St. Louis CofCC Blog

The L.A. Weekly has this eight-part profile on gang activity in Los Angeles and elsewhere.  Every word is worth reading, but here are some of the points that jumped out at me:

*  Gangs are getting more numerous, more vicious, more violent and more reckless.

*  This is happening in spite of recreation centers and cameras watching everywhere.  Something to keep in mind while reading Mayor Slay’s blog.

*  Hispanic gangs are pushing black gangs out of their “traditional” hoods.  Where they flee to, the gang problems increase there.  And that spread is helped on by popular culture glorifying the gangster existence.

*  There are about 800,000 gang members and 30,000 gangs in 2,500 cities and communities nationwide.  The scary part about that is that those are numbers akin to a legitimate standing army — Just think about how bad it would be if these gangs were just as well-organized as one.  Part of the increasing gang problem is just that — they are getting better organized over long distances.

* A quote:

On New Year’s Eve so much automatic weapons fire pours into Watts’ airspace that LAX air traffic control must divert the flight path of incoming planes. The U.S. military sends its medics to train at local trauma hospitals because the conditions in their trauma units so resemble live warfare.

The latter we knew from Jared Taylor’s Paved With Good Intentions.

* More:

The street lamps were out, and nearly all the windows were dark. I could make out the silhouettes of people hanging out in doorways, and the glowing cherries of their cigarettes. Later, I learned that most residents of Nickerson Gardens and Jordan Downs keep their lights off at night to avoid becoming targets in drive-by shootings.

I don’t think that’s the real reason.  The gangs shoot out the public lights, and prod residents to keep their private ones out, in order to conceal their dope dealing.

Another quote:

The differences between black and Latino gangs are stark. And the black gang members I spoke with readily admit that the difference is fatal. Damien Hartfield, the former Bounty Hunter, explained, “Blacks do what they want. When Latinos go gangbanging they have a solid plan. Blacks don’t go to war like that. It’s spontaneous. Something just happens. Latinos make a call, make a plan. They have a structure.”

Indicative of inherent differences in intelligence thereof.  That is why the Hispanic gangs will eventually defeat the black ones, as this article states that gangsters of both races admit.  The old time southern seggy tactics that would work to stop black gangs would not work with Hispanics.

*  The U.S. Justice Department, in the 80s and early 90s, were pursuing black gangs and crack cocaine, while ignoring the growing influence of Hispanic gangs and their contraband, drugs and otherwise.  The reason for that is that the White House during those years was run by “conservative” and vehemently pro-Hispanic Republicans;  forget not Reagan’s 1986 amnesty.

*  Maybe people like Calhoun and Wallace were onto something:

Families like Daisy’s have nowhere to turn. Though the projects are federal property, the Bounty Hunter Bloods and Grape Street Crips don’t just live there, they also run them.

“If you want to live in Jordan Downs you do not ask the housing authority or the city for permission, you ask the Grape Street gang,” says civil rights attorney Connie Rice. “When Latino families call the housing authorities to complain, the staff, the housing authorities call the Grape Street Crips.”

Maybe one shouldn’t say “though the projects are Federal property,” it’s “because” they are Federal property.  Would you expect the same Federal government that can’t subdue Mesopotamia because it’s obsessed with “diversity” and “sensitivity toward Muslims” to do any better with Baghdad-style L.A. housing projects?

So much for Federal supremacy.

Father Boyle, who has watched L.A.’s gangs from the street for 25 years, insists that legal solutions for the “gang problem” miss the point. The key to understanding what we’re really facing, he says, is to be honest about the depth of despair in L.A.’s neighborhoods. “Tough laws are not going to work for kids that don’t believe they have a future. You cannot terrorize a kid into caring. It’s bad math. It won’t work; it has never worked. And when his day is the bleakest, a gangbanger is going to get a gun and go look for his enemy and hope to die.”

With all due repsect, Father, you can’t “compassion” a “kid into caring,” either.  The goal isn’t “caring.”  The Romans had a phrase:  Oderint dum Metuant.  The best you can do is, using official means, “terrorize” them into behaving.  That’s how the gangs do it, and that’s how many governments used to do it until the mid-1960s.

I asked De’Andre Perry what he’d do if someone gave him a one-way ticket out of Watts and enough money to start a new life. He paused and looked around at the desolate buildings. “I am not going to die for these bricks,” he said. But the gang was more state-of-mind than geography. “Wherever you put me I am still going to be me. I am still going to have Bounty Hunters on my arm, embedded in my brain. Wherever you put me I am going to be hood. Wherever I am at, I am going to make it my hood.”

Nature beats nurture.  You can take the boy out of the hood, but you can’t take the hood out of the boy.