10028: Yo Is Cross-Cultural…?

This Auto Trader commercial from Canada presents stereotypes of gangbangers and wiggers. But check out the English and French versions. Didn’t realize “Yo” was a universally recognized expression.

7500: Boyz N The Web.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

Gangs using Facebook, Twitter more often

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES—When a gang member was released from jail soon after his arrest for selling methamphetamine, friends and associates assumed he had cut a deal with authorities and become a police informant.

They sent a warning on Twitter that went like this: We have a snitch in our midst.

Unbeknownst to them, that tweet and the traffic it generated were being closely followed by investigators, who had been tracking the San Francisco Bay Area gang for months. Officials sat back and watched as others joined the conversation and left behind incriminating information.

Law enforcement officials say gangs are making greater use of Twitter and Facebook, where they sometimes post information that helps agents identify gang associates and learn more about their organizations.

“You find out about people you never would have known about before,” said Dean Johnston with the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, which helps police investigate gangs. “You build this little tree of people.”

In the case involving the suspected informant, tweets alerted investigators to three other gang members who were ultimately arrested on drug charges.

Tech-savvy gangsters have long been at home in chatrooms and on Web sites like MySpace, but they appear to be gravitating toward Twitter and Facebook, where they can make threats, boast about crimes, share intelligence on rivals and network with people across the country.

“We are seeing a lot more of it,” Johnston said. “They will even go out and brag about doing shootings.”

In another California case involving a different gang, much of the information gathered by investigators came from members’ Facebook accounts. Authorities expect to make arrests in the coming months.

“Once you get into a Facebook group, it’s relatively easy,” Johnston said. “You have a rolling commentary.”

And gang members sometimes turn the tables, asking contacts across their extended networks for help identifying undercover police officers.

It’s hard to know exactly how many gang members are turning to Twitter and Facebook. Many police agencies are reluctant to discuss the phenomenon for fear of revealing their investigative techniques.

Capt. Walt Myer, director of the Riverside County regional gang task force, said gang activity often “mirrors general society. When any kind of new technology comes along, they are going to use it.”

Representatives from Twitter and Facebook say they regularly cooperate with police and supply information on account holders when presented with a search warrant. Neither company would discuss specifics.

Gang use of Twitter and Facebook still lags behind use of the much-older MySpace, which remains gang members’ online venue of choice.

The Crips, Bloods, Florencia 13, MS-13 and other gangs have long used MySpace to display potentially incriminating photos and videos of people holding guns and making hand gestures. They also post messages about rivals.

Last week, officials in Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, announced the arrest of 50 people in a crackdown of a Latino gang they say was engaged in drug sales and hate crimes against black residents. Prosecutors say some of the evidence was pulled from MySpace and YouTube, including rap videos taunting police with violent messages.

While some members are wising up to the police attention such postings can bring, gang information remains publicly viewable online.

Dozens of Facebook accounts are dedicated to the deadly MS-13 gang, with followers from around the globe. At one site, a video displays pictures of dead members of the rival 18th Street gang, and some users have left disrespectful comments.

The toughest part about tracking someone on Twitter is finding the alias or screen name they are posting under. And many tweets are nonsensical or pointless, so cutting through the clutter can be difficult.

“It’s tricky,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy David Anguiano. “If you find out what they go by, you are good to go.”

Anguiano tracks the online activity of graffiti vandals—the so-called tagging crews that sometimes morph into gangs. They post tweets saying they are heading out to spray paint and sometimes post links to photographs of their work.

Often, they cannot resist bragging about their handiwork, and the electronic trail they leave is frequently used as evidence.

“They talk about it too much,” Anguiano said. “You want the fame so you’ve got to go out there and talk about it. That’s when your mouth gets you in trouble.”

7353: Boyz N The Rez.

From The New York Times…

Gang Violence Grows on an Indian Reservation

By Erik Eckholm

PINE RIDGE, S.D. — Richard Wilson has been a pallbearer for at least five of his “homeboys” in the North Side Tre Tre Gangster Crips, a Sioux imitation of a notorious Denver gang.

One 15-year-old member was mauled by rivals. A 17-year-old shot himself; another, on a cocaine binge and firing wildly, was shot by the police. One died in a drunken car wreck, and another, a founder of the gang named Gaylord, was stabbed to death at 27.

“We all got drunk after Gaylord’s burial, and I started rapping,” said Mr. Wilson, who, at 24, is practically a gang elder. “But I teared up and couldn’t finish.”

Mr. Wilson is one of 5,000 young men from the Oglala Sioux tribe involved with at least 39 gangs on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The gangs are being blamed for an increase in vandalism, theft, violence and fear that is altering the texture of life here and in other parts of American Indian territory.

This stunning land of crumpled prairie, horse pastures turned tawny in the autumn and sunflower farms is marred by an astonishing number of roadside crosses and gang tags sprayed on houses, stores and abandoned buildings, giving rural Indian communities an inner-city look.

Groups like Wild Boyz, TBZ, Nomads and Indian Mafia draw children from broken, alcohol-ravaged homes, like Mr. Wilson’s, offering brotherhood, an identity drawn from urban gangsta rap and self-protection.

Some groups have more than a hundred members, others just a couple of dozen. Compared with their urban models, they are more likely to fight rivals, usually over some minor slight, with fists or clubs than with semiautomatic pistols.

Mr. Wilson, an unemployed school dropout who lives with assorted siblings and partners in his mother’s ramshackle house, without running water, displayed a scar on his nose and one over his eye. “It’s just like living in a ghetto,” he said. “Someone’s getting beat up every other night.”

The Justice Department distinguishes the home-grown gangs on reservations from the organized drug gangs of urban areas, calling them part of an overall juvenile crime problem in Indian country that is abetted by eroding law enforcement, a paucity of juvenile programs and a suicide rate for Indian youth that is more than three times the national average.

If they lack the reach of the larger gangs after which they style themselves, the Indian gangs have emerged as one more destructive force in some of the country’s poorest and most neglected places.

While many crimes go unreported, the police on the Pine Ridge reservation have documented thousands of gang-related thefts, assaults — including sexual assaults — and rising property crime over the last three years, along with four murders. Residents are increasingly fearful that their homes will be burglarized or vandalized. Car windows are routinely smashed out.

“Tenants are calling in and saying ‘I’m scared,’” Paul Iron Cloud, executive officer of the Oglala Sioux (Lakota) Housing Authority, told the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in July at a special hearing on the increase of gang activity.

“It seems that every day we’re getting more violence,” Mr. Iron Cloud said.

Read the full story here.

7322: This Is Not Disneyland.

From The Los Angeles Times

Giving tourists a look at gang culture
A group of civic activists is preparing to offer bus tours of some of the grittiest pockets of the city, with profits funneled back into the community. Some of the particulars are raising eyebrows.

By Scott Gold

A group of civic activists, united by faith and a belief that the poor economy in the interior of Los Angeles is a social injustice, is preparing to offer bus tours of some of the grittiest pockets of the city, including decayed public housing, sites of deadly shootouts and streets ravaged by racial unrest.

After a VIP preview last weekend, L.A. Gang Tours expects to open to the public in January, giving tourists a look at the cradle of the nation’s gang culture—the birthplace of many of the city’s gangs, including Crips and Bloods, Florencia 13 and 18th Street.

“This is ground zero for a lot of the bad in this city. It could be ground zero for a lot of the good too,” said Alfred Lomas, a former Florencia member who has become a leading gang intervention worker in South Los Angeles and is spearheading the tours. “This is true community empowerment.”

The nonprofit group plans to offer two-hour tours at an initial cost of $65 per adult, with profits funneled back into the community through jobs, “franchised” tours in new areas and micro-loans to inner-city entrepreneurs. Early routes will focus largely on South L.A., with forays through Watts and Florence-Firestone.

The concept appears to have no equal in L.A.—for good reason, some might argue. It seems to echo, more than anything, the “slum tours” of such sites as India’s Dharavi township and Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. Those operations have been lauded as innovative economic tools and mechanisms for humanizing poverty—and also attacked as exploitative and voyeuristic.

The L.A. tour comes after months of planning, and is offered in a spirit of education and public service. Lomas, who will lead tours at first, plans to talk about important chapters in the development of the city’s core, such as how racist housing restrictions shaped ethnic enclaves and the formation of gangs.

Other aspects may raise eyebrows. Selling shirts painted on the spot by a graffiti “tagger” is one thing. But one backer said he also hopes to stage dance-offs between locals; tourists would pick a winner and fork over a cash prize. It wasn’t long ago that organizers decided against a plan to have kids shoot tourists with water pistols, followed by the sale of T-shirts that read: “I Got Shot in South-Central.”

“It’s going to be fascinating—but really controversial,” said Francisco Ortega, a field staffer with the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission and a respected mediator and neighborhood advisor in South L.A. Ortega said there could be great value in “sensitizing people, connecting them to the reality of what’s on the ground.”

“But the other side is that it could come across like a zoo or something,” Ortega said. “You’re being carted about: ‘Look at that cholo over there!’ It could be perceived as demeaning for the people who are living in these conditions. I don’t know how they’re going to manage those perceptions.”

City Councilwoman Jan Perry said she has offered bus tours of South L.A. herself—but those were for real estate leaders she was trying to persuade to invest in the neighborhood. She said South L.A. could benefit from an effort to demonstrate “the potential of the community.” But she said some aspects of this kind of tourism could go too far.

“It’s not right to put people on display,” she said.

“It depends on their intent and how they balance it,” said Councilman Bernard C. Parks.

Organizers, however, say they’ve been careful to plan tours that are respectful and neither glorify gangs nor exploit the poor.

“What matters to me is that kids get fed and families get help,” Lomas said.

The organization is bolstered by business leaders and gang experts who are contributing start-up capital and advice.

Several are connected to the Dream Center, the L.A. church ministry where Lomas directs a food bank. Lomas credits the organization with helping him to turn his life around.

Kevin Malone, a former Dodgers general manager, sits on the board of the Dream Center’s charitable arm and has become one of Lomas’ chief supporters. Malone said he has become involved in human-rights causes, such as combating human trafficking. He said the possibility of introducing self-sustaining economic development into the city’s poorest neighborhoods is no less of a human rights issue.

“I believe in this,” he said.

Other backers include Ron Noblet, a leading gang expert and an early proponent of using gang intervention to augment traditional police tactics. Noblet dismissed any potential for criticism or controversy.

“There will be a lot of people who will be delighted if he fails,” Noblet said of Lomas. “But there is clarity in the dream.”

Another backer is Terry Jensen, an owner of Seattle-based Duninger Corp., which has subsidiaries in engineering and real estate investment. Jensen is the inventor of the “Jakpak,” a jacket that turns into a tent with a built-in sleeping bag. It was designed for the homeless and communities hit by natural disasters.

Jensen, also a minister, has allowed Lomas to use his accountants and marketers. The team, he said, believes the tours could generate $1 million in profit in the first year, and that it would compete for customers with operators of celebrity-home tours in Hollywood.

“I think this will be a destination tour,” Jensen said. “I think people will come to Los Angeles to take this tour.”

Jensen acknowledged that customers will have to sign a watertight legal waiver. He said that’s why it’s important to spread the word through affected neighborhoods that the tour is coming—and, eventually, generating jobs, grants and loans. For example, Jensen said he’d like to see some early profits send a graffiti “tagger” to art school.

“We all know that the day somebody gets hurt, it’s over,” he said. “We’re counting on the fact that the gangs aren’t going to mess in their own beds.”

There is another reason to spread the gospel: Lomas hopes to use the tours to foster peace on the streets.

In recent weeks, The Times was granted access to a series of “sit-downs”—meetings—seeking understandings between gangs that have historically warred: Florencia, 18th Street and Grape Street, the dominant gang in the Jordan Downs public housing development.

Other gangs are being added to the talks and will shape tour routes down the road. Lomas, for instance, hopes to include the South L.A. bus stop where five children and three adults were shot in gang crossfire last year, but needs the local gangs to sign off, giving him “safe passage.”

One “sit-down” took place in a Jordan Downs apartment that serves as the hub of the small nonprofit empire of Fred “Scorpio” Smith. The 38-year-old Smith said he joined Grape Street when he was 11 and recently completed a 13-year prison term on drug charges. Influential in Jordan Downs, he now runs a charitable organization, including a program for kids who have dropped out or have been kicked out of local schools.

A small group, led by Lomas, went to the apartment seeking approval to run the tour through Jordan Downs. At first, Smith sounded skeptical.

“A tour?” he asked incredulously. “Of the ‘hood?”

Lomas offered to hire two teens from the housing development as part-time tour employees.

“I’m not saying you have to stop shooting each other,” Lomas said. “Just allow me a certain time in the day. … Just let the bus go through.”

“Safe passage is a guarantee,” Smith said.

Lomas and Smith discussed a host of delicate issues: tension between African Americans and Latinos; a recent skirmish between Florencia and Grape Street. They discussed building a phone tree to open new lines of communication between their neighborhoods.

But the long-term goal, Lomas explained, is economic viability.

“People around the world have stereotyped us,” Lomas said. “I’m talking about sustainable change. But it won’t work unless we have unity.”

“The people on the ground doing the work,” Smith replied. “That’s cool. That’d be cool.”

6861: Everyone’s A Hustler.

Kicking it with a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• A California cop initially gained semi-positive notoriety when videotaped kicking a gang member in the head after a high-speed chase. Then it was revealed that the officer also runs a business on the side—selling “authentic jailhouse wear” online. The clothing includes t-shirts with gang symbols. Maybe he was kicking the banger after he failed to pay for some gear.

• Um, haven’t the fast feeders learned their lessons regarding free food giveaways?

5430: The Businessmen.

From The Los Angeles Times…

New job for an old gang
Aging members of the Businessmen -- precursors of the Bloods and Crips -- want to end the cycle of violence they helped create in South Los Angeles

Their name, the Businessmen, was derived from the slang term “taking care of business.” They were among several dominant African American gangs -- the Slausons, the Gladiators, the Del Vikings -- in the early 1960s in the neighborhood then known as South-Central: the precursors to the Bloods and the Crips.

Now, the Businessmen of South Park have traded their fedoras for bifocals, and their whiskers are gray. But they’re together again -- not to fight or drink but to try to unravel what they say is their own destructive legacy. They are tormented by the thought that their early gang activity begot increasingly violent generations of gangs. “We had a hand in making it like this,” said Carter Spikes, 61. “Now we are doing what we can to make things right.”

So the gang that once hung out by the gymnasium in the big green expanse of South Park on Avalon Boulevard and 51st Street now boasts an office across the street, with a brass placard on the door that reads The Businessmen, and with a computer, coffee maker and extra large canister of Coffee-mate inside.

Former gangsters turned anti-gang activists are nothing new in South Los Angeles. So far, the Businessmen acknowledge, their nascent organization has produced mostly ideas for future projects.

What sets the Businessmen apart are their age -- most are in their 60s -- their memories and a certain mellowness that comes with their status as grizzled survivors.

The Businessmen comprised four generations -- age groups -- of young men growing up around South Park in the 1950s and 1960s, many of whom attended Jefferson High School. Successive generations were dubbed the Seniors, the Juniors, the Babies, and the Unborns. Most of the current group belonged to the third installment of the gang, the Baby Businessmen, active in the period right before the 1965 Watts riots.

[Read the full story here.]

Essay 4372

Capping things off with a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• Baseball caps manufacturer New Era Cap pulled MLB caps deemed as appealing to gang members. The caps featured imagery associated with the infamous Crips, Bloods and Latin Kings. “It has been brought to our attention that some combinations of icons and colors on a select number of our caps could be too closely perceived to be in association with gangs,” said New Era Cap CEO Christopher H. Koch. “In response, we, along with Major League Baseball, have pulled those caps.” It was only a matter of time before bangers started busting caps.

• Burger King posted big 4Q profits, spurred by late night and breakfast sales. Profits could soar further if the King teamed up with the Latin Kings.