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Avenue 32 and Drew Street in Glassell Park. Sam Quinones.
Street gangs have been retreating all over Southern California, journalist Sam Quinones says in a piece for Pacific Standard posted just before the new year. Quinones used to cover the gang beat for the Los Angeles Times and is the author of two books based on his decade reporting in Mexico, "True Tales From Another Mexico" and "Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration." He calls the piece The End of Gangs and opens on Drew Street, the once notorious Glassell Park gang turf that Quinones says is remarkably cleaned up since the city cracked down there . Excerpt:
The transformation of Drew Street is not unique. In the past few years, street gangs have been retreating from public view all over Southern California. Several years ago, I spent a couple of days in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood, in an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County, interviewing some Florencia 13 gang members. One nearby garage was never free of graffiti for more than a few minutes a week. (This was the amount of time it took after the graffiti clean-up truck left for the 76th Street clique of Florencia 13 to re-deface the thing.) That garage wall has now been without graffiti for more than four years. I go by it every time I’m in the neighborhood.Fifteen miles southeast of Florence-Firestone, much of the tiny city of Hawaiian Gardens used to be scarred with the graffiti of HG-13, a local gang that absorbed several generations of the town’s young men. The last three times I’ve been to Hawaiian Gardens, I’ve seen nothing on the walls, and young black men freely visit taco restaurants on the main drag, something that would have been inconceivable a few years ago. In Oxnard’s Colonia Chiques neighborhood in Ventura County, the decades-old neighborhood gang is not outside, and their graffiti is gone.
Some of this is a state and national story, as violent crime declined by about 16 percent in both California and the nation from 2008 through 2012. But the decline has been steeper in many gang-plagued cities: 26 percent in Oxnard, 28 percent in Riverside, 30 percent in Compton, 30 percent in Pasadena, 30 percent in Montebello, 50 percent in Bell Gardens, 50 percent in El Monte.
Santa Ana once counted 70-plus homicides a year, many of them gang-related. That’s down to 15 so far in 2014, even as Santa Ana remains one of the densest, youngest, and poorest big cities in California. “Before, they were into turf,” says Detective Jeff Launi, a longtime Santa Ana Police gang investigator. “They’re still doing it, but now they’re more interested in making money.”
No place feels so changed as the city of Los Angeles.
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I don’t know if it’s a cultural shift or what, but being the member of a gang doesn’t have the same panache that it did,” says George Tita, a University of California-Irvine criminologist who has researched gangs and their use of neighborhood space. “Things have changed radically in the last five years.”
Quinones credits the culture-wide drop in crime and several LA-specific law enforcement policies such as gang injunctions, RICO prosecutions and the reforms brought to the LAPD by William Bratton. Also factors, he writes, are urban gentrification, higher real estate values, fear of the Mexican Mafia among street gangs, and gang members conducting their drug deals and other business out of sight instead of on street corners and in neighborhoods. "Gangs out of sight remain sinister, of course, but, in retreating from the streets, they become less of an immediate danger," Quinones says.
Quinones also gives credit to the COMPSTAT program that Bratton brought to the LAPD. But for what it's worth, the stats generated by the program are what's being called into question in the growing lack of faith in LAPD crime stats.
