When you don’t have kids hanging out on the street, there’s no one to shoot or do the shooting

Saturday, June 17th, 2023

In 2002, Bill Bratton took over as chief of the LAPD and applied what he had learned as New York City’s police commissioner:

Central to Bratton’s approach in New York was a system called CompStat, short for computer statistics. CompStat involved the real-time statistical monitoring of crime reports, giving cops, and their chain of command, data to which they could be held accountable. Bratton also believed in what has been called the broken windows theory, based on an argument (still much contested) put forward in 1982 by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, that broken windows or other forms of decay beget further deterioration, and that preventing serious crimes requires a focus on combating blight and petty forms of lawlessness.

When Bratton brought CompStat to the LAPD, it showed commanders where to deploy resources, and it meant the police, and especially division captains, could be evaluated according to reductions in crime in their territory. To fight chronic understaffing at the LAPD, Bratton lobbied for more hiring. Under mayors Richard Riordan and Jim Hahn, the LAPD had grown to 9,000 officers. Bratton and mayor Antonio Villaraigosa took it to 10,000.

The LAPD also began to make use of a tool that had previously been used sparingly: the gang injunction, essentially a ban on gang members hanging out together in public. The gang injunction spent much of the 1990s in court before being narrowly ruled constitutional, but law enforcement valued it. Today, Los Angeles alone has at least 44 injunctions against 72 street gangs. Gang members seen on the street together can be jailed on misdemeanor charges. Other towns and counties followed LAPD’s lead.

All this had a major effect: It drove gang members indoors. Drug dealing continued, and so did other forms of crime, including identity theft. Gang members became more adept at using the Internet to promote their gangs and belittle rivals. But boasting and threatening online doesn’t require the commitment or violence of classic L.A. street gang-banging, nor does it blight a neighborhood. “When you don’t have kids hanging out on the street,” says George Tita, the UC Irvine criminologist, “there’s no one to shoot or do the shooting.”

[…]

Prosecuting street gangs has meant abandoning the previous focus on kingpins. “‘Cut off the head and body dies’ just isn’t true” when it comes to Southern California street gangs, says Brunwin. “You have to go after everyone—anyone who had anything to do with, supported, or touched the organization. You have to have an effect on the structure, its daily operation. The only thing that works is adopting a scorched-Earth policy.”

Comments

  1. Mike-SMO says:

    Without a DA to back the play, as well as a cooperative populace, it is all pointless. You’d just be “pickin’ on them chilluns cause of their race or ethnicity. “School to Jailhouse” has been a popular theme. “Their” child is always “different”. Good luck.

  2. Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

    “Bratton also believed in what has been called the broken windows theory, based on an argument (still much contested) put forward in 1982 by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, that broken windows or other forms of decay beget further deterioration, and that preventing serious crimes requires a focus on combating blight and petty forms of lawlessness.”

    A man whose eyes are filled with ugliness everywhere he looks will soon have a spirit filled with ugliness too. It is much contested by those who are themselves ugly in spirit and don’t want anyone trying to stop them from imposing that ugliness on the world, in myriad forms.

  3. Bob Sykes says:

    On the other hand, the Mexican gangs eventually won the street wars and ethnically cleansed the blacks out of LA. A little under 10% of LA is black today, and the trend is down.

    It wasn’t that long ago that power in LA went from whites to blacks. Now it has gone from blacks to Mexicans.

    The whole west coast is practically a black-free zone.

  4. Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

    IT’s normal. Bantus aren’t capable of organized warfare on large scales. The only power they have is that delegated to them by a higher power.

    Narratives are already in place for coming down on whites trying to build civilization, the biggest real threats to blue tribesmen. It’s harder but not impossible to shoehorn coming down on East Asians trying to build civilization. It’s difficult to gin up the narrative for coming down on people they have also designated as their pets without imploding the narrative altogether. So they basically just quietly ignored it and let it happen.

    https://radishmag.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/anarcho-tyranny/

    (As an aside, now old pages like this show how ephemeral the internet in the world of our presently incumbent underlords can be, where fairly half of all the painstakingly curated links lie dead, especially where they verge on matters relevant to real history.)

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