All the street gangs are not homogenously structured with a single leader; the hierarchy stands different in different nationalities. While some have thousands of members for generations with constitutions mirroring municipal codebooks and conducting criminal activity worldwide; some gangs just exist with only a few members.
Their territorial boundaries might be just a block or two. The old and established criminal organizations do follow a structured hierarchy, that can be officially termed as street gang hierarchy structure and below given is the structure of the administrative layers of conventional street gangs –
Leader
The highest position belongs to the leader. The allocation of most rules and assignments are made by this person. The establishment of new rivalries, alliances and new activities are also created by the leader. For this position, prison is one of the inevitable dwelling places and the leaders usually take it for granted for the kind of crimes they have committed prison was their penultimate eventuality.
Committee
After the highest rank of the leaders, it is the committee of leaders who represented the prisoner members as well as the active ones outside the prison. This committee has people most trusted by the leader and is a big stronghold too. It gives out orders to different factions of the gang either outside or inside the prison.
Individual Factions
The third position in order is the individual factions. They all are separate criminal organizations but are many times called together for the common goal of the overall organization. They are mostly located at the street corners and these or the neighbourhood nicknames allocate the separate factions.
Sub Factions
Again there are sub factions within the selected group. This kind of scenario is common with the Disciples, Vice lords and Stones who separate themselves out from generic names. In fact there is an existence of many such separate factions who are part of the original street gang group. The sub-factions have key positions like warlord, enforcer, historian and bail bondsman. Underneath these positions are the ones like lookouts, runners and soldiers. This is the rank and file of each faction or sub-faction and the main body of any given gang is made up of these positions.
Fragmentations
In the sub factions, the Disciples are further broken down into Black Disciples, Gangster Disciples, Black Gangsters, Black Gangster Disciples, Black Souls, Maniac Latin Disciples, YLO Latin Disciples, Satan Disciples and Spanish Gangster Disciples.
For example if a member is from the Disciples Street Gang, he/ she will be listed under Folks Nation. Generically the next designation would be Disciples. Under this the faction has to be listed which will be Spanish Gangster Disciples. The sub-faction will decipher the exact location. So if this member is from the sub-faction situated at 88th and Houston Streets then that area on the street is known as “danger zone”.
This is the structure of Street Gang Hierarchy. Also, know about Wire Gang Hierarchy.