Word: ganges
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Criminologists point to two reasons for the city's upsurge in violence. First, veteran gang members jailed a decade ago during the crack epidemic are getting out of prison--and returning to reinfect their neighborhood with violent habits hardened and reinforced in prison. "The next generation of gang homicides is going to have a different construct [from the crack epidemic]," says Jack Riley, director of the criminal-justice program at Rand Corp. His research points to returning felons as a major reason for the spike in shootings across Los Angeles. "Locals in South Central and East L.A. think...
...sitting at her bedroom window in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles. She was putting on her makeup when a bullet came through the window and hit her just above the left eye. Tomas, who had just started high school, was the innocent victim of a random gang shooting. After visiting her in the hospital, L.A.'s new mayor, James Hahn, put up a $25,000 reward for information on the crime. "If a young girl can't stay in her bedroom safely," he says, "we are in terrible shape...
...Angeles is in terrible shape--again. The city's street gangs, which had been relatively quiet since the crack-cocaine epidemic of the late '80s and early '90s burned itself out, are back with a vengeance. After falling steadily from 1996 to '99, gang murders in the city increased 143% last year; 331 people died because of gang violence, in contrast to 136 in 1999. The violence got worse during the first half of this year, with a 23% increase in murders. Even as gang-related property crimes decrease--robbery is down 8.8%, carjacking is down 28%--other violent crimes...
TIME followed one gang, the Playboys, off and on for three months. The Playboys, with several hundred members, are just one of 1,300 such groups in L.A., all of them stuck in a deadly spiral of violence that the justice system has not broken, though it has put tens of thousands of gangsters behind bars. Five members of the Playboys were shot dead in the past year--most of them in senseless turf battles with nearby rivals...
...photographer who she says rammed her Mercedes last month in pursuit of a shot. The accident spurred the Los Angeles police department to launch a probe into the increasingly aggressive tactics paparazzi employ to catch celebs in such newsworthy acts as picking up dry cleaning. Freeway shootings and gang violence are important too, but someone's got to protect a starlet's right to park at the mall...