Living in NE LA, I always take special interest when the Times does reporting on the area’s gang problems. Although my neighborhood is a fairly safe part of Highland Park, one in which I have never felt threatened or in danger, it is unsettling know that LAPD considers the area’s Avenues gangs to be among our region’s most dangerous.
So, the first thing I read today was the front page story on the large scale law enforcement raid on a Glassell Park neighborhood yesterday.
Heavily armed police and federal agents stormed into a Glassell Park neighborhood Wednesday morning to wrest control away from a street gang — and loyalists with deep family ties to its members — that has in effect turned the sequestered swath of run-down apartments into rogue territory.
With a sweeping federal racketeering indictment, more than 500 agents, including 10 SWAT teams, arrested 28 people in an attempt to root out the Avenues gang members who have ruled the area with violence and near impunity.
Pretty intense. The targeted group is known as the Drew Street branch of the Avenues gang. The odd part of the feature is that in the primary article the overall Avenues gang is described numerically as such: “The Avenues, which police estimate has about 400 members…” A sidebar the focuses on the Drew Street branch describes its numbers as “Estimated to be 500 strong, Drew Street clique members” (Unfortunately this sidebar is not available online, so you’ll have to pick up a hardcopy and turn to A16 if you want to see for yourself.)
So somehow the estimated numbers of the subgroup are larger than the parent, which by definition should include the subgroup. Odd. Couple ideas about what’s going on here.
- “clique members,” the language used to describe Drew Street, are different than gang members. Clique’s connotations don’t quite strike me as very suitable when describing a violent street organization, but who knows maybe it’s a new vocab development.
- The police are exaggerating the numbers of the gang (either the sub group or the parent or both), but got sloppy and forgot to subordinate their numbers to the basic demands of logic. Given that a different reporter (Rich Connell) wrote the sidebar than the main article (Joe Mozingo, Sam Quinones, Molly Hennessy-Fiske), the two groups failed to coordinate and the relevant editor either missed the inconsistency or just didn’t care.
At any rate the whole thing is depressing, both as a measure of the Times’ quality control and LAPD’s integrity.
Thomas O’Brien from the U.S. Dept of Justice says that there are about 150 to 200 active Drew Street members. That would mean that perhaps as much as a third of the clique has been taken into custody. (Twenty-eight defendants were taken into custody on criminal charges during the sweep. Four were arrested on immigration charges. An additional 26 defendants named in the indictment were already incarcerated. Police are still seeking an additional 16 defendants.)The Federal charges mean long, mandatory sentences.
Margaret Arnold, News Editor, Arroyo Seco Journal
http://www.arroyosecojournal.blogspot.com/
Those number certainly make a lot more sense, though it still strikes me as odd that out of Times-reported 400 members, approximately 45% belong to to Drew Street. It’s possible, but seems rather unlikely given the Avenues and Drew Street gangs respective geographic spreads.