Quotes About Gangs

Gangs are a part of living in Los Angeles, but you can exist in Inglewood or Culver City or anywhere else, without joining one.

West Side Story was terribly important because of the style of the dancing and the gangs of New York.

We left my birthplace, Brooklyn, New York, in 1939 when I was 13. I enjoyed the ethnic variety and the interesting students in my public school, P.S. 134. The kids in my neighborhood were only competitive in games, although unfriendly gangs tended to define the limits of our neighborhood.

You live by the gun and knife, and die by the gun and knife.

I thought the musical aspect of 'Freak Dance' was a good contrast to how dancers always try to come off as really tough in those movies - they're trying to literally come off as gangs like as if the Crips and the Bloods are also dancing in addition or instead of fighting with guns and knives and stuff.

Whether it is kids carrying knives because they are in gangs or kids carrying knives because they are afraid of gangs, it is the gang culture that underpins the problem.

Part of the reason young people are getting involved with gangs, leading to the use of guns and knives, is not the lack of stop and search but the individualistic, consumerist society we live in.

Having robbed children of any sense that their Father is in Heaven and that they are His creation, we then launched an experiment in raising them without earthly fathers too. Having neither a Father in heaven or a father in the home, many young men make gangs their families.

The truth is that those who join gangs - more often than not they are young men in their later teens - often do come from the most difficult family backgrounds, from an environment where they feel neglected and unwanted. Gang membership can bring a perverse sense of belonging which they may not have ever got at home.

I want the violence among young people in this country to stop - particularly gang violence.

We're trying to challenge the gangs, not by repression, but by competing to get the young people to our side.

I founded Homeboy Industries in 1988 after I buried my first young person killed in our streets because of gang violence.

What people don't understand is joining a gang ain't bad, it's cool, it's fine. When you in the hood, joining a gang it's cool because all your friends are in the gang, all your family's in the gang. We're not just killing people every night, we're just hanging out, having a good time.

Gangs are bastions of conditional love, and one of the ways to counteract it is to offer community, which will always trump gang, and that's what happens at Homeboy Industries.

You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way! And that's how you get Capone.

In Los Angeles, the gang capital of the world, we have 1,100 gangs and 120,000 gang members so it is a daunting, complex social dilemma.

Back when I was growing up, gangs wasn't heavy. We was solo thugging. When we got money on our own, the hood got money. It wasn't about colors or a certain name when I was growing up. We wasn't doing no gangs. But as the generations change, things change.

I would hope that government officials have a healthy respect for the complexity of the gang problem. They should never lose sight of the fact that there are human beings involved. There is no single solution.

I know two L.A.s. Half my life was around the house my folks had for 46 years at 3rd and Norton. The other half was in Boyle Heights on the Eastside, working with gang members.

I work with gang members, and I feel a kind of affinity and gift, even. But who would've thunk it, you know? I mean, I didn't anticipate it.

If we were to take EarthBound's early hours as material evidence of Shigesato Itoi's impressions of American culture, we would have to consider cruel parents, small-town gangs, abusive cops, weak-willed politicians, usurious property owners, and murderous religious cults as the case. This does not seem inaccurate.

Anyone who knows gangs knows that lawmakers cannot conceive of a law that would lead a hard-core gang member to 'think twice.'

Already this war on gangs in California is taking money from universities to build prisons, and the universities have some clout.

My parents were laborers so we lived on South Park, which was a low-income region of Seattle. You had a choice - you either joined or formed a gang or you let others bully you.