link to the original article in the Pacific Standard
http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/th...mic-crime-95498

here's a comment left by the author about the article:

To neighborhood residents, street gangs’ gravest threat was their constant presence, the way they dominated public spaces, such as parks, or a corner, or an apt complex. It was the blight they created. It was the smashed car window, a graffitied garage, screeching tires, the police helicopters overhead, bullets whizzing through an apartment wall, the threat to one’s own children, the inability to breathe easy.

Gang homicides got the headlines, but it was gang presence that drove people nuts, stressed and depressed a neighborhood, and led, in turn, to virtually all the crimes they became notorious for: beatings, street dealing, strong-arm robberies, murders.

This public omnipresence was the essence of every LA street gang. Their public presence was key to their reputation. It inspired respect and awe. It was how they recruited and intimidated. They took names from those streets.

There is no doubt that virtually across Southern California that public presence has, in fact, ended.

From Pacoima to Hawaiian Gardens, Azusa to Harbor Gateway, Long Beach to Cudahy, Pasadena, NELA and most of South Central to Riverside, this change is palpable and clear.

The benefits are everywhere, but mostly they are to working-class neighborhoods.

You see in these neighborhoods almost no one hanging out on the streets that gave gangs their identities. Parks, including some that were most notorious (MacArthur Park), are free for families. Homeowners and market owners in many areas are improving properties because they can – or selling their homes at a healthy profit – because they can now, due entirely to this retreat.

Gangs have fundamentally changed their stripes and this has profound import. Police have to deal with what gangs have become, which is a lot harder to investigate than when gangs were doing all their stuff out in the open. Gangs have gone indoors, become more discreet, more low profile. That’s in part to protect their drug business, or perhaps other crimes. A lot of it is to avoid gang injunctions and RICO cases and the like.

Some gangs are involved in credit-card fraud, identity theft, pimping. And gangs still intimidate witnesses. Latino gangs still tax for the Mexican Mafia.

But today, if gang members are on a computer using social media to great effect, they’re not on the streets where their damage was always so much greater.

If they’re quietly selling drugs indoors, they’re not doing it on street corners, attracting shooters and committing strong-arm robberies and carjackings. Gang crime is way down. Carjacking, for example, is a gang crime if ever there was one, invented by gangs and growing from their classic public omnipresence. It’s now basically an extinct crime (for the moment, it seems, anyway) – 33 in 2013 for all of Los Angeles. That is an amazing event, in my opinion.

Gangs have generally stopped behaving in the way they have historically behaved and in the way that made them into the infamous problem they became in this region. If they’d always behaved this quietly, with so little contribution to public blight, few people would have paid them any attention.

But they did, and now (by and large) they don’t – so maybe that is the way gangs end.

• LAPD division commanders became community organizers, urging neighbors and City Hall to clean up the streets. They also logged hours with school principals, merchants, librarians, and pastors. "We can't arrest our way out of the problem" became a new mantra.
• In the 1990s, the Mexican Mafia ordered Latino gangs to stop drive-bys and tax neighborhood drug dealers instead. So police used RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) laws to prosecute gang-members on federal conspiracy charges. More than two dozen RICO indictments have been filed against major LA gangs since 2006.
• RICO cases have forced cooperation between police, DEA, FBI, IRS, and others, easing inter-agency turf wars.
• Other factors are beyond police control. Gangs have declined because leaders alienate or kill their own members; gang-members become middle-class, selling drugs behind closed doors; and rising property values gentrify neighborhoods once run by gangs.

Very TRUE.

great points

Nice post.

Pretty accurate IMO.

Life has changed so dramatically and I think about it everyday.

I feel at ease driving through town or even walking down the street. It isn't the same anymore. Not even close.

The gang members that are left aren't even visible for the most part. They blend in with the rest.

In some areas, the Mexian Mafia bosses were even successful in making old gang rivalries end permanently which also caused a drop in violence.

Youth kids in gangs don't know how to make money. They need to be shown how to make money by older criminals. Then you got some order.

Plus those kids are expendleble.

This is the way it has always been done.

I agree but disagree with the title. It should be more appropriate to say changing or alternating their style. Lets not forget that gang related murders are still going on and even now there's supposedly war between a Hoover set & the Rollin 100s. Also other conflicts as well.

Yeah there's been an uptick in gang murders in south central. From time to time you still have these increases in gang related homicides in some areas but the overall trend has been down for years now.

I'm not saying gangs are gone but it really is like night and day compared to the past.

There's less kids even wanting to be gangbangers anymore. Go through the most notorious gang hoods and see square looking kids riding skate boards and stuff.

and in Chicano gang neighborhoods, dressing like a cholo with baggy pants and all that stereotypical stuff will get you clowned on and laughed at if you're younger than 20 years old. It just isn't seen as cool anymore.

Indeed.