Los Angeles has long been notorious for its gangs. But the threat of the problem is reaching a new level, according to a June bbc News report. It quoted a former Crips gang leader’s as saying that he fears L.A.’s new crop of gangsters because they no longer operate within any moral framework.
“We should be very, very afraid,” responded Connie Rice, a civil-rights lawyer from L.A. (ibid.). Gangsters are gaining power that is hard for law enforcement to control; gangs no longer back off when police officers are near. They now even target the police. “We are now seeing the ambushing of cops by gangsters, and we should be panicking,” said Ms. Rice. It’s almost to the point where the criminals no longer fear the law, but the law department fears the criminals.
Scandals within the Los Angeles Police Department (lapd) since the early 1990s—such as the Rodney King trial and subsequent riots and the Rampart Division corruption in 1999—have chipped away at the authority of the police. These highly publicized racial events have sapped the will of the lapd to fight back in many cases. Gangsters took note of the failing power. And since many L.A. residents and gangsters don’t like what they see as the police’s racial profiling, the weakening of the lapd means payback time.
Add to this that there don’t seem to be enough badges to strike fear into the gangs anymore. In New York, which has a much lower murder rate than L.A., there is about one officer for every 200 residents. L.A. has about half of that ratio—one to 400.
Where is this all leading? Gerald Flurry, Trumpet editor in chief, has predicted that many major American cities will soon face this same authority breakdown, violence and rioting (request our free booklet Ezekiel—The End-Time Prophet).
For more on the declining power of U.S. law enforcement, see our May 2000 article “The Tarnished Badge” under Issue Archives at www.theTrumpet.com.