Actually I did mention throughout Southern California.





No I didn't dig up every article and stats for every city and every part of LA. I used East LA and Boyle Heights simply because that's a place everyone knows the gangs are all Chicano gangs. I even have old articles saved somewhere from as far as San Bernardino and Colton from the late 70s about gang truces after gang wars between Verdugo gangs and Colton, and there's also Cucamonga Kings war with the Onterio Black Angels of the 1970s and Black Angels vs Chino Sinners. How about Riverside? Case Blanca fern St vs Evans street? All peaking around the 1970s. West LA, Clanton 14th Street vs 18th Street..
San Gabriel Valley, Bassett Grande vs La Puente, El Monte Flores vs Bassett Grande, NS and ES Baldwin Park, Lomas, Sangra etc. All 1970s gang wars. What, I'm supposed post the stats for every neighborhood for you, so you could just dismiss it.. Why would I waste my time?

Even if the sample size used was small, it still helps blow a hole through your argument. Why would only East LA be a lone exception when it comes to the 70s violence?

Yeah there's some areas where Chicano gangs were particularly weak, where black gangs were the majority and Chicano gangs had very little muscle. But overall, the 70s were a wild time.

and of course I never said crack didn't contribute to more violence and crime. Gangs were in full effect before crack, that's my argument. Drugs always have and always do, contribute to the problem. Heroin was the epidemic for Chicanos in the 70s btw. More so from using it than selling it...but both too.

Hello SoCalGangs, I see your very in the know about LA gangs. Can I pm you about Florencia trece and 38th street gang? Very interested about those two gangs, aswell other south central gangs of the 70s and 80s.

Read a lot about Florencia, evereything there is online probably but I cant find so much of the Florencia gang of the 70s and 80s. Today the F13 is one of the biggest gangs in LA, but what about those decades I mentioned.

What it was like for them in those years surrounded by black gangs,etc.?

Thanks in advance.

Alex.

Reminds me of the gang wars in Chicago between the 60s - 80s. The conflict between the Black P Stones & Black Disciples escalated as years progress unfortunately.

Jackson's gang culture took off in the 80s and peak in the late 80s to early 90s.

Sure anytime.

SoCal,

still trying to dig up the interviews.
In the few years before crack, what % of a random neighborhood kids would be bangin'? Would you say that % was lower or higher than 5 years earlier than that?

I'm going off memory but what I read indicated that % of members and active members compared to the population of a neighborhood was steadily going down in the years before crack. And also that after a certain age......guys moved on or retired form the gangs.


Crack and the money it generated, reversed the downward trend of people bangin' and expanded it greatly.

The percentages were definitely lower before the late 80s. For Blacks especially.
I don't know the percentages exactly, but for the Chicano hoods it was a fairly high percentages before the 80s, then dropped of slightly in early and mid 80s, then spiked again in the late80s and 90s.

Another theory that I've been warning up to is the influence of gangster rap. Look up the interview of Alonso Williams of Dr. Dre's world class wreckin crew where he talks about how the music made gang banging the cool thing. Before 88, it was still cool to be a dancer or a DJ, then suddenly everybody wanted to be hardcore.
It's a theory I rejected for years, being a lifelong fan of the music myself, but I think there's something to it. It didn't start the problem, it most likely made it worse, as did crack.

The best analogy is that the crack epidemic was gasoline on an already burning fire.
You simply don't join a gang solely because of crack. Rick Ross didn't. Being neutral helped him.
On the other hand crack fueled the fire in other ways. When you're a kid and your mom is on crack and father in prison, yeah that's going to create a lot of overall dysfunction in the neighborhood. No doubt about it.

SoCal,

here's an interesting point about music. For about 2 year period in late 80s...the majority of the rap music was about positive stuff. The BDP/Public Enemy era where even other groups that weren't about that HAD to make similar songs because that's what people were receptive to hearing.

I'd bet that the crime stats for those years were as high or higher than the years between the bang bang shoot em up era between NWA first major label album and the release of the Chronic.

Why are you so insistent on distinguishing black gangs from Latino gangs?

To my knowledge, the highest murder rates were around 1990 to about 92. I'll try looking it up when I have time.

Do you ever pay attention to anything written? Because the timeline is different between Crips and Bloods, and the overall trends are slightly different. Lots of overlap between the two but still a lot of differences. Bloods and Crips in general had a higher murder rate than the Mexican/Chicano hoods. And that's important to know when looking at statistics and trends.

Here we go...

Yeah here we go with your nonsense again.

Chicano gangs were more into low riders in the 70s? Do you even realize how disrespectful that is to people that lived it through that decade? The amount of funerals people attended due to gang related killings and drugs? The amount of people going to prison or , being hooked on and Oding on heroin?

Let me take a wild guess, it's wayyyycist to distinguish Black and Brown gangs when observing trends?

Let's just forget about the fact that Crips and Bloods were barely in their beginning stages in the 70s, in their early escalation years while things were already fully escalated for many Chicano gang beefs by the 1970s the 1970s were like the golden years for many Chicano gangs. And the fact that crack disportionately affected Black neighborhoods..You want to dismiss that, for what? Because you're only politically driven and could careless about truth.

Here we go...

"I've given you much more nuanced responses than you deserved" lol.

@SoCalGang

I agree with you on the drug trade increasing the conflicts along with vendettas too. Black gangs that were active before joining the C/B umbrella have a reputation already. Hoover Groovers ( current Hoover Criminals), Green Jackets ( Bounty Hunters now), Black P Stones, Piru Boys ( W/S Prius), and few others already up and running. I notice the interaction between Chicano & Black gangs was a little different as well.

Nobody said this. Nobody.

The argument you were responding to said that gang violence was "dying down" before crack, not dying out. And, they're right in the sense that it did not produce murder rates that made national news, the way the confluence between gangs and the crack cocaine trade in the late '80s did.

That's fine with me. I probably misread his post that day. Some gangs were in fact dying down at that time. Others were gaining steam.As already explained. Also, gangs always go through low periods where things die down for a while then it spikes up again.
I have a hard time believing Black gangs were dying down right around the time Bloods and Crips were spreading the most. When you consider major gang rivalries like Rollin Sixties vs Eight Tray began in 1979 along with many others that quickly escalated.
Then you have to factor in that the crack epidemic created lots of violent crime and murder that simply wasn't gang related at all. Here's a decent article from 1993 talking about overall crime.

http://articles.latimes.com/1993-01-05/local/me-819_1_los-angeles-county

Yea and you're right to point out that a lot of these gangs had a rep before becoming Crips or Bloods. LA gangs are resilient and tend to survive through the times.

I would also like to mention one obvious thing regarding the whole drug trade/crack epidemic. It did help spread LA gang culture around the country as gang members moved out of town and out of state to set up shop. So there's another big reason the whole crack epidemic was bad.

A coroner in 1993 discounts a truce that just started a year beforehand? What does he know? The Grape Street, Bounty Hunter truce lasted over a decade. lol. But the coroner says the truce is a farce. The coroner. My goodness. Only in that circle of Los Angeles public servants. They really live in their own world.

I think you're reading it all wrong. He's wondering why the bodies are still stacking up despite the gang truces. He didn't call it a farce. The point of the article was that there was lots of crime and killings in general unrelated to gang or gang related murders.

His clear implication is that the truce was some sort of a charade, the same implication made by all of the dirty, lying cops in southern california at that time. Some of the truces between specific hoods lasted over a decade, like Grape Street and Bounty Hunters, two huge, influential gangs. This coroner could see 10 years into the future, and he was still wrong.

Also , The C/B were spreading out even prior to crack trafficking as their were sets in the South ( especially TX & LA).

That's a good point. I don't know a whole lot about out of state sets but we know they were spreading around Southern California at a rapid pace too, in the 70s and early 80s. To the Valley, to San Bernardino, Riverside, San Diego etc. pretty amazing how fast. Very formative years for street gangs.

Cheaper housing outside of LA and California.

Not some elaborate plan for LA's gangs to take over the world.

Sorry to spoil the fun.

Nobody said that.

I've always been aware of LA gangs moving to the valley and San Bernardino etc., for cheaper rent and housing.
It's amazing how quickly it spread.

Why do you insist on poisoning almost every thread you post in?

BF,

Interesting. It makes sense because lot of Blacks folks who live in L.A. have roots in those places. Similar to how Chicago gangs probably had presence in The Crooked Letter before crack because so many people in Chi have roots there.

You addressed something about "sets spreading". You didn't address the economic and housing conditions that played a role in Los Angeles residents migrating about the country at that time. So, I did.

Okay, but your snarky comment about "spoiling the fun" was unnecessary.

Although there was no "elaborate" plan by all LA gangs to take over the entire country, many LA gang members do have a set up shop and take over mentality when they relocate somewhere, regardless of why, it happened.

One of my biggest areas of interest for years has been LA gangs moving into San Bernardino county for cheaper rent, so this all very familiar to me.

Thousands of people in general were moving to San Bernardino for cheaper rent, people in gangs included. That is the primary reason LA based gangs spread to other places.