Gangs

Some of you may wonder how gang violence escalated to what it is today. There are many stories out there; some based on truth and others outright lies pieced together to conceal the truth. Gangs have existed almost as long as people have established societies. Many organizations and even governments may have come into existence because they started as one. The ancient Roman legend of Romulus and Remus gives hint that Rome may have been started by a band of men or a gang.

Gangs typically start with youth within a community whom intermingle and form bonds. As these youth venture through their neighborhoods, they set up social companionships and defensive boundaries to protect themselves from any person or group who intrudes into their realm of domain. Some gangs will be duped to do anything to defend their territories, thus the level of violence any gang executes depends on the toleration of the gang’s leadership and what the community will bear. New gangs have migrated into the United States from Central America, Caribbean Islands, and from other nations of the world. The conflagrations of their violence are sensationalized almost every day by the media. The damages to individuals, their families and our society are being done every day. Yet, the reason why gang violence has mounted to what it has is because communities and institutions have allowed it so. Let me explain.

As mentioned earlier the existence of gangs goes back to our prehistoric times when we were building societies. The control or lack of control of gangs has always been at the discretion of civilization of which gangs belong. Civil leadership has and always will control the outcome of what is tolerated.

Today’s escalation of gang violence can be traced back to Los Angeles County in the early 1970’s. Prior to 1972 the gangs in Los Angeles County were confined to racial divides long established by government. To identify some of the diversity of gangs during that era, there were White gangs in the Inglewood and Hawthorne cities, Black gangs in Watts, Compton, South and Southwest Los Angeles, Asian gangs in Monterey Park, and Mexican gangs in East Los Angeles. These gangs rampaged throughout their own communities then and certainly had the propensity for violence; there had always been gang shootings, but these incidents were only known to the victims, witnesses, and people within the communities. Little recognition was given to their existence except for the justice system which often had to regulate these activities. Inadvertently it was the justice system and later the media which propelled gangs to the forefront of becoming a social stigma.