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Title: Gang mayhem grips LA
Source:
The Guardian (UK)
URL Source: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2036580,00.html
Published: Mar 18, 2007
Author: staff
Post Date: 2007-03-18 14:40:36 by mirage
Keywords: None
Views: 425
Comments: 33
A bloody conflict between Hispanic and black gangs is spreading across Los Angeles. Hundreds are dying as whole districts face the threat of ethnic cleansing. Paul Harris reports from the epicentre of America's new urban warfare Sunday March 18, 2007 The Observer Father Greg Boyle keeps a grim count of the young gang members he has buried. Number 151 was Jonathan Hurtado, 18 - fresh out of jail. Now the kindly, bearded Jesuit mourns him. 'The day he got out I found him a job. He never missed a day. He was doing really well,' Boyle says. But Hurtado made a mistake: he went back to his old neighbourhood in east Los Angeles. While sitting in a park, Hurtado was approached by a man on a bike who said to him: 'Hey, homie, what's up?' He then shot Hurtado four times. 'You can't come back. Not even for a visit,' says Boyle, who has worked for two decades against LA's gang culture. Boyle's Los Angeles, where daily slaughter is a grim reality, is a world away from the glamorous Hollywood hills, Malibu beaches and Sunset Strip - the celebrity-drenched city that David Beckham and Posh Spice will soon make their home. Boyle's Los Angeles is where an estimated 120,000 gang members across five counties battle over turf, pride and drugs. It is a city of violence as a new race war escalates between new Hispanic gangs and older black groups, each trying to ethnically cleanse the other. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who has referred to his city as 'the gang capital of America', has launched a crackdown on the new threat. The latest front is the tiny strip of turf known as Harbor Gateway, a nest of streets between malls and office blocks. It was here, just before Christmas, that Cheryl Green, a 14-year-old fond of junk food and television, died. At school she had just written a poem beginning: 'I am black and beautiful. I wonder how I shall live in the future.' She never found out. As she stood on a corner talking with friends, two Hispanic members of the neighbourhood's notorious 204th Street gang walked up and opened fire, killing Green and wounding three others. They were targeted because they were black. Traditionally the outside view of LA gangs has been of black youths like the Bloods and the Crips and their countless subsets. It focused on the streets of Compton and South-Central and the culture of gangsta rap. But Hispanic gangs are in the ascendant, spreading across America. They have names such as Mara Salvatrucha, La Mirada Locos and Barrio Van Nuys, and now the 204th Street gang - who made it clear that they will kill innocent girls to force black families off their turf. Last year there were 269 gang-related killings in LA. Gang-related crime leaped 15.7 per cent last year, as most other types of crime fell. Hate crimes against black people have surged. With a rapidly growing Hispanic population, LA's gang culture is shifting. It means that being black in the wrong neighbourhood can get you killed. Green's murder was the latest in a line of killings by the 204th Street gang. In 1997, 11-year-old Marquis Wilbert was killed on his bike. In 2001, Robert Hightower, 19, was killed. In 2003, Eric Butler, 39, was shot dead trying to protect his daughter from being harassed. There are streets that blacks have been forbidden to cross. Green's death brought the gang war between 'brown and black' to public awareness. Next week a summit will be held called the Black and Brown Strategy Meeting which aims to head off a race war. 'All of the signs are there that a racial war is going to explode in this city,' says Khalid Shah, director of Stop the Violence, one of the groups organising the meeting. Memories of the 1992 Rodney King riots, which claimed 53 lives, remain fresh, but Shah believes that worse is ahead. 'It will be 10 times bigger than what happened after King. You are looking at an event which could not only paralyse an entire city but an entire state,' he warns. Green's death sparked Villaraigosa's crackdown. The police took the unprecedented step of publishing a list of the 11 worst gangs, including 204th Street. They vowed to go after them with police, FBI agents and injunctions to prevent members meeting. An extra 50 police were assigned to anti-gang duties in San Fernando Valley. In south LA, a team of 120 detectives and 10 FBI agents has been set up. An extra 18 officers have been put into Harbor Gateway. But Angelenos have seen it all before. The city's history is littered with anti-gang initiatives, and what the new effort shows is just how widespread the gangs have become. They have spread into the San Fernando Valley, an area previously famed for suburban prosperity. Last year one area of the north Valley saw a 160 per cent rise in gang crime. Publishing the 'hit list' could backfire. In the warped gang sub-culture, being on the list is a badge of pride. The lesson of the 204th Street gang seems apt. They number only a few dozen members in a tiny strip of city that was open fields half a century ago, but killing blacks has propelled them from obscurity to enviable notoriety. 'Putting out a list was a bad idea. Groups that don't make the list will want to be on it. They don't exactly think rationally,' said Alex Alonso, a gang historian who has testified in more than 100 court cases. Yet there is hope. Alfonso 'Chino' Visuet, 23, was sucked into the gang life as a teenager. There was the lure of excitement and riches, the push of a difficult home life. 'People who join a gang are always running away from something. They flee to the gang,' Visuet says. Visuet is not running any more. He works for Father Boyle's Homeboy Industries http://(homeboy-industries.org), a project that helps people leave gang life. It provides jobs, an education, pays to have gang tattoos removed and gives counselling. It aims to remove the circumstances that lead to crime: poverty, abuse and unemployment. It is staffed almost entirely by former gang members and has spun off a bakery, a silk-screen printers and a restaurant. 'You have to address the lethal absence of hope. I have never seen a hopeful person join a gang,' Boyle says. It worked for Visuet. He starts college this autumn and wants to be a probation officer. 'I was on the edge of doing something that would ruin my life, either by doing violence or having it done to me. That's over now,' he says. For the moment it is organisations like Homeboy Industries that pick up the slack. Father Boyle has a catchphrase: 'Nothing stops a bullet like a job.' But that can be a hard message to get across in a city whose political classes see gangs as primarily a police issue. That is not the way it is on the street. Visuet despairs at the conflict. 'A brown gang member now just sees a black gang member. What they don't see is how that person comes from the same place they do. They might have a mother who is an alcoholic as well or a father who beats on them. They have the same story,' he says. Boyle and others have mixed feelings about the crackdown. The road to LA's problems is littered with failed plans and policing, and incompetence. Over the past decade the main anti-gang scheme, LA Bridges, has spent more than $100m yet keeps no record of whether those it helps leave gang life or return to it. Then there is political scheming. The list of 11 gangs, critics say, was drawn up deliberately to present a 'balance' by covering the whole city. Politicians use the presence of a high-profile gang to act tough on law and order and police chiefs use it as a way of upping manpower. 'It is a ridiculous list,' says Alonso. LA is a city of two worlds - Hollywood and gangs. On a two-lane highway that roars through the middle of Harbor Gateway, a few hundred yards from where Cheryl Green was gunned down, there is a billboard for a new TV show called Sons of Hollywood. It shows three rich young men against a backdrop of palm trees. It claims to be a 'reality' show, but for most of the impoverished, racially torn citizens it is nothing more than a fantasy.
Poster Comment: Who will be the first "civil rights leader" to decry the brown-vs-black racism?
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#1. To: mirage (#0)
Visuet despairs at the conflict. 'A brown gang member now just sees a black gang member. What they don't see is how that person comes from the same place they do. They might have a mother who is an alcoholic as well or a father who beats on them. They have the same story,' he says. I'm surprised they haven't all been recruited by the military.
"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Ephesians 6:12 KJV
Who says they haven't been approached? Iraqis are getting tired of the gang graffiti over there. Who would have thought that the Latin Kings would ever have a base in the Middle East?
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Oh, I missed that news coverage.
"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Ephesians 6:12 KJV
Check this Wikipedia Article for details.
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The Ugly American, updated.
"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Ephesians 6:12 KJV
Maybe they should just give them more weapons and ammo. With no, or a crappy, education, no, or a crappy job, with no, or a crappy father, what do we expect?
Clearly we need to spend billions more on social programs. They've been so successful so far!
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Build a fence around the mess, toss in an unlimited supply of drugs and AKs, then withdraw the decent folks. Lets see if Darwin was right.
Jews and their pets - click me
Yep. The gang-bangers do better wars than does fedgov.
With AKs all they do is waste ammo. Give them 12 guage pumps with 00 buckshot.
There are streets that blacks have been forbidden to cross.
#2. To: robin (#1)
I'm surprised they haven't all been recruited by the military.
#3. To: mirage (#2)
Iraqis are getting tired of the gang graffiti over there. Who would have thought that the Latin Kings would ever have a base in the Middle East?
#4. To: robin (#3)
#5. To: mirage (#4)
#6. To: mirage (#0)
#7. To: lodwick (#6)
With no, or a crappy, education, no, or a crappy job, with no, or a crappy father, what do we expect?
#8. To: mirage (#0)
#9. To: mirage (#7)
Clearly we need to spend billions more on social programs. They've been so successful so far!
#10. To: Jethro Tull (#8)
A new truth movement friendly digg type site: Zlonk it!
#11. To: lodwick (#9)
Comedians have been saying for years we should enlist them to fight our wars for us. Perhaps its time we listen to them?
The gang-bangers do better wars than does fedgov.
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#12. To: Critter (#10)
that works for me
Jews and their pets - click me
#13. To: mirage (#0)
Here's the real headline: "Hispanics, blacks, murder, 'ethnically cleanse' each other"
"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." -- Marshall McLuhan, after Alexander Pope and William Blake.
#14. To: YertleTurtle (#13)
From the LAPD website on gangs: Not all gang members are obvious in their dress or manner. Asian gangs, for example, are not immediately recognizable by their attire. Also, they may not display gang characteristics while in school. They are respectful to staff, do not disrupt activities, do not drop out of school and maintain their grades. In such cases, gang affiliation is often not known until a criminal incident occurs.
"Hispanics, blacks, murder, 'ethnically cleanse' each other"
#15. To: mirage (#11)
And when the legions come home??
Comedians have been saying for years we should enlist them to fight our wars for us.
Nullus vir bonus bellum cupit.
#16. To: mirage. all (#11)
Perhaps we should elect comedians as president - even the dopiest ones have more sense than the current joke.
Perhaps its time we listen to them?
#17. To: randge (#15)
Why bring them home? They seem to like it there -- and they've already claimed turf. Why not let them keep it?
And when the legions come home??
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#18. To: mirage, Christine, Brian S, Honway, Robin, Aristeides, Red Jones, Diana, Kamala, All (#0)
Oh-no! "Hate Crimes!" There should be a law, ya know?
#19. To: mirage (#0)
To paraphrase Jack Nicholson" "Decent people shouldn't live in Los Angeles."
Remember...G-d saved more animals than people on the ark. www.siameserescue.org
#20. To: mirage (#17)
Idea man. There are neo-con think tanks that you should apply to. They need someone that can think outside the box - they're not doing so hot these days. Perhaps you have other fearsome & bloody-minded imperial notions that you could sell them on.
Nullus vir bonus bellum cupit.
#21. To: mirage, robin (#0)
Putting aside the PC "we're all the same" nonsense for a moment, when I still lived in TX I got the sense the Mexicans were meaner than the blacks. And they had this attitude that they were now living there, and the gringo should leave. That sounds bad though, I've never even been to CA and don't think I'd want to go anywhere near L.A.
Boyle's Los Angeles is where an estimated 120,000 gang members across five counties battle over turf, pride and drugs. It is a city of violence as a new race war escalates between new Hispanic gangs and older black groups, each trying to ethnically cleanse the other.
#22. To: SKYDRIFTER (#18)
Well since no white people are involved it will be looked at as a social problem that can be fixed with well-intentioned programs that will only continue to waste money and breed more of the same.
Oh-no! "Hate Crimes!"
#23. To: Illegal Aliens and their deluded supporters are destroying what's left of this country (#0)
From: The New American | Date: February 9, 2004 | More results for: LA gangs illegal aliens Although all illegal aliens are, by definition, criminals--they have violated our immigration laws--most do not come here with the intention of engaging in a life of street crime. Many violent foreign criminals, however, come to America precisely because it is considered a rich, soft target. "Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens," writes Heather MacDonald, a reporter for the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. "Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status." MacDonald's in-depth expose in the January 14 City, Journal, entitled "The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave," notes: "In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony. Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is he who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD's rule against enforcing immigration law." How can this be? MacDonald explains: "The LAPD's ban on immigration enforcement mirrors bans in immigrant-saturated cities around the country, from New York and Chicago to Sail Diego, Austin, and Houston. These 'sanctuary, policies' generally prohibit city employees, including the cops, from reporting immigration violations to federal authorities." However, federal authorities still do arrest and deport thousands of these felons every year, something they will not be able to do, except with great difficulty, once these criminal aliens receive legal status under President Bush's proposed plan. Once they receive citizenship, they definitely cannot be deported. MacDonald turned up some additional eye-openers for the misty-eyed open border advocates. She reports: * In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens. * A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California are illegal aliens. * The leadership of the Columbia Lil' Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.'s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, according to authorities. Illegal alien crime wave.(Insider Report)
Jews and their pets - click me
#24. To: randge (#20)
Nonsense. I just can't abide gangbangers of any stripe and would love to be rid of them. A favorite idea is that gangbanger supporters (and illegal alien supporters) should be delivered two dozen to care for. Draconian, yes, but would solve the problem permanently.
Perhaps you have other fearsome & bloody-minded imperial notions that you could sell them on.
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#25. To: mirage, Jethro Tull (#0)
If Jose will just target whitey instead of blackie, the media coverage will take on an entirely different tone. The press is all aflutter simply because blacks are being killed by non-blacks; blacks killing blacks never elicted the same concern. What's worse in this case is that Jose can't be guilt-tripped like whitey. There's no money in it. Jose has a clear sense of his self-interest, has a strong sense of peoplehood, and can't be talked into disbelieving the evidence of his eyes. Despite all the press coverage, blacks remain more likely to target Hispanics for violence than the reverse. Can't say I have a dog in this fight, but my money's on Jose.
'A brown gang member now just sees a black gang member. What they don't see is how that person comes from the same place they do. They might have a mother who is an alcoholic as well or a father who beats on them. They have the same story,'
If you take the red pill, does Big Pharma still win?
#26. To: Tauzero (#25)
Jose' has an inexhaustible source of additional footsoldiers for his fight. My money is on him in this fight.
Can't say I have a dog in this fight, but my money's on Jose.
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#27. To: Tauzero (#25)
And the system can't take anything away from Jose. They live is slums, albeit better than Mexico City. I pray for a double, fatal, knockout.
Jews and their pets - click me
#28. To: mirage (#24)
You have a very fruitful imagination.
Nullus vir bonus bellum cupit.
#29. To: randge (#28)
Thank you.
You have a very fruitful imagination.
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#30. To: mirage (#0)
I just reviewed a compilation list of crime statistics, looking for trends in Los Angeles. It appears that LA has a lower crime rate than most major US cities. I didn't review all of the surrounding areas, but it seems that this story may be a bit hyped.
It is not a Justice System. It is just a system.
#31. To: robin (#1)
There are many Chicago gang members in Iraq. The gangs want training in using heavy weaponry, explosives, etc. The nuttiest thing is that gangs are starting to take over small towns in the midwest. They make younger members move to Omaha or whatever, start dealing drugs, recruiting new members, and if there are any problems, the older guys show up en masse and take out the competition, then go back to LA. There are a lot of towns in Indiana, Ohio, Iowa and Missouri that are trying to figure out how to get rid of these clowns.
I'm surprised they haven't all been recruited by the military.
#32. To: Mekons4 (#31)
There is only one way.
Missouri that are trying to figure out how to get rid of these clowns.
#33. To: bluedogtxn (#30)
Its not hyped. The reported crime rate is pretty low *aside from the gang warfare* down there. Keep in mind that LA has about a million illegals in it and they don't report crimes.
it seems that this story may be a bit hyped.
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