Dear_one wrote:
Chronos wrote:
I saw a documentary on crime in the U.K. once....the police brought people tea after they put them in their cell. I do think in the UK they treat inmates a little more like people. then again, here in the U.S. we have some horribly violent gangs of the likes that don't exist in the U.K.
I think the gangs are caused by the bad policing, in a deadly spiral. In Norway, prisoners are treated very well, and offered help for the problems that drove them to crime. Few re-offend. The justice system in the US is in such tatters it must feel like every man for himself, and maybe his gang. In parts of Central America, young men have to join one, or be the target of all.
The birth and growth of street gangs in the United States is an interesting and complex subject. The most infamous gangs in the U.S....the Bloods, Crips, and MS13 all started out as groups of youth who felt a need to defend themselves and their neighborhoods from neighboring groups of youth who were often a different race or ethnicity but not always. So in some sense, it does relate to poor policing....or rather, the failure of police to provide residents of the low income areas in which these gangs formed, such as Compton, Watts, and South (Central) Los Angeles, a sense of security, but not entirely, as youth seem to tend to feel themselves at odds with police for the mere fact that police are authority figures.
I've seen a gang form in my own home town. It started out as groups of neighborhood boys playing and hanging around as kids do. As these boys got older, they became a little rebellious as many boys do, being a nuisance and having the police called on them, drinking beer under age, smoking cigarettes and pot and I have no doubt some of them started selling it. Then they started with the spray paint, tagging out of the way places that theoretically, no one cared about. At this point they had morphed into a tag crew and they were now young men. It wasn't long before they clashed with another similar group of boys and temper flared and a cycle of revenge was started. There were some brutal fights with felony charges, and then someone got stabbed to death, and by this time, a lot of them were into a lot of bad things. It was very disheartening to see what was once a typical group of neighborhood boys become so malignant and damaging to their community. I no longer live there.
MS13 started in a similar manner. Young immigrants ad refugees fleeing the civil war in El Salvador found themselves in parts of Los Angeles where gangs were already becoming a problem, and MS13 was formed to protect El Salvadorans from these gangs but soon resorted to the same behaviors and tactics. Eventually many of these men were deported back to El Salvador where they came into contact with former soldiers who had become involved with the drug trade. They networked and MS13 was then established in El Salvador and it's members who had been deported, became the first drug mules in this network when they trekked back to the U.S. with drugs to sell and their newly formed business connections and have now surpassed the Bloods and the Crips.
MS13 and other gangs like it, at the forefront, appear to be a patchwork of teenagers and young adults who run around out of control and have no rules or ethnics, but these are just the pawns of the organization who typically have no idea what they are actually getting into. At the more senior levels, this is an organized crime syndicate with very frugal, organized, and intelligent individuals at the reigns. In fact, it's much like a military, and it's their military against our police.
10 Feb 2018, 1:19 pm
