You know that gang violence is getting bad when the media will actually come out with statements like this:
Cheryl's shooting - allegedly by two 204th Street gang members as she and friends talked on a street in broad daylight - underscored a new reality: that since the mid-1990s, according to the L.A. County Human Relations Commission, Latino gangs have become the region's leading perpetrators of violent hate crimes.
The worst part is that this will probably actually surprise a lot of people because of the indoctrination that many have had that white people are the racists of America. While there is racism everywhere, it comes in many different forms, though one thing this article should make clear is that racist violence is not the monopoly of any race by any stretch of the imagination. This news also brings to mind the anti-Korean violence that was perpetrated by many rioting blacks during the Rodney King race riot in 1992.
The reason that this sort of thing is becoming more common and worse as time goes on is that there is a lot of intellectual dishonesty about racism. The day that racism is treated as a human problem, not a white problem, is the day that meaningful gains against racism in general might be possible.
In 1997, police, the county Human Relations Commission and neighbors organized to fight the gang and the blight.
The city added bulletproof streetlight covers. Residents repaired holes in fences - escape routes for gang members. Girl Scouts, accompanied by officers, picked up trash and painted over graffiti. More than 100 gang members - black and Latino - were sent to jail for parole or probation violations. Police patrols increased. Violence fell.
But the campaign dissipated, and gang members slowly returned. By 1999, the Latino-on-black violence resumed.
Notice the niceties that were promoted here. This sort of campaign is doomed by design because it is a feel-good campaign that ignores a fundamental truth about violent crime. A culture of security will get rid of violent crime, not social programs or neighborhood cleanups. Armed citizens, a regular police presence that can and will respond with force against gang members, and things like that will reduce the crime rate.
The problem with the left-wing solutions that focus on poverty is that they never ask why the people there are poor to begin with. No small part of the reason is that violent crime, allowed to fester, has driven away economic investment and opportunity. Small businesses have too much to lose to set up shop in de facto war zones. If you want to break the poverty-violence cycle, the only solution is the use of coercion and force to stop the crime. That is the only way that private citizens can be encouraged to bring business back to the community and get the employment back up.
The one thing that is repeatedly brought up in the article that doesn't get the attention that it deserves is the role of the drug trade in all of this. The gangs are able to survive and thrive because of the money they make on it. With the support of the Mexican Mafia, it is actually possible for them to benefit, not be harmed, by increased enforcement of the drug laws that drives the value of drugs through the roof. The only solution is full decriminalization. That is the only way to launch a fundamental attack on the revenue of many of these groups and force them to do honest work.
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