Thanks to the participant who broached this subject I think I'll write to Thomas Thompson who is the SAFE representative for my neighborhood. Surely by now the Gang Strike Force has a pretty good idea of how to detect the presence and growth of gang activity in a neighborhood. And we block club members who are involved in CCP/SAFE will want to learn about gang detection. No neighborhood wants to be oblivious to this activity until the day when someone dies in the crossfire. We want to add hundreds of eyes to the cruising prowl cars so that they can PREVENT these tragic crimes. -------------------------------------- The gang discussion is interesting and a vital one for Minneapolis at this time.
But drugs don't cause gangs. They merely provide a particularly violent activity in which the gangs can participate. Because of the draconian philosophy toward drugs by all levels of government, law enforcement uses no subtlety in dealing with gangs once they get the notion that gangs are about drugs. Before there was crack, before there was the war on cocaine, there were gangs. Leonard Bernstein wrote a score for a play on the subject. It wasnt a new phenomenon when he wrote the score. Gangs are about living in a chaotic, dangerous society. When government cannot guarantee safety, people attempt to guarantee it themselves. When individuals are at risk, then individuals combine until they find enough power that it is dangerous to attack them. That is why Thomas Hobbes says we have a social contract. Family is one key to security in the world, but society is hostile to family in many ways. For one thing, it thinks so LITTLE of family that it carelessly takes the ability of breadwinners away from them, as if to say that practically anything is more important than keeping families together. Heck, in slavery days, it was considered a PROPERTY right to break up families and sell off the pieces. That I think is why we have gangs. For some people, it is simply the only key to a sense of safety. We know that, in general, law enforcement has not treated the populations from which gangs mostly come as worth protecting, especially in the cities where the large gangs started. Well, gee people, if the death of an ethnic population is trivial to society, where do the members of that population GO for its protection? You can suppress gangs, but so long as you don't provide a superior alternative, they will come right back. ===== Jim Mork -- Cooper Neighborhood ________________________________ Help stop spam -- Join SpamCon Foundation, http://www.spamcon.org __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
