A-Infos News Service

LOS ANGELES, California, USA, 1 February 1999 - At Berendo Middle School in the Pico Union neighborhood of Los Angeles, you would think that students have enough to worry about with 10 street gangs making claims to neighborhoods served by the school as well as the more normal rigors of adolescence and student life.  Now, the local courts have started to issue injunctions taking away the rights of people to assemble in groups of two or more if they are suspected of being "gang members."  Gangs like "18th Street" and "Harpies" have been targeted because of stories in local news papers.

The reality of these injunctions is a lot different than the way the cops will tell it.  They have notebooks on "suspected" gang members based on statement from snitches, guilt by association and all sorts of rumors to where a lot of these "suspects" don't gang bang at all!  But this is not the worst of it.  The Los Angeles Police department has started picking up anyone with brown skin who they see in groups of two or more and taking them down to the police station for questioning.  They stop anyone with brown skin in groups of two or more in a car, frisk them and search their car.  Some neighborhoods now have concrete barricades across streets to keep traffic out. The result of this is that children are scared to walk home with their friends for fear of being stopped and labeled a "suspected gang member" simply because they have brown skin or dress a certain way.  At school, they get pissed off at everyone fucking with them, start to loose interest in learning and get resentful of anyone in a position of authority [with good reason!].

The situation in Pico Union is one of the uglier examples of the current campaign to criminalize youth.  Race is a strong factor in "profiling" youth as gang-bangers so that the first time they bet busted by the cops for stupid shit, they are sentenced to jail time and stereotyped as a lifelong criminal simply because of their race and class.  Class because most of those being messed with live in Working Class communities where the cops think they have a free hand to mess with people because they don't expect the local politicians to complain. The tragedy in the community is that parents re being fed a line about fighting "gangs" when it is their own children who are being targeted. They are justified in fearing gangsters, but don't realize that this is not the real motive behind the gang injunctions nor the actual outcome. They realize this too late when they discover that new laws are also criminalizing parents when the cops accuse their kids of being criminals!

--- Report from Cecilia

"The problem is that in this country, being a young Chicano in a fraternal organization has been criminalized, in some cases systematically and ruthlessly. (Take a look at a book called The Zoot-Suit Riots, I can't remember the author offhand). It was never allright to be a young Chicano, emphatically expressive in culturally accented ways, the way it was allright to be young Anglo man or  woman."

 --- Esteben Garcia

"I am a 17 years old and I am a member of LA MARA SALVATRUCHA they call me muneca and I am the head leader of the girls. When I read your story it really touched me but when I see how my homies get shot and killed it makes me get  revenge and never leave my homies. I always try to change. I grew up in a christian home and at the age of fourteen I started  leading S.S.L south side locas M.S.  I wish there was more people out there encouraging the youth to get out of all this, thanks for trying."

---  La Muñeca

"During the drive, Ferndog told me that his girlfriend was waiting for him. She had run away from home two weeks ago and was living with Ferndog's brother, Carlos, who lived just across the street from his parents. Ferndog told me that she tried to call her parents once but "they don't care if
she comes home or not." He told me she was a speed freak and that she really annoyed him when she was high on metamphetamines - which was most
of the time. At any rate, Ferndog told me she was just one of his six girlfriends and he did not really care that much for her either. The problem was that  he had just found out that she was pregnant."

---  Ferndog Interview by Rich Geib

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