Mendenhall could. A 51-year-old mother of four, she had lost two sons to gang warfare in Watts, something she knew well. During the 1980s, Mendenhall was a high-ranking member of the PJ Crips, one of the oldest Crips gangs in Watts. We sat down at a booth, and Mendenhall began to talk.

“Frank was a free spirit, an African-American white boy, a hippie,” she said. “He thought he could go anywhere.” Frank, who was nicknamed “Peace,” was wrong about that. Gangs in Los Angeles don’t fly their colors the way they used to, but the rivalries persist. In the 1980s, members of the two dominant gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, flaunted their affiliation by dressing in blue (Crips) or red (Bloods), even though doing so made them targets. Today, computer databases, gang injunctions and enhanced criminal sanctions for gang-related crime have driven such obvious, outward expressions of gang affiliation underground.

Gang members now wear their colors mainly on YouTube (where they conceal their identities with bandannas) or on special occasions. As a result, a blue or red shirt no longer signifies gang membership in the way that it used to. At least, it’s not supposed to. But when Evans stepped out of a friend’s house wearing blue in a part of South Los Angeles controlled by the Swan Bloods, a member of the gang pedaling past took offense and opened fire on him. “Now they just found out they shot the wrong person,” Mendenhall said. “They say, ‘Oh, my God, we did not know who he was.’ ” Meaning: they didn’t know about me.

Apr 21, 2017. Dokapon Kingdom Wii On Pc Iso Torrent. My exam paper is about one of the biggest gang wars in the whole world: The Bloods versus The Crips. The reason I have chosen this subject is because not so many people are aware of what's going on between those two gangs. There are more gangs who are sometimes involved in this war, such as.

Mendenhall is better known in South Los Angeles as Sista Soulja, a name earned in the 1980s when Watts was practically a war zone. (Mendenhall is not to be confused with Sister Souljah, the rapper Bill Clinton made famous on the 1992 campaign trail.) The code of the streets is clear: You kill one of mine, I’ll kill one of yours. But things have changed in South L.A., somewhat. Wow Wurth Keygen Download Bandicam.

When Mendenhall’s cellphone rings a half-hour into breakfast, it’s not a PJ Crip calling to plan a counterattack; rather, it’s her favorite police officer, Sgt. Anthony Cato, who grew up near Watts. He’s calling to talk about arrangements for the funeral and the three repasts that will follow it, each of which is occurring in a different part of the city so that mourners from rival gangs won’t have to cross into each other’s territories. “O.K., O.K., listen to me,” Mendenhall tells him. She then reviews where she wants Cato to deploy his officers — these intersections, this many cars, this close to the church where the service is taking place. She even specifies their gear (“soft tactical,” meaning short-sleeve shirts and a more casual look). The goal is to provide enough of a law-enforcement presence to prevent a drive-by shooting — funerals make for tempting targets — without angering family members by overwhelming the occasion with police officers.

Satisfied, Mendenhall tells Cato she’ll see him that afternoon at the repast at Imperial Courts, a 498-unit public-housing project that has long been the PJ Crips’ home base. The Los Angeles Police Department, which for most of Mendenhall’s life has been the enemy, was now working with her — almost for her — to ensure the day was a nonviolent one.

Since 1994, violent crime in the United States has fallen by more than 40 percent. By all accounts, police departments today are more professional, less corrupt and more effective than they were 30 years ago. Yet, for a variety of reasons, minority perceptions of the police have not improved. A 2009 Pew Research Center study found that just 14 percent of African-Americans had a great deal of confidence in the proposition that their local police officers treated blacks and whites equally, compared with 38 percent of whites who thought so. “The communities that need police protection the most, trust police the least,” John Laub, the former head of the National Institute of Justice, says. “Bridging that divide is the most urgent task for American policing today.” Even the most successful police departments struggle with the perception of racial bias. For example, over the past 20 years, violent crime in New York City has fallen by 80 percent, twice the rate of decline of the nation as a whole.

According to the New York police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one way the department has driven crime down is by stopping and questioning (and sometimes frisking) large numbers of people in high-crime areas, thus deterring people from carrying weapons. In 2012, the New York Police Department conducted almost as many stops of black youths as there are black youths in the city, recovering 729 guns in the process. Nearly 60 percent of white New Yorkers approve of the tactic. Less than a quarter of black New Yorkers share that opinion. Many perceive it as racial profiling, an interpretation bolstered by recent police testimony in a lawsuit filed against the city over the practice. This perception has real-world consequences, says David M.