Word: gangly
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...then there is Los Angeles. Gang violence doesn't fit the Geneva Convention standard of war: there has been no invasion, no mass uprising against an oppressor, no minefields, aerial bombings or refugee camps. Instead, there are small armies of youths fighting one another and the police. Gang violence is combat stripped of all the familiar rationales. It is the closest thing the U.S. has to battle within its borders, and many of the children emerge from the streets of Los Angeles more psychologically scarred than the young mujahedin who patrol the mountain passes of Afghanistan...
...inner city of Los Angeles, it's the parents who dream of seeing their kids leave and the children who refuse to abandon the old neighborhood. & Ginetta Robinson wants her 17-year-old son out of his gang and out of the house, even though the place he is likeliest to end up is jail. "I'd rather see him locked up than dead," she says. Ramona Penuelas, a housewife who immigrated to America in search of a better life, plans to take her 14-year- old son back to Mexico once he gets out of juvenile detention. Zuela Menjivar...
South Central Los Angeles looks a lot like the rest of the city -- smog- filtered sunlight, palm trees, pastel-colored stucco apartments. It doesn't look like a ghetto. The gang writing on cement walls, criminal samizdat that cops read for news of a planned attack with the expert alacrity of CIA cryptologists, is fastidiously printed; it bears little resemblance to the loopy graffiti of New York City...
More than 500 gangs, with some 80,000 known members, infest Los Angeles County. The best known are the Bloods and the Crips, the two largest, predominantly black gangs, and the most bitter of rivals. Bloods and Crips break down into small neighborhood sets, and it is not uncommon for one Crip group to fight another Crip group up the street, for Blood to fight Blood. There were 462 gang-related murders in 1988, 107 of them in South Central, a 43-sq.-mi. stretch of ghetto with a population of 500,000. Though the murder rate does not approach...
...Little Ducc" went on his first "mission," a drive-by shooting, as an observer when he was twelve. Freshly inducted into a local Crip gang, he drove in a sedan he describes as a GTA as casually as if he were saying GTO or MG, though it is police parlance for "grand theft auto" -- a stolen car. He is 14 now, in juvenile detention, and mainly remembers the noise. "A lot of yelling, some shooting, and then the police sirens." He never knew what prompted the attack. His "homeboys" had brought him along to test his mettle, and he acquitted...