What, exactly, is the rationale for establishing "sanctuary cities?"

You think in terms of your side and the other side. I don't.

You think in terms of your side and the other side. I don't.

If that same bum points a gun at me and tells me it's his crib now, I wouldn't throw him out.

But I'm not laying down with anyone.

You seem to have a problem with the notion that the absence of a vainglorious rejection isn't necessarily agreement.

Did You Know?
The overall crime rate in East Los Angeles is 69% higher than the national average.

For every 100,000 people, there are 13.14 daily crimes that occur in East Los Angeles.

East Los Angeles is safer than 10% of the cities in the United States.
In East Los Angeles you have a 1 in 21 chance of becoming a victim of any crime.

Did You Know?

The overall crime rate in South Central Los Angeles is 56% higher than the national average.

For every 100,000 people, there are 12.13 daily crimes that occur in South Cental Los Angeles.

South Central Los Angeles is safer than 24% of the cities in the California.

In South Central Los Angeles you have a 1 in 23 chance of becoming a victim of any crime.

Gang rivalry grows into race war

Over the years, the two rival gangs have battled over control of the drug trade in Florence-Firestone, an unincorporated neighborhood north of Watts.

The feud has escalated into what many residents call a race war.

It used to be that innocent bystanders were not targeted, said Chris Le Grande, pastor of Great Hope Fellowship in Faith, one of Florence-Firestone's largest black churches. "Now it's deliberate. 'I'm deliberately shooting you because of your color.' "

On Tuesday, the U.S. attorney's office announced a sweeping indictment against more than 60 members of Florencia 13, accusing the Latino gang of waging a violent campaign to drive out African American rivals. Once primarily black, the working class community of 60,000 today is mostly Latino.

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

But I'm not laying down with anyone.

You seem to have a problem with the notion that the absence of a vainglorious rejection isn't necessarily agreement.

What do ya think, eh, Finn? You figure we need to become a "sanctuary country," or what?

There is a line between between reasonable debate and bigoted extremism.

I had been writing about gangs in Los Angeles since 2004, when, after 10 years as a writer in Mexico, I’d returned home to take a job with the Los Angeles Times. My reporting took me into scores of working-class neighborhoods and cities within Southern California, places like Pacoima, Watts, Azusa, Hawaiian Gardens, Florence-Firestone, and Harbor Gateway.

Gangs ravaged all these locales. Walls were covered with graffiti. Shootings were constant. In many of these neighborhoods, Latino gangs had taken to attacking and killing random black civilians, turning themselves into the leading regional perpetrators of race-hate crime.

Several years ago, I spent a couple of days in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood, in an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County, interviewing some Florencia 13 gang members. One nearby garage was never free of graffiti for more than a few minutes a week. (This was the amount of time it took after the graffiti clean-up truck left for the 76th Street clique of Florencia 13 to re-deface the thing.)

In the 1990s, members of the Mexican Mafia ordered Latino street gangs to stop drive-by shootings. They also ordered gangs to start taxing drug dealers in their neighborhoods and kicking the proceeds to Mexican Mafia members and their associates. That system created the first region-wide crime syndicate in Southern California history, turning scruffy neighborhood street gangs into tax collectors and enforcers. (As M is the 13th letter of the alphabet, many gangs took the number 13 as a symbol of their obedience to the Mexican Mafia.)

Since 2006, there have been more than two dozen RICO indictments in Southern California, targeting Florencia 13, Hawaiian Gardens (HG-13), Azusa 13, Five-Deuce Broadway Gangster Crips, Pueblo Bishop Bloods, and many more of the region’s most entrenched and violent gangs. Most of the indictments have dozens of defendants; the Florencia case had 102, while Hawaiian Gardens, in 2009, was one of the largest street-gang indictments in U.S. history, with 147.

Meanwhile, Latino home-buyers have been replacing black populations in Inglewood, Compton, and South Central Los Angeles. Like many other migrant groups, blacks have moved out, to the Inland Empire, 50 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, or to Las Vegas, or to the South. Compton, the birthplace of gangster rap, was once 73 percent black and is now nearly 70 percent Latino. This has often meant that Latino gangs replaced black gangs, and, while that might seem like nothing more than one violent group displacing another, the central role of the Mexican Mafia has often made these newer gangs easier to prosecute.