Gang series: Part I

For leaders of the Mexican Mafia, “stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” According to this recent LA Times article, much of the gang violence in L.A. starts behind bars – even if prisons are hundreds of miles away. The emphasis here is not so much on the fights and altercations between inmates and rival gang members, but on the orders issued by imprisoned gang leaders.

On the street is where these edicts are enacted, where battles for drugs, money, resources and territory meet concrete with blood. The latest of these calls to battle?

Ethnic cleansing.

Under orders from imprisoned leaders of the Mexican Mafia (La Eme), Florencia 13 (F 13s) gang members allegedly attempted to “cleanse” their neighborhood of rival black gangs. But so much for getting the ‘bad’ guys – or other bad guys, I should say. It turns out that the numerous assaults and murders “extended to innocent citizens who ended up being shot simply because of the color of their skin,” said U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O’Brien.

But there were some exceptions to this rule – that is, when money is involved. Latino gangs allegedly sold large amounts of drugs and sometimes guns to blacks, including Crips gang members. At any rate, near the end of October, 102 people – mostly members of Florencia 13, based in Huntington Park and the Florence-Firestone neighborhood – were charged with illegal drug and weapons sales, conspiracy and racketeering.

According to this article in CityBeat, news of these charges comes as a sense of vindication for some and a bitter pill to swallow for others. Many black and Latino community activists have struggled for years to get law enforcement and city leaders to admit that many of the racially-charged murders in the area are intrinsically gang-related – particularly comprising pieces of the Mexican Mafia’s larger plot to cleanse their neighborhoods of the black population. And while law enforcement and prosecutors have admitted before that some Latino gangs have attacked innocent victims based on race, this is the first time that the Justice Department has publicly disclosed the Mexican Mafia’s racist agenda – one that is also against prison blacks and includes known collaborations with the Aryan Brotherhood.

For Florencia 13, one of the largest street gangs in the city, racially-charged murders operate as one function in a complexity of organized crime. Members have been ordered to tax prostitutes, ice cream vendors, taxi operators and dealers of fake green cards. At the same time, networks of shooters, gunrunners and drug dealers rule the streets. And as we’ve just witnessed, organized crime is still just as organized behind bars.

In April 2007, Villaraigosa issued his “Gang Reduction Strategy” in response to the recent increase in gang-related crime (14% from 2006), despite the city’s decline in overall crime for the fifth straight year. In the report, the mayor called for a “comprehensive, coordinated, and sustained” approach to combating gangs. While devoting more resources toward arrest and prosecution of gang members, Villaraigosa stressed that prevention, intervention and re-entry are key tools of the trade.

Funny, this model sounds a lot like what Father Gregory Boyle has been doing in Boyle Heights for the past 20 years. It’s no wonder the mayor’s office has based its strategy on the results of the federally-funded Gang Reduction Program (GRP) that reduced gang-related crime by 44% in the area. Father G and Homeboy Industries were a large part of that success.

But this recent article in GOOD magazine highlights Chief Bratton’s announcement in January that gangs will be met by an “unprecedented collaboration” of resources from the FBI, LAPD and other local agencies. The article also hints that the city’s official plan is to “pursue the most notorious gangs and hope for a trickle-down effect to curb the violence.”

However, with all this emphasis on suppression, it comes at no surprise why gang violence is still a viable option for even younger and younger crowds in Los Angeles. “Cops often overstate the problem,” said Boyle in an interview with GOOD magazine. “[The city’s] treatment plan is bad because the diagnosis is bad. If you can fix what they’re fleeing from, then you’ve done a lot.”

What they’re fleeing from is what the mayor identifies as the most problematic of social conditions – poverty, a failing education system, domestic abuse, negative parenting, child abuse and neglect, and the tolerance of the gang culture. (Of course, as if we didn’t already know this from before). And in addition to calling a war on gangs, Villaraigosa also calls on a war on social ills.

But tough talk on crime and social ills is cheap. Father G once said “building prisons to address crime is a little bit like building graveyards to address AIDS…it’s ridiculous.”

At any rate, I’m just wondering if the mayor’s words and plans can count for much now, several months after the issuance of his report. For some reason – as we’ve seen with organized crime – turning words into action seems to work out better for gangs than civil institutions.