Sometimes I don’t know which I find more gobsmacking. That California, as different as it is from the other states in size, geography, economy, and demographics could be a model for the balance of the country or when people don’t understand the implications of their own arguments. At Pacific Standard Magazine Sam Quinones explains how California has reduced its gang problem. Here’s the slug:
Los Angeles gave America the modern street gang. Groups like the Crips and MS-13 have spread from coast to coast, and even abroad. But on Southern California’s streets they have been vanishing. Has L.A. figured out how to stop the epidemic it set loose on the world?
It’s an interesting article and one I’d encourage you to read in full.
However, I don’t think Mr. Quinones appreciates the full implications of his argument. He paints a picture of gang culture as being born of the immigrant experience:
Literature about street gangs in the United States dates back at least to the 19th century, when diverse groups of immigrants began settling en masse in the tenements of New York. The reformer and muckraker Jacob Riis, who spent decades among the city’s poor, saw the gang as a temporary product of dislocation, something that “appears in the second generation, the first born upon the soil—a fighting gang if the Irishman is there with his ready fist, a thievish gang if it is the East Side Jew—and disappears in the third,†as he wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1899.
In Southern California, street gangs had a later start, and many histories trace them to the 1920s, when groups of Mexican American teenagers began to band together in shared ethnic alienation. California’s early Chicano gangs usually restricted their violence to the use of fists, chains, and knives. Guns were rare, and shootings were seen as unmanly. Black gangs, which began to form following a great migration of African Americans to Los Angeles after the Second World War, were also subdued in comparison to their later incarnations.
and then proceeds at some length to explain the evolution of Southern California’s approach to police work and how that has affected Southern California gangs.
It seems to me there is an obvious counter-argument. It may be that Southern California’s experience with gang has little to do with policing and everything to do with immigration. According to the Pew Research Center (see the graph on page 9) immigration from Mexico (the source of most of Southern California’s immigration) peaked in 1999 and has been declining sharply since then. In other words it might be the case that Southern California gangs are seeing precisely the development outlined above, we are now somewhere between the second generation and third generation, and the clearest way to control gang violence, at least in the long term, is by controlling immigration.
But this is where the difference between California and the rest of the country comes into play. California’s black population is about 6.5%. That’s about the same as Rhode Island or Kansas and a lot different from the national population of about 12.5%.
I think that it’s obvious that urban black gangs (the kind we have in Chicago) are completely different from immigrant gangs and I suspect that they’re different from Mexican-American gangs. I’m not sure much can be generalized from Southern California to Chicago.
As I see it street gangs are not a product of the immigrant experience but more generally a product of social dysfunction. The social dysfunction in Southern California is driven by immigration and an ongoing stream of new immigrants while the social dysfunction here in Chicago has both external causes, racism, and internal causes as Pat Moynihan pointed out in The Negro Family: the Case for National Action a half century ago.
Fifty years later many of the things that Pat Moynihan cautioned about in the Moynihan Report are occurring within the non-black population as well as the black population and it will be interesting in a coldblooded sort of way whether we see a rise in the number of native white street gangs in coming years.
