well.

A big reason why you don't really hear about these gangs is because they aren't among the most arrested gang members in the region. That belongs to the Crips, Bloods, and West Texas Tangos. The majority of the arrests for those groups were for violent crimes.

Assaults led the way for arrests among these groups, while the West Texas Tangos were arrested for the highest number of homicides, kidnappings, sexual assaults, and robberies.

85% of the reported arrests in general amongst gangs in the region were for assault, with robbery checking in behind it at 9% when it comes to violent crimes. However, the majority of arrests in general with the gangs were drug-related.

You can find the full study, along with all the other areas of Texas here.