Articles - Gangs

One thing is clear about the battle against the Mexican cartels: Your strategy for countering it tends to reflect your personal world view. And regardless of where you work on this continent, Mexican drug cartels present a great danger to you as an American law enforcement officer.

On the first night of TREXPO West 2009, four gang experts sat on a panel moderated by FOX 11 Los Angeles investigative reporter Chris Blatchford to discuss the challenges gangs pose for law enforcement.

The truth is that the state of American law enforcement is a very fluid thing.

Ride around the streets of Salisbury, N.C., and you'll see graffiti that looks out of place. Gangs in this Southern city have splattered once-pristine walls with messages pledging allegiance to gangs in Los Angeles and New York City.

In cases involving gang violence, get to the scene quickly, find the witnesses, and document who these witnesses are and what they say. Then if gang members do change their version of events, at least it can be explained why this person did what he or she did.

Back about 20 years ago when gangs in Los Angeles were shooting at each other in drivebys and hitting a lot of innocent bystanders, I was fond of saying that I had a solution for the gang problem: marksmanship lessons.

They may seem disorganized, they may act stupid, they may look really young, but they are deadly and cunning as sharks.

Tactical consultant John Giduck used a lot of humor in his six-hour two-day keynote presentation at TREXPO West. And that's a good thing because Giduck's presentation is about Islamist terror attacks on children, especially school children. So if his audience of veteran cops and soldiers didn't have some comic relief, they'd probably start crying.

In a Broken Windows crime model, graffiti is one of those foothold crimes that leads to a neighborhood's decay.

"This war has the potential to last beyond our children's lifetimes and to be fought mostly on U.S. soil." —Michael Scheuer, "Imperial Hubris"

Members of street gangs and drug dealers are unlikely to redress their grievances through the criminal justice system. If their territory is invaded or if they are victims of drive-by shootings, they are much more likely to seek retribution with drive-by shootings of their own.

Baaah! Baaah! That's the sound of me once again becoming a sheep. I thought I had shed my wool back around 7:30 a.m. PST on Sept. 11, 2001, when I watched a second airliner slam into the World Trade Center.

The conference portion of the 2007 TREXPO East offered a little bit of something for every attendee. Once primarily SWAT oriented, the TREXPO conference now includes classes of interest to tactical medics, SWAT operators, patrol officers, and gang officers.

While such acts are rarely reported in the media, one in three schools has reported acts of vandalism each year. In 1990 more than $600 million in damage to school property was caused by vandals. By understanding the nuances of vandalistic acts, patrol officers can develop specialized responses to help minimize future attacks.

Some cops could use a hug. Others could use a Huggy Bear. Like Starsky and Hutch's trusty tattletale, reliable informants provide us with a worm's eye view of their sordid social circles, a heads up on threats to officer safety, and the groundwork for search warrants. They hang in circles we wouldn't want to enter. There is no question that the access they have and the intelligence they acquire is often invaluable to law enforcement.

I remember riding with another L.A. Deputy Sheriff in an East Los Angeles gang car in 1975. To me, it was a privilege working with a special gang suppression unit, but my partner complained that he hated working gangs because it was useless. But he was wrong.

The U.S. Supreme Court has said that "Because many situations which confront officers in the course of executing their duties are more or less ambiguous, room must be allowed for some mistakes on their part. But the mistakes must be those of reasonable men, acting on facts leading sensibly to their conclusions of probability." (Brinegar v. U.S.)

It has been argued that drug use is a victimless crime. But you’re a cop, and you know better. You’ve seen the overdosed victims, the worried looks on parents’ faces. You’ve also seen the neighborhood deterioration. You know that as drug dealers move in, citizens have a diminished feeling of safety and legitimate businesses move out. This creates an environment suitable not only for drug dealing, but also prostitution, burglaries, robberies, rapes, and murders.