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.

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.

POLICE Magazine is proud to offer you this excerpt from "Bomb Squad," a book that answers the age-old question: Why would any right-thinking cop want to come face to face with a bomb?

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.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared what he called a modern-day war on drugs, calling it "America's Public Enemy Number One." Since then, police departments all over the country have been fighting that war, without a foreseeable end.

When custodial interrogation is imminent and it's time to give the suspect a Miranda warning, what exactly do you have to say? The answer is, nothing exactly. The U.S. Supreme Court, which created the necessity of a warning of rights and a waiver as prerequisites to the prosecutorial use of a statement obtained through custodial interrogation, has never held that any precise wording is required.