Word: ganges
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...second reason for the increase in gang violence is just as basic. As gang members like Chino are coming back to their old neighborhoods, the police--demoralized by scandal--are backing out of them. In the mid-'90s, the L.A.P.D. curtailed gang violence with some hard-nosed policing, spearheaded by tough CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) units. But after Rafael Perez, a rogue cop from the L.A.P.D.'s Rampart division, was arrested in 1998 for stealing cocaine from a police warehouse, he implicated 70 antigang cops, alleging corruption, excessive force, planting evidence and falsifying testimony. In the end, eight...
...result of his testimony--which helped secure Perez a plea bargain and reduced sentence, though its accuracy is a subject of intense debate--some 100 gang convictions were overturned. The city is facing as much as $125 million in liability claims stemming from the Rampart scandal...
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...
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...
Chino is a spoon. (Like other gang members mentioned in this article, he agreed to speak to TIME on condition that his real name not be used.) At 29, he has been a Playboys member for 14 years. Many of his crack-war contemporaries are long dead. Chino, as a battle-scarred survivor, has earned special respect in the gang. In his spine are the fragments of a .38-cal. bullet from a 1994 drive-by shooting. A devil is tattooed on his back. He has shot at least two gang rivals, and he got out of jail this year...