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Warlords? Criminals? I Can't Tell The Difference, Anymore
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1797 Reads
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There's a Latino gang based around 204th street that has supposedly declared a cease fire, a truce brokered by Najee Ali, director of Project Islamic Hope.
Good on ya, Najee. Let's get the gunfire down to a dull roar ...
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On December 15th, Cheryl Green, a 14-year-old black girl, was killed at 206th and Harvard in Torrance. Seems she stepped across one of those invisible gang boundaries and, being the wrong color, was shot for her trouble.
Deemed a hate crime, her murder underscores one of the biggest problems Los Angeles has with its gangs. Like it or not, you can't tell me this shit isn't racially motivated. Pitchess Detention Center? Riots in '92?
Los Angeles has a diversity that doesn't necessarily restrict itself to individual enclaves. Sure, there's K-Town, Little Tokyo, Little Ethiopia, but that's not what I'm talking about. In my mind, at least, those are more ethnic commercial centers and less large chunks of ethnically sequestered communities. Go ahead and debate amongst yourselves if you have to.
Instead we have neighborhoods that, for example, are largely black, then largely Latino, black again, and so on and so forth.
And that's where things get fucked up. People are fighting over neighborhoods. Not countries, not states. City blocks. The area in question here, for example, is less than half a mile on a side.
All right, before I lose my soundbite audience, let me actually get to my point."If there is no truce, we won’t get a rec center. We won’t get the things on our agenda. We are willing to make sacrifices." That's from Jonathan O’Gorman, who the paper is claiming is a 16-year member of the Latino gang, who, supposedly, has the authority and means to broker and enforce a cease fire.
Who is this guy? Che Guevara? Jesus H. goatfucking Christ. Aside from the outrageously small thinking (a rec center?), what does this say about the kind of attitudes on both sides that allows this kind of situation to arise in the first place?
Yes, I get it, they've got guns. They're hurting people. People who are just in the way. They don't have the restrictions that the police have. Making them stop killing people is an official GOOD THING.
But all this essentially boils down to, "If you give us what we want, we'll stop killing you."
These are thugs, not romanticized freedom fighters sitting atop the hill with the sunlight of righteousness pouring out their puckered assholes. These are not people to be negotiated with. They are people to be locked up for a very long time.
And what is this about, "We are willing to make sacrifices"? What, it's a sacrifice to not shoot a 14-year-old girl because she's got the wrong skin pigment on the wrong side of the street?
Here's a newsflash, dipshits. You're fighting these tiny, territorial wars over chunks of dirt too small for anyone but yourselves to even notice. The only reason anyone cares about these little turf wars of yours is that bystanders are getting murdered for being the wrong person in the wrong place.
Gain some fucking perspective. There is much more than that little block you and your circle-jerk cronies are pissing in the corners about. But you can't see it because you're too busy killing bystanders and demanding rec centers.
After all, there's nothing more important than getting that new basketball court, huh? To hell with economic improvement, or educational opportunities. No, a rec center's just what you need to make life better.
I don't have answers. I commend anyone for at least trying to solve the problem. But when things have devolved to the point that a street gang is being negotiated with as though they're a bunch of bandits looting and pillaging the village, something has seriously gone wrong.
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| Posted by: S_Blackmoore on Wednesday, January 17, 2007 - 10:09 AM
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