L.A. Gangs: Nine Miles and Spreading

More codeless, arbitrary and brutal than ever... and coming to a neighborhood near you

Comments (0) By Peter Landesman Wednesday, Dec 12 2007

...continued from page 8

Lieutenant Sullivan, the intelligence analyst for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, has started to track a demoralizing parallel between the way street gangs are changing in the United States and the inception of home-grown terror cells in Pakistan and the United Kingdom, as well as child soldiers in Africa. “There is debate as to whether gang members are child soldiers because they are not in a declared war. But I think functionally it is the same thing. Whether you declare war or not, we are in a societal conflict.”

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.”

Demond Whiting, who was shot in the back and is now paralyzed

Blunt object: A Grape Street Crip from Jordan Downs enjoys a quiet moment.

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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.”

I asked Andre the same thing.

“You can remove your tattoos, disassociate yourself,” he replied. “But the only thing that everybody knows about you is you are from Bounty Hunters. And the only way out of it is just death.”