What’s in a color? Maybe nothing


Durham police Sgt. Howard Alexander talked a lot about gang clothes and signs during the session on Latino gangs at the Aycock Recreation Complex on Wednesday. He also put to rest a myth about colors: the meaning of the white T-shirt.

Plain white T-shirts became controversial in Henderson in April 2003 when Henderson Middle School Principal Victor Fenner banned the shirts. He said he was responding to parents’ warnings that the shirts were a gang uniform.

City Council member Mary Emma Evans, from the time she joined the Clean Up Henderson Committee in the spring of 2003, complained about the singling out of white T-shirts. She denied that the shirts meant anything; they were just cheap and convenient.

When the Rev. Harold Harris suggested last year that participants in the Clean Up Henderson Children’s Crusade wear blue jeans and white T-shirts, Evans half-seriously warned him that he was asking for trouble with the white T-shirts because so many people thought they had gang significance.

Those people are wrong, Alexander said Wednesday.

“Let’s talk about the white T-shirts,” the gang expert said. “They mean absolutely nothing.”

Speaking of white, Alexander also had advice for law officers trying to stop drug shipments.

The advice might have been a bit surprising, coming at a meeting on Latino gangs in a city where two of the biggest cocaine seizures in Vance County history were made in recent weeks after traffic stops of Hispanic men on Interstate 85.

The best way to move drugs is with a middle-age white couple in a minivan, Alexander said, because those are the people whom police officers are least likely to suspect. Thus, those are the people officers should suspect.

“Don’t look for the profile,” Alexander told fellow law officers.