Gangs, Drugs and Terrorists

Ever since I became a social worker and even when I was a teacher I was confronted with the problem of gangs. In East LA, where I taught back in 1999, the Mexican-American and El Salvadorian-American children were easy prey for MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) and the Latin Kings. In Massachusetts, many of the kids I worked with a home for oppositionally defiant boys swore allegiance to local Boston gangs. When I began working in foster care in Brooklyn, “The Bloods”, “The Crips” and any other gang in the immediate vicinity surrounded the black children I worked with. The plague of gang violence worked its way out of the inner city and in to my former neck of the woods in suburban and highly over-taxed Long Island, NY. When I was working as drug counselor I remember listening to one of my clients tell me that Westbury (a fairly affluent town) had been overrun by MS-13. He wasn’t the first person to lament the rise of MS-13 around the corner from one of the biggest shopping malls in the country.

Gangs are a huge problem in this country. The idea that street gangs are made up of just minorities and “so what” if they murder each other is archaic at this juncture. This is where I stray far from the path of traditional conservatives. They look at the problems of crime and street gangs as existing in a vacuum and never bother to look deeper at the socio-economic context. Their solution is to pass more laws, enact harsher sentencing guidelines and build more prisons. Conservatives tend to live outside of the ghetto and they make a policy out of building higher and thicker walls as to not have to see the problem they themselves are exacerbating. This is the sort of like medieval medicine in that the doctors of the age didn’t really understand the disease and just treated the symptoms…with leaches and amputations.

The days of “white flight” are over my friends. There is no untamed suburb for you to move your family away to, far from the “animals”. Because of television, the Internet and basic upward mobility of the lesser income classes, you can’t hide from the end results of bad social and criminal justice policies anymore. Eminem is in your living room and MS-13 is waving at you form the corner store…or bodega if you like.

Billy Big Head came to me when I was in the 10th grade and asked me if I wanted to join his gang. It was 1992 and Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” was like the second coming of the Beatles in my lily-white suburban community. As near as could tell, the only harm gang’s caused in my town at the time was the introduction of sagging pants as a fashion choice in a school that had no black students and a household income of over $50,000 per year. Needless to say, the definition of a gang in that time and place was rather liberal.

Real street gangs have a much more violent and serious history. Much of that history is intertwined with drug dealing. “Following the Civil War many soldiers returned home addicted to morphine because of their wartime injuries. Drug abuse was a common problem among young and old. Most gangs recognized the needs of the public and quickly took advantage of the demand for drugs. There was easy access to morphine, cocaine and laudanum, a popular depressant. These drugs quickly stripped away what little values, ethics or remorse that a gang member had. Jacob Riis, a photographer and journalist of the time, documented an incident in which two members of the Montgomery Guards Gang were arrested for murder. Reiss said that after the two young suspects robbed a Jewish peddler, they bragged how they tried to cut off the victim's head. When questioned about the attempted decapitation, the suspects smugly replied that it was "just for fun."

…In the early 1900s, keeping up with technological advances, the organization level of gangs took a dramatic increase. In one city, the Car Barn Gang posted a sign on every street-corner reading, "Notice-COPS, KEEP OUT! No policemen will hereafter be allowed on this block. By order of the Car Barn Gang." They had such control of the neighborhood that police had to move through the streets in squads of at least six men to avoid showers of bricks and attacks from gang members. Patrolmen who did enter this forbidden area were commonly stabbed or beaten with blackjacks. By the early 1900s, Irish citizens were no longer considered second-class citizens and Italian and Jewish controlled gangs were in nearly every large city. Gangs were no longer just a problem among the Irish community. Drunkenness and immorality plagued the entire country.

Drug abuse was a familiar problem in all large cities and to combat the growing drug addiction among the population the Harrison Narcotic Act was signed in March of 1915. This began the government's first attempt at regulating narcotics. Within five years the Volstead Act was announced and prohibition began making the production and use of all alcoholic beverages illegal. Again, the concept of supply and demand was recognized and many gangs went into the business of producing and selling liquor.

… At the beginning of the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, gang-related violence continued to increase to unprecedented levels. Many of the gangs formed during this time are still in existence today ending the supremacy of one racial group controlling organized crime. The gang problem now belongs to everyone-Asian, Black, Hispanic, and white. Gangsters of all races now share the underworld. The social and economical burden that gang members inflict upon society is not a new problem. Gang rapes, drive-by shootings, home invasion robberies and murders have been commonplace for hundreds of years. Although they may have ridden horses instead in cars, wore hats instead of bandanas and carried knives instead of automatic weapons, gangs are not a new tribulation facing the citizenry of this country. Since the beginning of civilization, gangs in one degree or another have always contributed to the decay of society and although the United States is the most technological advanced nation in the world, the gang problem continued to grow faster than any virus or disease.” (Credit knowngangs.com)

This is just a sample of gang and drug history in America. Another tale involves the CIA turning a blind eye toward drug trafficking and the introduction of crack to Los Angeles. That however is a tale for another day.

The issue at hand now is that the gangs may be adding another item to their resume of criminal offenses, human smuggling. The latest headline is that al Qaeda is unlikely to use Latin American gangs to get them smuggled across the Southwest border. Of course it was also “unlikely” that they’d use planes as missiles and fly them in to the World Trade Center. The fact remains that money talks on this side of the pond and it speaks rather loudly in Latin America. There are countless numbers of smuggling gangs that will get somebody with enough money into one or all of our border states. It only takes one suitcase nuke in one city to set off a row of utterly disastrous dominoes.

It took a catastrophic event to mobilize our federal government to change its policies to meet the threats of the modern era. Unfortunately, it will probably take yet another attack for that same government to get serious on the border issue. If we are attacked again, it will be because of the gang issue we let fester in this country without a comprehensive solution that factors in socio-economic factors.