Word: jaile
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Chino is as hard-core as it gets. In jail he learned how to make a tattooing needle, and a recent afternoon found him sitting in a small apartment in Highland Park inscribing a bunny design on the shoulder of Guapa, a 19-year-old female gang member. As Chino worked, he talked about the thrill he got from shooting at people when he was younger. "After a while I really wanted to see myself hit someone," he said. "That is how intense it became in my relationship with my gun. So I walked up to some guys and shot...
Like many veterans who have put in jail time, Chino thinks the younger gang members don't know how to behave on the streets. "The neighborhood is more dangerous now because the young homeboys are not looking out for each other," he said. He mentioned Lucky, one of the dead Playboys, who was shot and killed on a street corner last summer while talking on a pay phone. "Nobody was there to watch his back, so this guy could just walk up to him from behind and shoot him," Chino said. The two gang members in the room nodded silently...
...stoned, then driving a car through a rival gang's neighborhood while shooting out the window. Word got back to the parole officer that Chino was out causing trouble, and the police did a parole search of his house and found a gun. In May, Chino was back in jail--but not before he had communicated the "rush" of shooting to other gang members...
...other gang experts, is that aggressive policing alone will never break the cycle of gang violence. Father Greg Boyle, a Jesuit priest who works in gang-infested Boyle Heights, says the antigang strategy developed in California and copied elsewhere "is bankrupt. You have the three-strikes law and jail and so on, but you can't terrify a kid into being hopeful about his future." Many cops agree. "We don't need new laws," says Sergeant Wes McBride, founder of the California Gang Investigators Association and a 28-year veteran of antigang policing. "We have a penal code a foot...
...whenever Chino gets out of jail from his latest weapons-possession charge, he will still have nowhere to go but the gang neighborhood, nobody to hang with but his homeboys--and nothing to do but shoot at his enemies...