Los Angeles, You Have a Gang Problem

The spotlight has been on L.A.'s gang problem this month, with the release of The Advancement Project's City-Council sponsored report on the problem. (You can download the full report at their website.)

According to another recent report on gangs, from the Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the two U.S. cities with the biggest gang problems are Los Angeles and Chicago. "More than half the homicides in Los Angeles and Chicago were documented as gang-related (59 percent and 53 percent, respectively) in 2001."

According to the Advancement Project report (of which I've only read part), "Los Angeles is the gang capital of the world," with an estimated 40,000 gang members. The report chides Los Angeles for lacking an ambitious anti-gang agenda and settling for narrowly-targeted programs and containment of gangs to certain neighborhoods. ("A resident in LAPD’s West LA Division faces a 1 in 78,000 chance of being murdered. In the Southeast Division of LAPD, the chances are 1 in 2,200...").

Most of the press coverage of the report (and the Mayor's subsequent press conference) seems to follow the lead of the New York Times article on the subject, "Racial Hate Feeds a Gang War’s Senseless Killing". So I was surprised that the Advancement Project report hardly mentions the racial aspect of the gang problem.

This raises a few questions in my mind:

-Is the Advancement Project right to downplay the tensions between African Americans and Latinos as a cause of the gang problem, or is the New York Times using race to sensationalize the issue?

-Are poor "Black-Brown" relations at the root of increased gang violence, or a repercussion of it, or a separate problem altogether?

-Does the hype over the "Black-Brown" issue exacerbate the problem or simply shed light on a real problem in Los Angeles?

What do you think?