Gangs in L.A
Gangs can be hard to control and even harder to put an
end to. We live in a society where not only violence is committed but seen in a
daily bases. What does this mean to us? Should we keep deciding to look past
this awful mess? Citizens expect ‘someone’ to take care of it all. But who are
this people, and what are they really doing? Is it working?
Let’s take our own L.A County
into perspective. The L.A County has one of the biggest police force around but
our crime rates our still flying with the airplanes. L.A.P.D, themselves,
stated that “Gangs are not a new phenomenon” and that there was a total of
“16,398 verified violent gang crimes in the City of Los Angeles” in these last
3 years. (http://www.lapdonline.org/get_informed/content_basic_view/1396 ) The number is outrages. This
averages out to about 455 crimes a month and about 15 a day.
So what does the government
force try to do? It is said that the FBI takes on the “high end gangs into
research”. They decide to take out the main connection of the lower ‘less’
criminals: Giant drug lords, human trafficking, psychotic murders etc. A smart
idea, put it doesn’t look like it is working. What they should be doing is
tackling the base of the pyramid not the top.
It
won’t be easy, and life never is. Many cases remain unsolved because witnesses
of theses gang crimes do not wish to talk to the police enforcement or any
government forces. What these people might not understand is that we can’t help
the community if they don’t want to help enforcement. A community moves as a
whole so every single one of the citizens has to correspond to one another.
Many times there is no one to testify or help convict the people whom are being
prosecuted so they get‘off the hook’. This is what makes the investigation hard
and the judge of getting criminals off the streets difficult.
We
have to stop this. NOW. Getting these men, women, and children all labeled as
criminals and prosecuted is not going to break the endless cycle we see in
gangs. Instead of pushing this ‘criminals’ of the streets or even trying to, we
should turn them around.
Thankfully we already have many
organizations with this same mission as this one. Organizations like the YMCA,
Boys and Girls Club, and Parks and Recreation are just a few names. The L.A.
Parks and Recreation’s mission reads that they will try their best to “enrich
the lives of the residents of Los Angeles” . They carry on their plans by
giving the citizens many different activities and recreational events to
attend. This helps support the idea to “be good stewards of our environment”
and by being part of a fun full organization it makes it easy . (http://www.laparks.org/dos/dept/mission.htm) Kids can go hangout here
instead. Do activities that well help them in the future. Become better leaders
so they to can make help others be better motivated. And let’s motivate them
and give them the opportunities to go do something greater.
Motivation
that is what gets people going. Finding out what motivates you and the people
around you/ A solution to increase the help to end L.A. gang problems is to
give a word of motivation to someone. You do not have to be part of an
organization. You yourself can do this by greeting the next person you see with
a smile and a piece of motivational words. “The early bird gets the worm”,
“bring home the bacon” anything really. This will bring the community closer as
a whole. And bring the community together as one can end the lines of
boundaries these L.A. streets give us. The same streets who have caused many
pains of sorrow, grief, and deaths.
This
means that age does not matter. If one is willing to change not only his point
of view but his actions then, he can change his life in the directions that he
has chosen. Be a leader, show someone respect, be energized, and you will get
it all back from one another. Many times people feel alone. Being alone can
lead people to be driven to fit in others become emotionally unstable. Sometime
all someone needs is a smile. So we must give a smile and if we’re lucky we’ll
get one in return.(: -Maria Soria
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