Word: ganging
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...bill's backers say cities pass zoning laws that keep churches out. They say children cannot wear the Star of David to school because of regulations meant to ban gang symbols. They say coroners perform autopsies on those whose faith holds that the corpse is sacred. In short, without the Religious Liberty Protection Act, says Marc Stern of the American Jewish Congress, "you send a message to the state [authorities] that they have carte blanche to interfere with religious practices...
...unclear how Salt Lake City, of all places, wound up with the most crime-happy crew within Straight Edge, an unstructured international movement of young people, many of them pacifists who don't get high or sleep around and would never dream of calling themselves gang members. Even Utah's nonviolent Straight Edgers, who constitute the vast majority of the state's several hundred members, are clueless as to what went wrong here...
Local police say Repreza and some buddies got into an exchange of taunts with kids on the street. Police insist it was neither gang related nor racially motivated, but in the brawl that ensued, Straight Edgers squared off against non-Straight Edgers, and racial slurs were heard...
With the Olympics coming to town, "some people are trying to downplay [the Straight Edge threat]," says James Yapias, a correctional and educational consultant. Others suggest that the group would get more attention if the bad guys were black or Hispanic. Nonsense, say police. Of the 200 gang-related felonies last year in Salt Lake County, only three were by Straight Edgers. They might be the oddest gang, but they're not the baddest. They don't even have guns...
...gang-force detectives Robin Howell and Troy Siebert pull up to a perfect tract house in suburban Kearns on an assault investigation, imagine the horror of John Lim, a mail carrier who has tried to steer his three sons clear of Straight Edge. The detectives are in Lim's garage now, breaking down his stepson Jesse, 20, with a splendid good-cop, bad-cop routine. Jesse admits throwing a pipe at another kid during a fight at a cemetery, but he downplays the gravity of what police are calling a possible felony assault and swears that...