I am a gang member. In my neighborhood it seems everyone is. I can't remember when I wasn't in a gang. I'm not bragging or anything; that's just the way it is in my neighborhood.
My gang controls a certain territory. I don't know how it came to be our territory; I think we sort of conquered it. Gang wars do happen. Like if another gang challenges us in our territory, or if we need to sell more stuff or need something else in another gang's territory, or if one of our members is attacked or killed. Usually we have no choice.
Fortunately, we seem to be the best armed gang in the neighborhood. Usually that's enough, but not always. Sometimes other gangs get so fed up with us that our superiority in weapons turns out to be a hindrance. So it goes. We lose gang wars occasionally, but our overall dominance usually remains. That's what counts.
The decision to go to war is made by our gang leaders. Even if we disagree with the decision, gang loyalty prevails. That loyalty is crucial to the survival of our gang.
Most of what you've heard about gangs is actually true. Like we do have gang colors. They mark our territory but also help create a sense of pride among our members. Also, there seems to be an agreement between the gangs that no one uses the same colors. It works pretty well.
Disloyalty is not tolerated. Sometimes just raising questions can lead to harsh treatment. Sounds tough, but it's necessary. It's usually the gangs that are tight that dominate the neighborhood.
And it's almost impossible to leave the gang. I don't know anyone who got out who wasn't forced by circumstances to join another gang. That's life in the neighborhood.
The only thing most people have wrong about gangs is the terminology. Even though we sometimes use the phrase "presentation of colors," our gang colors are called "flags." Gang loyalty we call "patriotism." Gang membership is "citizenship." My neighborhood? Planet Earth. My gang? The United States of America.
This Gil Cedillo is really a miserable little person. Over at Nuestra Voice you can hear him with LA radio DJ Mario Solis Marich answering questions about that ridiculous attack mailer on Emanuel Pleitez using Facebook photos to build a narrative of Pleitez as a scary drunken gang-lover who parties with white women. In the transcript, you'll notice Cedillo's immediate reaction to bringing up Pleitez' name:
SOLIS MARICH: There was some controversy over the past 2 weeks when your campaign decided to do a negative attack piece on newcomer Emanuel Pleitez. Many people who observe campaigns including myself took that as a sign that the young candidate was really eating into your base.
CEDILLO: Well, one we're not sure we'd call it negative unless he calls it negative, the fact that he posted these photos on his Facebook.
Two, we recognize what his roll is in this campaign, to suppress the vote and to try to take away votes and we think the electorate has the right to know all the information, information that he's made public, about the candidates. We put the record out there and let people decide if they want to elect someone who has 25 years of effective leadership or if they want to elect somebody who they may not have full confidence in.
So in other words, anyone who participates in a campaign to try and get elected is automatically "suppressing votes," presumably votes from Gil Cedillo. The backstory here is that Parke Skelton, Judy Chu's campaign manager, and Eric Hacopian, Pleitez' top strategist, have worked together on other campaigns, which is to be expected from two Democratic consultants in LA. Off of that thin reed Cedillo spins a wide-ranging conspiracy theory that Emanuel Pleitez swooped into the race to suppress votes from the naturally chosen "one" candidate who is supposed to win the seat. Now, if you were of a conspiratorial nature, you could say the exact same thing about Betty Tom Chu, the Republican Monterey Park City Councilwoman who entered the race late and will undoubtedly cause some ballot confusion given the closeness of names between her and Judy Chu. But it's this sense of entitlement on the part of Cedillo, this idea that he deserves that Congressional seat and no Hispanic should dare "suppress the vote" by, you know, running against him, that stands out here. This is typical sleazeball identity politics, the idea that any Hispanic must vote for a Hispanic, and multiple Hispanics in the field dilute the strength of the vote, and they should line up and wait their turn behind the self-anointed savior.
Now, here's the rest of the interview, where Cedillo becomes increasingly ridiculous:
The Stacy Peralta-directed documentary Crips And Bloods: Made In America looks at the history of gangs in South Los Angeles over the last 50 years, and the violent civil war on the streets that has raged for the past 30, killing as many as 15,000 residents, three times as many as in the Unionist/Catholic war in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 80s. Anywhere else in the world, UN peace negotiators would be brought in and Security Council resolutions passed to stop the violence. In South Central, the battles continue, and children growing up among the chaos, according to a recent RAND Corporation study, have higher rates of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) than children growing up in Baghdad.
One of the more amazing things about the documentary is that, despite unparalleled access to the gang-bangers surviving on the streets over the past 30 years, there is precious little about the actual feud between the Crips and Bloods. Most of the history of why they fight and why they kill has been lost in the minds of the young leaders on both sides who suffered an early death. Crips and Bloods shoot and get shot largely because they are supposed to oppose one another. Wearing the wrong colors in the wrong neighborhood is a death sentence, but it's unclear why. At one point, one of the original gang leaders, Masuka, says that "one of the ways the oppressor state functions is by turning the subjects against one another."
The story traces gang culture from the earliest days, through the Watts riots of 1965, the Black Power movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the rise of the Crips and Bloods, as South Los Angeles fell into a self-perpetuating cycle of decay and despair. After the major factory jobs left in the early 1960s, residents were without opportunity and without hope. Crack cocaine and other drugs eventually became the only economic salvation. And it led to violence and warfare in the streets.
The most revealing sequence in the film comes when every current gang member is asked about their childhood, and they all - to a man - respond that they were products of a broken home, without fathers, with the family members who raised them selling drugs out of the house, caught at an early age without positive role models or figures to enable their own empowerment. Those living in South LA with strong family units had mothers and fathers who kept them off the streets and away from the gangs. Those without had little hope. And this is a very direct consequence of an insane prison policy that locks up nonviolent offenders, particularly in the black community, at absurdly high rates. One out of every four black men will be imprisoned at some point in his life, and particularly in California, the inability of the system to handle all the warehousing of inmates leads to a lack of rehabilitation and an expanded recidivism rate. In fact, the explosion of gang activity inside the prisons ensures an increase outside the jail. This revolving door in and out of prison rips apart families and leads to a sustained cycle of gang activity and violence. The "war on drugs" is unquestionably a war on people of color and the lower classes.
That is the faillure we are talking about when we look at California prison policy, a failure that will now lead to mass release in the absence of leadership in Sacramento. Policymakers would rather lock away the problem instead of facing the terrible blight in the black community. Indeed, they have locked up these people inside AND outside of prison, confining them to the few miles in South Central that is their turf; there are stories in the film of young gang members who have spent their entire lives in a 10-block radius. The border between South Central and suburbs like Lynwood and South Gate has been a virtual pen for black youth for 50 years, with anyone crossing the border risking a beating or even their lives. We built communities that are prisons, through restrictive housing covenants and police directives to "maintain order". This is what created gang life, out of mutual protection from whites. And what now sustains it is not only the locking up of parents from sons and daughters, not only the locking up of blacks inside ghettos and away from opportunity, but the locking up of minds, the locking in of self-loathing and the snuffing out of the flame of hope.
While South LA is now as Latino as it is black, the difficulties for residents and the ravages of gang life remain. While violent crime has decreased since 1992 it remains unspeakably high. As we look at prison policy in California, and in particular the efforts by elites in Sacramento to block any meaningful reform, despite bending over backwards from federal receivers to work out agreements that allow for inmates to retain their Constitutional rights to be free from cruel and unusual punishment, we need to think about the Crips and the Bloods, about why they persist, about why they fight, and about why we made them.
Yesterday I spent some time at an often contentious debate in the race for the 2nd District of the LA County Board of Supervisors. The two most high-profile candidates for the seat, State Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas and former LAPD Chief and current City Councilman Bernard Parks, squared off in a pretty lively debate which featured a lot of sniping and criticism.
Why the heated exchanges in a county Board of Supervisors race? Why is a state Senator and a very highly recognized City Councilman running in this race? Why is Sheila Kuehl planning to run for the Board of Supes when Zev Yaroslavsky's term is up in the near future?
Because these are unbelievably powerful positions.
Its time for the annual march on Fort Benning, and great strides have been made by SOAW. Two hundred three congressmen voted to stop funding to the School of Assassins, a fifth country announced its military will discontinue involvement with the school, and congress voted to release the names of the 2005 and 2006 graduating class. But this progress may be deceiving. The last year's Foreign Operations bill included $16.2 million to fund International Law Enforcement Academies (ILEAs). These facilities including ILEA-South in El Salvador which was established to deal with the prolific gang violence and instability in Central America. Unfortunately, reports about human rights violations from authorities continue to come from El Salvador.
I was rendered almost ill by John Edwards' stance in the debate against the decriminalization of marijuana because "it would send the wrong signal to young people." Chris Dodd made a strong response that cut to the heart of our failed prison policy.
DODD: Can I respond, I mean just why I think it ought to be? We're locking up too many people in our system here today. We've got mandatory minimum sentences that are filling our jails with people who don't belong there. My idea is to decriminalize this, reduce that problem here. We've gone from 800,000 to 2 million people in our penal institutions in this country. We've go to get a lot smarter about this issue than we are, and as president, I'd try and achieve that.
This, of course, is most acute in California, where we're waiting for the other shoe to drop on a federal court order that could potentially force the release of thousands of prisoners due to overcrowding. State Sen. Gloria Romero held her ground and didn't allow the usual spate of tougher sentencing bills to pass the Legislature this year. So once again, George and Sharon Runner will go to the ballot with a punitive measure designed to make themselves look tough while further battering a crippled prison system.
A year after bringing to California Jessica's Law, the crackdown on sex offenders, the husband-and-wife team of state Sen. George Runner and Assemblywoman Sharon Runner announced Monday a new initiative that would target gang members for tougher prosecution and dedicate nearly $1 billion annually to enforcement and intervention.
The Republican legislators from Lancaster hope to collect enough signatures to qualify the measure for the November 2008 ballot, and they have the backing of the father of the state's three-strikes law as well as law enforcement officials, including Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca.
The Legislature has already rejected this bill, and it would again constrain the state budget with another walled-off mandate while doing nothing to address the major crisis in overcrowding. It's feel-good nonsense for "tough-on-crime" advocates.
By the way, let's see how the last initiative the Runners promoted, Jessica's Law, is working out:
Today, the FBI confirmed what CA AG Jerry Brown said in May, Irvine is one safe city. In fact, it's the safest in the nation:
For the third year running, Irvine tops all large cities in the nation with the lowest incidence of violent crime after posting a nearly 17 percent drop in 2006, according to a report by the FBI. Reported violent crimes for the city – which include homicide, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault – fell from a total of 151 in 2005 to 126 in 2006, for a rate of 67 per 100,000 in the preliminary posting of the 2006 FBI Annual Uniform Crime Report. (OC Reg 6/5/07)
Last time, I talked about the importance of parks and recreation. And of course, economic factors surely weigh into the amount of crime. Given that Irvine has a pretty high per capita income, it's not surprising to see a low rate of crime. But Irvine actually does better than similarly sized cities with higher per capita income. Take that Sunnyvale! (Ok...Sunnyvale is #2 on the AG safe city list, but that's one slot below #1).
But something else is also at play here, that is the role of the city's various crime prevention programs. Irvine has implemented geographic policing, neighborhood watch programs, and Internet reporting. Follow me over the flip for more..
I don't write a lot about Mayor Villaraigosa; I don't live in the city, and I get the sense that Antonio wants everyone to know he's there without necessarily knowing what he does, which makes it frustrating to try to gauge. But this is an interesting article about the promise that he had matched with the difficult reality of this last year. His eye appears to be off the ball of improving the lives of Los Angelenos, and toward the crystal goblet of higher office, and it shows in the work he's done. He's very active in pressing flesh (it's almost a permanent campaign) and tackling high-profile projects like the school takeover and LA Live development downtown. But substantively, I think this list of accomplishments are a little thin.
Villaraigosa and his senior aides acknowledge the recent disappointments but prefer to see them as minor bumps overshadowed by the mayor's accomplishments on education, public safety, mass transit, the environment and city budgeting.
They say, for example, that he deserves credit for balancing the city's books and dramatically reducing a $295-million structural deficit — by more than $200 million — amid declining revenues.
They also speak of his successful effort to win an increase in trash collection fees to hire 1,000 additional police officers, saying the city is well on its way to meeting the goal as the rate of violent crime — including gang homicides — drops.
They single out his efforts this year to tackle gang crime by devoting more money to suppression and prevention programs.
And they point to Villaraigosa's securing billions of dollars in state bond money for mass transit projects — including carpool lanes on the 405 Freeway — and an aggressive expansion of the Department of Water and Power's use of alternative energy sources to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
A lot less than meets the eye here. There's still a deficit. The reports on gang violence and police protection has been tempered by the MacArthur Park riot and the fact that LA County still has 120,000 gang members. I resent the focus on carpool lanes on the 405, and mass transit projects are actually stagnating, plus MTA had to raise its fees last week.
Villaraigosa is succeeding in the sense of setting himself up for the Governor's mansion by taking on the big issues even if he doesn't really move on them. I don't know if residents of the city will look back fondly on this time, however, thinking they had a champion for them at City Hall. I'd welcome another perspective, however.
