Metropolitan Crime Myths*Jack Katz, June 8, 2001

for David Halle, ed., NY/LA book.

* Acknowledgments: The germ of this paper was presented atthe UCLA Neiman conference of 1999, to the Criminal JusticeReading Group at UCLA, at the Oñati Institute for theSociology of Law in 1997, and as the Fortunoff lecture atNYU Law School in 1998. One outgrowth was “The Gang Myth,”(pp. 171-187 in Social Dynamics of Crime and Control, S.Karstedt and K-D. Bussmann, eds. Oxford, UK and Portland,Oregon: Hart. 2000), from which a few passages areduplicated here. A version closer to the present mutationwas discussed at the Law and Society Center at UC, Berkeleyin 2001. Suggestions at various points along the way fromJeffery Fagan, Malcolm Feeley, Joan Howarth, Robert Kagan,Mark Kleiman, Eric Monkkonen, Harry Scheiber, DavidSklansky, Jonathan Zasloff, and Franklin Zimring wereparticularly helpful. Curtis Jackson-Jacobs and Sal Zerilliprovided essential and creative research assistance. Thispaper was prepared while I was a Fellow at the Center forAdvanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. I thank the Centerfor its support.

Introduction

Over the past twenty years, two very different storieshave dominated the popular understandings of crime in NewYork and Los Angeles. To judge from the major metropolitannewspapers and the stated views of political and communityleaders, LA has been plagued by gangs, and when lawenforcement has tried to respond to the problem, the resultshave been worse than simply ineffective. In 1992, therelease of the verdict acquitting LA policemen on charges ofbeating Rodney King set off an episode of urban anarchy; inretrospect, earlier anti-gang law enforcement crackdowns inthe late 1980s and early 1990s were seen as contributingsubstantially to its causes [Christopher, 1991 #3129]. Aseries of subsequent scandals and reports of disorganizationin law enforcement led to the replacement of two chiefs ofpolice and the loss of elected office of two successiveheads of the LA County District Attorney’s office (LA DA). As of this writing, in spring 2000, the LA Police Department(LAPD) and the LA DA’s office remain mired in revelationsthat anti-gang officers in the Rampart and other divisionsof the LAPD regularly stole and sold drugs, and on occasioneven shot and framed alleged gang members [Parks, 2000#3127] [Chemerinsky, 2000 #3128]. While crime declined inLA in the 1990s, virtually noone has seriously suggestedthat local law enforcement deserves the credit.

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In New York in recent years, the media and politicalleaders have not attributed crime to youth gangs but to adiffuse culture of chaos, and the police department, closelycontrolled by the mayor, has been seen as extraordinarilysuccessful in reducing crime through tight professionalmanagement of police personnel. Notorious instances ofpolice abuse have occurred, but in contrast to theexperience in LA, they have been resolved relatively quicklythrough locally organized prosecutions. And, whilesuspicions of racism and brutality haunt the NYPD, NewYork’s mayor, police chiefs, and local prosecutors haveenjoyed widespread support and enviable professionalreputations. New York’s police leadership has beendisseminating its management philosophy throughout thecountry and, indeed, the world [Bratton, 1998 #2502].1 NewYork’s Mayor Giuliani, credited by the usually reserved NewYork Times for having produced a “marvel” of law enforcement[Silverman, 1999 #2708], p. 3., was easily reelected in 1997and was set to run for U.S. Senate when health problemsintervened.

Judging from media reports, popular opinion, politicaldiscourse and the institutional cultures surrounding policedepartments, it would seem that the fundamentals of crimeand law enforcement in the two largest metropolitan areas inthe U.S. must be strikingly different. But if we look atcrime rates and the routine realities of law enforcementover the last 15 years, the differences evaporate. Theoverall picture is one of basic similarity colored bydifferences which do not consistently support either theunderstandings in New York or the perspectives in LosAngeles that are conveyed by media, popular culture, and lawenforcement leaders.

The contrast between the divergent portraitsrepresented in popular cultures and the similar histories ofcriminal violence and police activity in the two cities areso extreme as to warrant an inquiry into metropolitan crimemyths. By characterizing the views of crime and lawenforcement in the two coastal cities as myths, I do notmean to assert only that they are fundamentally wrong. Myth, a concept familiar in anthropology and historicaltheology but unfortunately usually heard only as a summarycriticism when voiced in application to contemporary Westernsocieties, is a useful technical term in the analysis ofculture.

Three features are salient in assessing whether a

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belief is a myth. First, myths are not necessarily false;they are ideas about matters that, under current states ofevidence and by the use of the logic of empirical research,cannot be established as true or false. Second, myths arenot just guesses about the unknown; they are beliefs thatresonate deeply because they address immediate existentialconcerns which they would resolve with presumptions. Third,myths are not just emotionally evocative fantasies aboutcentral matters; they are profoundly consequential for thedistribution of power in society.2

The sharp differences between LA and New York3 in theirstories about crime and law enforcement call for at leastthree inquiries. First we need to document and reveal thesystematic patterns in how crime and law enforcement aredifferentially interpreted in the two cities. Second, weshould look at the evidence of crime and law enforcementactivity independently of media commentary, political spinand police claims, in order to analyze the patterns ofdifference and similarity in the two cities. When we findthat the myths are powerfully contradicted by the twometropolitan histories of crime and law enforcement, we areled to a third question. If patterns of crime and lawenforcement cannot explain differences in the popularcultures that have emerged to interpret crime in LA and NewYork, what does? The evidence bearing on this question isnot as neatly organized as are statistics on crime andpolice activity, nor as ready-at-the-fingertips as are thepublications of major metropolitan newspapers. But threecritical factors can at least be suggested in this briefspace: different immigration experiences, the structure ofthe two criminal justice systems, and the parochial concernsof metropolitan crime news.

Overall we find that to explain differences in thestories told about crime and law enforcement in LA and NewYork, we must look at institutional and contextual factorsthat shape the generation of popular culture in the tworegions. There are vast institutional stakes involved insustaining a presumption that something as telling aboutcollective life as crime must tell a fundamentally uniquestory in each city. In the end we are left intrigued abouta larger question, whether the more basic myth that isshaping metropolitan crime myths is that NY and LA arefundamentally different metropolitan areas.

1. Crime news in New York and LA

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Newspapers in New York and Los Angeles have promulgatedmany similar themes about crime and law enforcement inrecent years: a terrifying rise of criminal violence in thelate 1980s, amazing declines in the 1990s, a concentrationof violence among youth and minorities, and stunninginstances of police brutality. But closer inspectionreveals patterned differences.

In each city’s news, crime has been portrayed with anorganizational character that is juxtaposed against thecharacter of the organization of law enforcement; but therelationship between crime and official control in each cityhas been the obverse of the other. In New York, crime hasbeen depicted as produced chaotically, with law enforcementagencies portrayed as professionally managed. In LosAngeles, crime has been attributed significantly toorganized street gangs, with law enforcement described aschaotic, professionally compromised, and strugglingunsuccessfully with its own organizational disorder. If wetake the coverage by the major city newspapers as anindication of popular culture, the general, everyday,presumptive understandings in the two urban areas appear toform a dialectic of dialectics.

“Organization and Chaos in Images of Street Violence”

In Los Angeles, gangs have long been the leitmotif forunderstanding crime.4 In the early ‘90s, the Los AngelesTimes used “gang” in its headline or first paragraph torefer to local street youth groups at about ten times therate as did the New York Times. The relationship diminishedsomewhat through the decade, but a recent check shows thatthe comparison remains extreme.

Table 1: Stories on “Gangs” in Metropolitan Newspapers*

1990 & 1991 1997 & 1998 Sum 4 years

LA Times 1393 775 2168

NY Times 136 176 312

* Based on a search in Lexus/Nexus for the word "gang" inthe Headline and Lead Paragraph of all articles in the 1990,1991, 1997 and 1998 New York Times and Los Angeles Times,Home Edition.5

At first glance, “gang” suggests that some form oforganization is at least partially governing crime. When we

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look beyond the raw counts and examine how the twonewspapers use “gang,” sub-themes emerge to enrich thecontrast. In New York “gang” more often takes on the natureof a verb, while in LA’s constructions “gang” functions morelike a noun. New York stories may be of offenders who “gangup” on someone, or who, in an adverbial phrase, attack “in agang.” Note that when used as a verb or adverb, “gang”describes a kind of attack but does not conjure upexplanatory ideas or suggest why the attack occurred. Evenwhen “gang” is used grammatically as the subject, as in “Agang of youths attacked...,” the reference to gangs oftenfunctions as a description of the kind of action rather thanas a cause.

In LA’s crime stories, gangs are postured as entitiesthat pre-exist criminal victimizations, providing themotivation that explains them. There are great numbers ofLA crime stories of the following sort (all taken from theLos Angeles Times index of its 1991 editions). “MarthaNaverette....became the 100th victim of street-gang violencein greater Los Angeles during 1991.” Here the victim was notnecessarily “ganged up” upon but the message is that streetgangs caused her death.

“Gang” in LA’s crime culture is used as an adjective inways that indicate not how violence was done but why: crimesare characterized as “gang confrontations,” described aspart of “gang warfare,” labeled “gang-related” or as “drive-by” shootings, even when the only direct evidence reportedis that of an assailant acting alone or of a victim’sinjuries. “Retaliation” is another common way that the gangidea implies an explanation. As situationally specificbehaviors, retaliatory shootings may look no different thanother shootings; the message is that they have pre-situationally formed motives.

Sometimes particular gangs (Bloods, Crips, White Fence,18th Street, Trucha Salvadoreña) are named as the symbolsthat violence honors, but even when they are not, classicformulas such as “gang-infested area of Los Angeles” impliesthat gangs exist as live creatures, here as vermin, withongoing destructive appetites. Just mentioning that avictim was “gang-related,” or that attackers were gangmembers brings an explanatory thrust: “one youth was shot todeath and two were wounded by gang members....” “Gang” hereis a powerfully resonant part of a noun-phrase; reading suchdescriptions we already have images of why the eventoccurred: because revenge, or territory-claiming or even

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senseless attacks are the sorts of things gangs do.

When there is no description of “ganging up” or someother distinctive way that violence was situationallyenacted, the assertion that, in any case, the crime was“gang” violence suggests that there was organizationindependent of the moment of victimization. Note how thisformulation can ironically work a lack of evidence so thatit satisfies the classic form of causal explanation. Inorder to avoid tautology, explanatory variables should be“independent,” i.e., they should vary or be shown to existindependent of the dependent variables that they wouldexplain. “Ganging up” doesn’t explain crime because it doesnot imply organization independent of the situation ofvictimization. It tells how the crime was done by not why.But an article asserting that situationally undistinguishedviolence was by a “gang” can suggest why, because it impliesthe existence of an entity that transcends moments ofviolence. Such a report can lend a hard sense of causalityto an account of crime just because it does not describe howthe crime was done. In LA, the very fact that there is nosituational evidence of distinctive gang activity supportsrather than undermines the gang myth.

“Gang” news organizes the reader’s otherwise chaoticperception of crime. What is available for reporting onviolence is usually mute result and brute fact, mostcommonly, that someone was shot. By suggesting ganginvolvement, what otherwise might be nothing more than anaked, unnerving description of victimization is immediatelyencased in explanatory imagery. If it does not put readersat ease, the gang connection at least suggests that orderand discipline is available for their understanding. Oftenno offender is identified, either in the LA or New Yorkstories on crime. But as the news in LA uses “gang” incrime stories, even if readers do not know who to target,they learn what to aim at: those gangs! New York storiesabout attacks by a “gang of youths” do not offer the readereven that shred of abstraction for orienting and groundinganxieties.

If New York does not use the street youth gang as acentral trope for conceptualizing its problems of urbancriminal violence, what does it use? Significantly, youthsand street violence also loom large in New York’s crime newscoverage. But if the hermeneutic lenses for perceivingyouth crime in Los Angeles come in a variety of gang colors,in New York the prevailing interpretive posture at the end

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of the 20th century has been a caricature of existentialphilosophy. News coverage in New York stresses therandomness, wildness, and senselessness of crime. Imagesof chaos prevail.

One of the most famous street crimes in the nation inthe early 1990s was the rape and near-fatal violent assaultof a young, female, Wall Street professional who was joggingin Central Park. This attack was characterized as a“wilding,” a term introduced into popular culture by thisapplication. In early 1990 (January 19), the New York Timesfound it advisable to provide a definition of wilding as aphenomenon in which brazen urban youths rampage throughstreets. In this case the attack had been a group effort,the attackers had been youths, many of the assailants hadprior involvements with criminal law enforcement, and theattackers had associated with each other in theirneighborhood before the event. Yet no effort was made tocharacterize the offenders as members of a gang.

In another story from 1990, the New York Times reportedthat “loosely organized groups of young people who rob, rapeor kill for money or fun are on the rise in New York City”(December 11, B, 3). Just when the facts would seem toinvite a gang label, the interpretation turns sharply away,leaving an overall impression not of social organization butof youth running in, around, and over superficial symbols oforder. In other stories, the New York public learns thatstabbings in Central Park are the work of a random, derangedkiller (June 23, I, 1), that there is a wave of brutal,random crime in New York City (Aug. 9, B,1 1990), that theincrease in the murder rate in 1990 was caused by drug-related random violence (April 23, A,1 and Sep. 6, B,1),and, to quote newspaper pidgin English, “New York City likeWild West” (August 6, B, 1). For their crime mythology,Manhattan writers here favor the symbolic world of thefrontier, of humanity forced by the accumulated,incomprehensible forces of history to live on a territorywhich, while old, has evolved beyond the reaches ofcivilization.

The suggestion of chaos is heightened in stories about“drug gangs,” which, despite the intersection of youth,collective associations, and illegal drug marketseverywhere, are rare in LA’s crime news. “Gangs” in LA areyouth “street” gangs, associations that form aroundcollective symbolic identities, which are understood to becompelling for adolescents and young adult men independent

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of specific acquaintance fights, assaults on strangers, ordrug sales. But in New York, the imagery is of drug marketsgiving rise to vicious collaborations to exploit illegalopportunities. Thus even where there are gangs in NewYork’s crime news, they tend to be indicators of theinherently chaotic realities of contraband markets.

One can already see how the style of reporting criminalviolence in New York leads the public to look in wilddesperation to criminal justice officials, not only forpractical action but also for cognitive direction. Thisinclination is promoted more directly when “gang” news isabout the “mafia” or “organized crime” gang, e.g.: “Lawenforcement officials said yesterday that Vincent Gigante'sracketeering conviction was unlikely to immediately weakenthe Genovese crime family's powerful....”6 Note the relianceon law enforcement expertise. We learn about “crimefamilies” with the assistance of law enforcement expertise.When New York crime is not described as chaotic but as organizationally produced, as in news on “organized crime,”professional criminal justice officials are already at leastpartially in cognitive control, even if the “family’s” powerremains unchecked.

In LA, the contrast of organized street gangs and thedisorganized law enforcement system opens a distinctivecognitive space for intermediary actors. One genre of crimestories reports the efforts of “neighborhood organizations”and “community groups” to mobilize efforts against gangviolence. Representative stories include: the head of the“Community Youth Gang Services Project” denies that they areoperating as informants for police; United NeighborhoodsOrganization mobilizes against gang violence.

Another intermediating organization often mentioned inLA gang stories is the school: A “31-year-old ‘gangcounselor’ suffers anxiety attacks from stressful occupationbut refuses to give up.” Vandalism does $27,000 damage toan elementary school, and gang graffiti is found in thebathrooms. A “fight erupted between rival gangs anescalated into a brawl between black and Latino students” atInglewood High School.

In contrast, apart from the small number and specialcategory of “organized crime” stories, the “drug gang” storyin New York stresses barbarism, a set of people beyond thereach of sympathetic efforts at social control.

They called themselves the Cut Throat Crew, and the

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authorities say that in one horrific incident, the druggang more than lived up its name -- by beating, tryingto rape and then throwing a customer off an apartmentroof to her death. When the gang was not demanding payment from itscustomers, investigators said, it was solidifyingcontrol of a $150,000-a-week heroin empire on the LowerEast Side, squelching competition through violence andusing children as young as 14 to ferry drugs tocustomers.7

One would not expect to find “counselors” employed to workwith New York’s “drug gangs” or mafia “families.” The NewYork conception of local gang problems does not set thestage for innovative programs of intervention throughschools, neighborhood associations, and city-fundedalternative activity programs such as night basketball andsummer camps; it cries out to law enforcement agencies as adesperate community’s last chance.

“Organization and Chaos in Images of Law Enforcement”

LA’s gangs shade into youth culture, and thus thesocial worlds of schooling. LA’s crime news thus carves outa large role for amateur intermediaries, such as communitygroups, and non-law enforcement professionals, for exampleschool counselors. The trope of the non-law enforcementintermediary amplifies the dialectic between gang-organizedyouth and the police. The work of the intermediariesimplicitly casts the police as, at best, irrelevant and, atworst, through alienating “at-risk” youth, routinelycounterproductive, even when they are not racist andcorrupt.

The cognitive space that is filled in LA withneighborhood groups, charitable and publicly funded anti-gang programs, school counselors and school-sponsoredconflict resolution sessions, in New York is filled byreferences to the multiple law enforcement offices that areconstantly supervising disorder, each poised within itsparticular jurisdictional boundaries to sweep down and pickup some of the bad guys. Robert Morganthau, who long agobecame a venerable institution as Manhattan’s districtattorney, is credited with descending on the “Cut-ThroatGang” of drug dealers. “Strike Force” agents, from the FBIand prosecution offices of the Justice Department, track thedestinies of mob families. A police expert on Chinatowngangs, commenting on the background to acts of violence byyoung men in the “Flying Dragons,” explains the gang’s links

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with economic power groups in Chinatown, immigrant labormanagement, and home country “tongs.”

The contrasting images of the etiology of criminalviolence in New York and LA have been complemented byopposite images given to law enforcement over the lastdecade. In Los Angeles in the 1990s, the image of organizedstreet gangs was first used to create an inverse portrait ofa disorganized police force in the context of the spring,1992 “rebellion/riot” following the verdict in theprosecution of LAPD officers for beating Rodney King. Earlynews reports attributed the outbreak of the anarchy tomarauding bands of gang youth. Indeed, the LAPD set up thisinterpretation by its dramatic “gang sweeps” in the late1980s and early 1990s. Drawing personnel from distantbureaus, the LAPD assembled large forces that on givennights entered south Central, low income African-Americanneighborhoods in a kind of blitzing action, arresting scoresof young men based on perceptions of their gang affiliation. For lack of evidence of criminal behavior other than curfewviolations, the vast majority were released after a night ortwo in jail. When the verdict acquitting LAPD officers ofbeating King was announced in far off Simi Valley, itinstantly reverberated through south Central, and young menwere soon seen on t.v., vandalizing stores, settingbuildings on fire, moving in carloads through the center ofthe city, beating non-African Americans whom they haddragged out of cars. The most famous videotaped streetassault was carried out by a set of young men including“Football Williams,” who was identified as a gang member andwas later arrested in a publicity event personally led byLAPD chief Daryl Gates.

In a report scheduled to be released on May 1, 1992but, since May 1 turned out unexpectedly to be the 3rd dayof the King riots, delayed several weeks, Ira Reiner, thenDistrict Attorney of Los Angeles, opened with thedeclaration:

As the 20th century draws to a close, Los Angeles isgenerally acknowledged to have the worst street gangproblem in the United States, if not the world (Reiner1992, 1).

According to this report, every other black adolescent in LAwas a member of a street gang.

The “King riots” added to the disgrace that the much-aired videotape of the police beating of Rodney King hadalready brought the LAPD. An investigating commission was

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established and its report damned the policedepartment[Christopher, 1991 #3129] . Gates was removed aschief (although his removal had to await his decision toretire), a new chief was brought in from Philadelphia and,after his penchant for accepting “comps” in Las Vegas waspublicized, his contract was not renewed. For years thedepartment was depicted in LA politics and news as in chaos. Later in the 1990s, when a veteran LAPD African-Americanpolice officer took over as chief, it appeared for a briefperiod that the LAPD was on the way toward tight internaldiscipline and a recovery of professional respectability. Then, as the ironic result of an internal investigationlaunched by the new chief, Bernard Parks, the “Rampart”scandal broke. It was revealed that LAPD officers hadextorted money from drug dealers, had themselves dealtdrugs, and, apparently in connection with these crimes, hadshot citizens and covered up the shootings by framing thevictims. The events initially reported occurred in theRampart division, although similar allegations laterappeared in other areas of the city. Notably, the officersinvolved had been acting in “anti-gang” units. As thescandal grew more intense, reports began to appear ofwidespread abuse of youths’ rights by anti-gang officers.

Thus the dialectical relationship in LA in the 1990sbetween images of gang-organized criminality andorganizationally undisciplined police officers was not amatter of coincidence. The former image was the solidfoundation on which the latter image was rapidlyconstructed. An obverse dialectic emerged at more or lessthe same time in New York. Just as the perception in LAabout the nature of crime as organized by gangs led to thedisorganization of law enforcement, in New York theperception of a baffling chaos as the breeding ground ofcrime shaped the organization of law enforcement. Thedialectical relation between the construction of crime andlaw enforcement was no more coincidental in New York thanwas the opposite dialectic in LA.

Under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the NYPD became famousfor a “zero tolerance” policy which in police rhetoric andpopular understanding meant two things. One was that, ifthe law did not mandate less punishment for first offenses,neither would the police. The second was that minorinfractions would be treated as seriously as major crimes. New Yorkers were treated to a series of stories describingthe NYPD not only punishing homeless men for urinating inpublic but also arresting well-dressed Wall Street workers

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for smoking marijuana in public. Property was seized fromunlicensed street vendors; trespassers and “squeegee men”were arrested; parking law scofflaws had their carsimpounded and sold. Earlier, the Transit police had mounteda campaign against graffiti, and for the first time inyears, subway trains began to appear free of graffiti. William Bratton, the chief of the transit police, rode onhis subterranean success to become Mayor Giuliani’s firsthead of the NYPD.

Chaos, not just crime, was being attacked. Citing the“broken windows” theory promoted by university academics,James Q. Wilson and George Kelling [Wilson, 1982 #2999],Giuliani and his police chiefs argued that signs of disorderregularly escalated through a series of steps into seriouscriminal violence. Broken windows, graffiti, abandoned carsleft for weeks on the streets, were interpreted by streetcriminals as signs that an area was not being supervised,and thus as a license to use areas criminally, for exampleto hold drug markets openly. Contraband drug markets inturn bred chaotic struggles over distribution rights thatled to violence.

But the “broken windows” theory was only the streetside of the alleged transformation of law enforcement. Within the NYPD, the leadership proclaimed a revolution inmanagement style, and it was this new internal policy,particularly a tightening of discipline within thesupervisory ranks, that was said to have given effect to“zero tolerance” policies [Bratton, 1998 #2621]. Withinpolice administration, the anti-disorder effort was thoughtto decrease crime not by garnering a new-found respect fororder in the hearts of the masses but through more practicalmeans. When the police stopped young men on minorinfractions, such as jumping subway turnstiles, they wouldcheck them for outstanding warrants, unpaid fines, and theywould frisk them for concealed weapons. It became riskier tocarry guns, and the suppression of spontaneous gun violence,it was reasonably thought, would significantly reducehomicide.

The mayor and the police leadership took great pride inclaiming that they had reduced crime not simply by beingtough with all miscreants but by exercising sophisticateddiscipline within police ranks. Computer tracking of crimetrends began in this period, and the top echelon of NYPDleaders began holding review meetings with subordinates inwhich they would be held accountable for knowing what the

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data showed about their areas of responsibility and forallocating their personnel in response. On one side, theaudience for police leaders was the bad guys on the street,on the other, perhaps more personally important side, it waselite business school trained CEOs on whom they modeledtheir administration. [Bratton, 1998 #2502] [Silverman, 1999#2708], p. 89.

If we compare the experiences of the two cities withpolice brutality cases in the 1990s, we get a soberingreminder that we are dealing with mythology. One mightthink that the greater public respect, apparent managerialdiscipline, and organizational unity of the NYPD made adifference in lowering the level of police brutality, butthere is no clear evidence to that effect. As the LAPD wasrocked in the 1990s by publicity over the brutalization ofRodney King and of latino “gang” members by Rampart Divisionofficers, NYPD officers were revealed to have engaged inmind-boggling brutality against Abner Louima and AmadouDiallo. Louima, a black Haitian immigrant, had beenarrested for a brawl outside a nightclub. In a Brooklynprecinct station, a white officer “shoved a broken-off broomhandle up his rectum, then waved the feces-covered stickunder his nose and threatened to kill him...” [Morganthau,1999 #3124] p. 42. Amadou Diallo was killed in a completelygratuitous, tidal wave assault by four white members of “thecity’s élite Street Crime Unit” (SCU) [Chua-Eoan, 2000#3123] p. 26. Diallo, a West African immigrant, was at thetime isolated, unarmed, and innocently engaged. The policefired 41 bullets at him in a matter of seconds on theapparent perception that he was acting evasively and pullingout a gun (it was a wallet). Addressing more routinepractices of the NYPD, the New York State Attorney General,issued a probing critique suggesting racism in stop-and-frisk practices [Spitzer, 1999 #2930].

But there are notable differences in the socialmeanings and organizational implications of police scandalsin the two cities. In New York, even when extreme policebrutality has surfaced, there has been no parallel in recentyears to the LA riots following the verdict in theprosecution of officers in the Rodney King case. The“Mollen Commission” investigated a scandal about NYPD drugdealing that broke in 1992, eventually implicating 6precincts in widespread drug trafficking, massive perjuryand brutality related to corruption. Mayor Giulianiresponded by abolishing a city council-created policeoversight committee in favor of a new commission of his

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creation; his police chief, Bratton, developed a plan totrain police to testify truthfully. Both Giuliani andBratton continued to enjoy widespread public support. Theink on the Mollen report was barely dry when the New YorkTimes was referring to the NYPD as “a marvel of American lawenforcement” [Silverman, 1999 #2708], p. 3. Even inreporting the police killings, local and national news mediatreat the NYPD with respect. Time magazine, for example,wrote of the “élite” SCU (the Special Crimes Unit, whichkilled Diallo) that “It had been tremendously successful. Though making up less than 2% of the police force, the SCUaccounted for more than 20% of the city’s gun arrests....Themurder rate plummeted” [Chua-Eoan, 2000 #3123] p. 26.

In New York, scandals lead to commissions that recruitlocally prominent lawyers, who use their experience as astepping-stone to prosecutorial and judicial office. (Seethe review in [Chin, 1997 #3125], Vol. 1 Pp. xii-xvi.) Thesame process through which the city officially damns thepolice department functions as a moral certification for newlegal leaders. This pattern, which is barely known in LA,is so well-established in New York that, when policescandals break, New York’s would-be elite appreciate theopportunities for professional-elevation-through-public-service that will ensue.8

In the two famous New York police brutality cases ofthe late 1990s, prosecutions were handled by African-American-led district attorneys. While Robert Johnson, theblack Bronx D.A., lost the trial of in the Diallo case, theracial composition of the legal drama was not lost on thepublic. The Louima cases were successfully handled byZachary Carter, the African-American head of the U.S.Attorney’s office for Brooklyn. If the public could nottake assurance that police brutality would be less likely inNY in the future, there were grounds to believe that in somefundamentally important respects, the law enforcement systemin the area works admirably.9

Meanwhile in Los Angeles, not only has the LAPD been incrisis during virtually the entire decade of the 90s, theL.A. District Attorney’s office has suffered continuouspublic attacks. Two successive heads of the prosecutionoffice, Ira Reiner early in the decade and Gil Garcetti atthe end, lost reelection bids. And the LA police commissionand mayor have failed to regain apparent control of theLAPD, with the mayor firing the head of the policecommission and the U.S. Justice Department threatening to

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take over control of the LAPD because of a lack ofresponsiveness to the civil rights violations revealed bypolice scandals. Three years after a beating of a suspect,eighteen months after the revelation of the beating in aninternal LAPD investigation, there is no end in sight to theprobe of the Rampart Division anti-gang officers forbrutalizing suspects, stealing drugs from them and from thepolice evidence lockup, and in one instance, for planting agun and framing a defenseless suspect who became paralyzedfrom a police shooting.

2. Crime and Policing Patterns

The New York and LA myths about crime and lawenforcement imply several patterns in the histories of thetwo cities. In LA, where “youth gangs” were distinctivelyportrayed as responsible for crime, one might reasonablyexpect to find that youth violence rose relatively morerapidly when overall crime rates in both cities soared. Given the claims made in NY that policing policies uniquelybrought about a “turnaround” in crime, one might think thatthere was a dramatic decline in New York’s crime unmatchedin LA’s experience. With respect to measures of lawenforcement activity, the two metropolitan crime cultureslead us to expect an unusual concentration of policeactivity against adolescents in LA, at least in the periodbefore the LAPD scandals of the 1990s; and in New York, anintensification of law enforcement activity that could havebrought about the decline of crime in the 1990s.

What data may we consult to assess these implications?Apart from public medical examiners’ offices, the policegenerate virtually the only readily available, regularlyproduced data about crime and police activities, but we mustbe especially wary of police statistics in this analysis. After all, the police in LA and New York have been strongadvocates of their respective city’s myths. Although wehave no satisfactory alternative to the data generated bylaw enforcement activity, some police data are generallyaccepted as being “harder” than others. For measuringcrime, these are data describing the annual number and somedemographic characteristics of victims of homicide, whilefor measuring police activity, they are statisticsdescribing the annual number and some demographic featuresof people arrested for homicide.10 In the followingdiscussion, I cite only population data, homicide counts byyear and age, and arrest counts by year and age. With theselimited resources we can still generate telling analyses.

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We are especially interested in “gang” crime andpolice action against “gang” crimes, but the police neverhave reliably produced “gang” statistics over a period ofseveral years, much less by using the same coding proceduresin different cities.11 Still, to measure events relevant togang-aged youth, we can carve out a reasonable age categoryfor organizing the standard victimization and arrest data. Homicides generally drop significantly after early childhoodand rise sharply in late adolescence, thus “adolescent”homicide is defined here as crime by or to 16-19 year olds.

Table 2: Homicides, number and rate per 10000 population*

1984 1990 1994 1998

LA 2.39 [758]

2.81 [983]

2.37[845]

1.2[426]

NY 2.[1450]

3.[2262]

2.02[1566]

.81[638]

*Sources: Population data: U.S. Census Bureau, 1980 Censusof Population, General Population Characteristics, New York,Volume 1, Chapter B, Part 34, issued August 1982;California, Volume 1, Chapter B, Part 6, issued July 1982;1990 Census of Population; General PopulationCharacteristics, New York, Volume 1, Part 34, Section 1 of2, Issued May 1992; California, Volume 1, Part 6, Section 1of 3, Issued July 1992; U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 Census ofPopulation, http://factfinder.census.gov/bf. All inter-census years estimated from differences between prior andpost decennial year figures. Homicide data from CaliforniaDepartment of Justice, Criminal Justice Statistics Center,Special Request Section; State of New York, Division ofCriminal Justice Services, Office of Justice SystemAnalysis, Bureau of Statistical Services. Unless otherwisenoted, in all tables and figures in this paper, “LA” is thecity, not the county.

We note first that homicide rates, when examined overthe period 1984-1998, do not sustain the claim that thepolice in New York did something distinctive to lower thecrime rate.12 If we look at the changes between 1990 and1998, the perception in New York of a greater decline ismodestly consistent with the New York myth. The drop in LAis 57% compared to a drop in New York of 73%. Somethingmiraculous arguably happened, but the difference in thedecline in the two cities does not make an overwhelming case

17

for attributing saintly powers to the police in New York,and if we look within a longer time frame, the citydifferences diminish further. Thus contrasting the rates in1984 and 1998, the rate of homicide dropped 60% in New Yorkand 50% in LA. It remains to be seen whether in a few moreyears, as the time span for perceiving change grows, LAmight catch or surpass the New York drop. At the least,there would seem to be reason for substantial celebration inLA as well as in New York. It is not the historicalexperience with crime victimization but the lack of morallyeligible candidates that explains why no-one has been raisedto hero status on LA’s collective shoulders.13

It is especially revealing to observe that New Yorkstarted this period, in 1984, with a substantially lowerhomicide rate than was being suffered in LA. Homicides inNew York jumped up much more in the late 1980s than they didin LA, rising fully 50% from 1984 to 1990 as compared toonly 18% in LA. Much of the perception of an incredibledecline in New York in the 1990s can be explained by thecity’s exceptionally accelerated increase in the late 1980s. As a mayoral candidate in 1993, Rudolph Giuliani was eagerto blame the incumbent administration for New York’s crimecrisis, but a rapid rise in criminal violence was a nationalphenomenon in the late 1980s (the national homicide rate of14-17 year olds tripled from 1984 to 1998, rising from 4.212.1 per 100,000; from 1984 to 1991, the homicidevictimization rate of black males aged 14-17 went from about18 to about 72/100,000 [Fox, 2000 #3131], pp. 295, 300), and there has been no serious argument that a breakdown inpolice activities was the cause. New York and LA were partof this national rise, and if there was any miracle in theNew York story it was that the rising wave moved through thetwo cities with a slightly different historical timing thatwas blessedly fortuitous for Rudolph Giuliani’s career.

A closer look at the dating of changes in crime ratesgives one further pause in reading New York’s slightlylarger drop as justifying the superlatives bestowed on NewYork’s mayor and police department. As noted, the LAexperience suggests that enormous declines in crime wereoccurring in this historical period, independent of policepolicies. To put a finer point on this observation, notethat the 57% drop in LA between 1990 and 1998 came during atime when, because of the turmoil in the LAPD started by theso-called Rodney King riots and extending through theRampart scandal, the department’s management was in almostconstant chaos.

18

But note also that, even looking only at the drop inNew York, the details do not fit the story that credits thetoughness of the new mayor or the new management policiesthat his police chiefs brought in. Giuliani and his newpolice chief, William Bratton, only came into office inJanuary, 1994. Their new policies started at the earliestonly in 1994. But in the period 1990 to 1994, the homiciderate in NY had already dropped 33%. It appears thatwhatever was happening to reduce crime in NY before thestart of Giuliani’s administration essentially continued,picking up a slightly greater pace in the overall period1990-1998. Had there been no acceleration in the rate ofdecline, and had the pre-Giuliani trend simply continued,the 1998 rate still would have been less than half the 1990rate. Note also that the drop in NY in the period 1994-1998, when the NYPD/Giuliani regime was touted as havingachieved miracles, was only slightly faster than the drop inLA. Homicide in New York was dropping twice as fast as itwas dropping LA in the period 1990-1994, before Giuliani andBratton came into power. If mayoral policies and policemanagement are to be credited with lowering crime rates,these comparative data suggest that it was the regime ofMayor David Dinkins that should be credited.

The image of New York’s exceptional drop, and theexuberant crediting of its police for it, was not createdout of whole cloth. The New York crime myth was a product of3 powerful and common biases in the popular reading of crimedata. The first is a practice of not looking comparativelyat the experience in other cities, especially the experiencein LA. As the country’s second largest city and because ofpolice debacles of the 1990s, LA was strategicallypositioned for any serious examination of the effects ofpolice management on crime rates.

The second bias in the New York view was due to thefrequent habit of looking at raw homicide numbers, notrates. There were significant population changes in bothcities in the 1990s, with growth in LA running at a muchfaster rate than growth in New York, 14% as compared toabout 6%, but in this case the biasing effect of raw numbersis not that a contrast of rates would produce asignificantly different measure of relative change. It is,rather, that New York newspapers and politicians couldcorrectly and with great emotional impact point to a muchlarger number of lives saved by the crime decline. Whetherwe compare rates or the raw changes in numbers of homicides,NY’s 1998 homicides stand at about 27% of its 1990 homicide

19

total, while LA’s are at about 43%. That decline in New Yorkis given powerful additional human weight when it isobserved, as it frequently was, that a specific large numberof people, in the contrast of these two years, 1624 people,would have been dead had rates remained what they were in1990 but were in fact alive at the end of 1998. In LA thecomparable figure would be 557, and even if the differenceis significantly due to the much larger size of the New Yorkcity population as compared to the city of LA (8 million v.3.5 million), politicians in New York were eager to brushaside statistical niceties about “rates” versus raw numbersby invoking images of the very numerous bodies they couldclaim their policies had kept warm and mobile.

Finally, the time spans guiding the New Yorkperceptions were misleading. The decline in the 1990s in NYseemed to be especially dramatic in part because the declinestarted from a significantly higher peak relative to ratesin the prior decade. And more generally there seems to be alag in media and popular cultural recognition of changes incrime rates. Rates began falling significantly during themayoral administration of David Dinkins, but the search forsomeone to credit only began after Rudolph Giuliani was inoffice.

If a comparative view of the historical record ofhomicide victimization substantially undermines thecelebration of law enforcement policies in New York, whatlight is shed on the myth of gang violence in LA by asimilar inquiry? Here we can usefully focus on datadescribing adolescent homicides and arrests of adolescentsfor homicide.

20

Table 3A: Male Homicide Victims 16-19 years old per 10000Males 16-19, and (number)*

1984 1990 1994 1998

LA 6(63)

12 (125)

12(135)

5(60)

NY 5(110)

12(232)

9(164)

3(57)

* Sources on victimization. NY, 1984: New York PoliceDepartment, Office of Management and Planning, CrimeAnalysis and Program Planning Section; NY, 1990, 1994, 1998:State of New York, Department of Criminal Justice Services,Office of Justice System Analysis, Bureau of StatisticalServices. LA, all years: California Department of Justice,Criminal Justice Statistics Center, Special Request Section.Sources on population: LA, 1984 figure estimated from 1980and 1990 figures faxed from Census; 1998 figure, from CPS;1994, estimated from 1990 Census and 1998 CPS figures. NY:1984 figure estimated from 1980 and 1990 Census figures;1990, 1994, and 1998 figures from United States CensusBureau, Population Division, Administrative Records andMethodology Research.14

Table 3A offers a strikingly similar picture foradolescent homicide victimization in LA and NY, especiallyfor the period from the mid-1980s to 1990. As we have seen,these were the years in which the news media, lawenforcement, politicians and community groups were intenselyexercised about youth street gangs, attributing to themmajor responsibility for the increase in the city’s crimerate. Again as we saw in detail above, no similarattribution was made in New York.

Now, these data can be still reconciled with a viewthat youth street gangs are much more prevalent in LA. Itis not inevitable that a city with a distinctive problem ofviolent youth gangs would have a higher youth homicide rate. But if youth gangs are not raising the homicide rate beyondwhat it otherwise would be, it is not immediately clear whypolitical, police and communal demands for punitiveattentions should focus on them. Note moreover that to theextent that there is a difference between the increase inyouth violence in the two cities during the 1984-1990period, it was New York that had the greater increase notjust in overall homicide but specifically in adolescenthomicide. These data make us doubly curious, not only as to

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why in LA in this period there were community supported,mayoral encouraged, DA and police organized “sweeps” ofblack poverty areas to arrest gang members, but also why adistinctive story about subcultures of youth deviance didnot arise in New York.

Consider now the comparative change in the two citiesover the entire 15 year period. In both cities there was astartlingly rapid rise in the victimization of adolescentmales in the late 1980s, the homicide rate doubling on bothcoasts. And there was a startling drop in victimization ofadolescent males in both cities in the late 1990s. As withthe total homicide rates reviewed earlier, New York showsslightly more dramatic changes, rising more up to 1990, butonly because it started at a slightly lower base rate, andthen dropping further in the 1990s.

These patterns would, by themselves, not suggest adifferent explanation of crime in the two cities. The straightforward reading of these data is that, to the extentgangs were the vehicles for youth homicide in LA, a causalimputation is spurious. It may well be that street gangshave in recent years been a greater phenomenon in LA’s youthculture in than in New York’s, but if so, it appears thattheir role in guiding youth violence has been to channel itin the sense of giving it a particular symbolic twist andselectivity of targets, not to cause it in the sense ofincreasing its frequency.

Table 3B: Percent of all homicide victims who were 16-19*

1984 1990 1994 1998

LA 9 14 17 15

NY 9 11 11 10

*Male and female. Sources: see Table 3A.

The doubling of youth homicide in the late 1980s was,of course, phenomenal; it would provoke a search forunderstanding among the most somnambulant organs of popularculture. With Table 3B, we begin to see why popular culturein LA might especially focus its imagination on youth gangs. Even if adolescents were not becoming more violent in LAmore rapidly than in New York, it is true that in the late1980s, and ever since, they have been a bigger part of theLA crime story than they were earlier and than they are in

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New York. Note (from Table 3A) that between 1990 and 1998,adolescent homicide rates dropped enormously in LA, by 58%. But the 1998 percent of all LA homicide victims who wereadolescents was still 67% higher than it had been in 1984,while in New York, adolescents contributed a relativelysteady percentage to the overall city homicide victimstatistics.

It was easy to look too quickly at elements in thishistorical picture and believe that youth gangs werebecoming more violent in LA or at least a bigger problem inthe city, even when youth homicide victimization plummeted. Youth violence was becoming worse in LA over this fifteenyear period, but only as compared to other forms ofviolence. Youth violence did shoot up in the 1980s, andwhen it declined significantly in the 1990s, other forms ofviolence declined even more rapidly, leaving youth violenceas a larger part of the overall violence problem in LA.

Some of the biases that we previously found to besustaining the myth of a police-engineered “turnaround” inNew York have supported the gang myth in LA. In particular,news reports and official commentary on crime in LA almostnever make a comparative reference to trends in New York orany other city. But something else has been distorting theunderstanding in LA: the changing absolute size of the youthpopulation in the city’s overall population, which has beenincreasing twice as fast as in New York (at about theoverall rate of population increase, 14%, noted above).[check this] Continuously there was a rapidly increasingnumber of adolescents in the city over the fifteen yearperiod, and this may have enhanced sensitivities that wereprofoundly irritated by the crime rate increases in the1980s and sustained by the larger role of youth crime in thecity’s pathologies in the 1990s.

In the 1980s, the gang myth was literallyinstitutionalized in LA’s culture. The California AttorneyGeneral’s office pressed police departments across the stateto label more and more events as “gang” crimes. LA’s policechief and District Attorney in the late 1980s and early1990s, invented catchy labels, such as “Operation Hammer,”for mass arrests of alleged “gang” members. Communitygroups, including many that had been severely critical of LApolice chief Daryl Gates, thanked him for organizing thesweeps and remained supportive up to the release of thevideotape of the Rodney King beating.

Reactions of South Los Angeles residents to the police

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incursions into gang-infested neighborhoods over thepast two nights were nearly unanimous: Get the gang-bangers off the streets--fast and for good.And while some argued that innocent people often getcaught up in the sweeps, most of the residents agreedthat the Police Department must increase its raids toeradicate gang violence. Los Angeles Times, July 4,1989, II, pp. 1,4.15

The Los Angeles Times published stories on “gang” crimes ata frenetic pace up through the early 1990s, as we have seen. Once set so powerfully in motion, the fact that youthviolence in the 1990s declined to a fraction of its earlierrate was not sufficient to kill the gang myth.

The histrionic mobilizations of LA law enforcementagainst “gangs” in the first half of the fifteen year periodobscured the double structure of the gang myth. The gangmyth is not only a superficial popular cultural lens forinterpreting LA’s crime, it is also superficial forunderstanding what has been happening with the area’s lawenforcement.

Table 4: Homicide Arrests of Males 16-19*Number and Percent of all homicide arrests

1984 1990 1994 1998

LA 243/19% 343/33% 179/32% 98/27%

NY 198/18% 413/29% 339/27% 168/21%

* Sources: California Department of Justice, CriminalJustice Statistics Center, Special Request Section; New YorkPolice Department, Office of Management and Planning, CrimeAnalysis and Program Planning Section.

Arrests are key tools for investigation. If homicidesare thought to occur because of the activities of gangyouths, then arrests of youths thought to be gang associateswould be a logical investigative strategy. When a set issuspected of involvement, it makes sense to arrest membersand try to develop evidence by turning each against theothers. One might reasonably expect an aggressive policedepartment to be making a lot of homicide arrests,especially where it is thought that there are communicationnetworks, like gangs, among those who are likely to knowabout homicides.

If youth gangs are thought to contribute significantly

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to criminal violence in LA, we might expect the police in LAto intensify arrests of adolescents when crime rates soarmore than do police in cities which also have soaring crimerates but where there is no prevailing belief that youthgangs distinctively contribute to crime. Table 4 shows thatfrom 1984-1990, when crime rates soared in LA, adolescentarrests did rise by 41%, and when crime rates fell in theperiod 1990-1998, adolescent arrests dropped by 71%. Butthe swings in New York do not indicate that the gang mythactually guided police arrest practices in LA. As we sawearlier, homicide jumped even more in the 1980s in New York,where, from 1984-1990, arrests of adolescents for homiciderose much more than they did in LA, by 108%, and thendropped by 50% in the 1990s.

A comparison of police practices in arrestingadolescents in New York and LA continues the portrait ofsubstantial similarity that we saw in homicide rates ingeneral, a portrait that reveals somewhat more extremeshifts in New York. Read as reflections on the myth of adistinctive police policy in New York, these data are alsodisconfirming. Before the Giuliani administration tookoffice, when crime soared in New York in the 1980s, thepolice were hardly passive in their response, nor did theyrespond more vigorously in the 1990s, at least as regardsarrests of adolescents for homicide.

But these data do not allow us directly to comparecrime rates with police practices. Perhaps myth-consistentdifferences between the two cities would appear if weexamine how many adolescents the police arrest in each cityfor each adolescent homicide, during each of these fouryears. Perhaps the police in LA are consistently arrestingmore adolescents for each adolescent homicide than are thepolice in New York, and perhaps the New York police underMayor Giuliani brought about their city’s crime decline inpart through an unusual commitment to arrest a great excessof adolescents per youth homicide.

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Table 5: Adolescent homicide arrests per adolescent homicidevictim*

1984 1990 1994 1998

LA 3.5 2.5 1.2 1.5

NY 1.6 1.6 1.9 2.7

* Sources for LA and for NY victims, as in Table 3A; for NYarrests: New York Police Department, Office of Managementand Planning, Crime Analysis and Program Planning Section;“adolescent” is 16-19, combined male and female.

Table 5 indicates a difference between the two citiesover this fifteen year period but again, not one thatsustains the myths about crime and law enforcement in eithercity. In LA, arrests of youths for homicide, per homicide,drop in the 1980s, when youth homicides soar, as well as inthe 1990s, when youth homicides dramatically decline. It isnotable that the decline in police activity in LA wassubstantial in the late 1980s, even as crime rates weresoaring, the gang myth was raging, and the police had broadcommunity support to act aggressively against youngsuspects. The decline of police activity in rounding upadolescents on murder charges to get evidence on adolescenthomicide, and to intimidate or otherwise deter would-beyouth killers, did not wait for the early 1990s, when the LApolice were supposedly “demoralized” by the publicity aboutpolice racism that was stimulated by the O.J. Simpson trialand by the historical staining of the reputation of the LAPDwhen the videotape of the beating of Rodney King was playedand replayed around the world. The per-homicide arrests ofadolescents dropped by half in the late 1980s and again byhalf from 1990 to 1994.

The “sweeps” against gang members staged by the LAPD inthe late 1980s and early 1990s, and the damning of gangcriminals by LA’s police chief and District Attorney inappearances on national t.v. news shows as well as in thelocal news media, were essentially publicity stunts. Otherthan the capture of a handful of youths on outstandingarrest warrants, it appears that these mass arrests made nosignificant contribution to law enforcement. The gang mythin LA is thus revealed to be a double myth, one that notonly misleads with regard to the causes of crime but thathas also masked what the police fundamentally do to enforcelaws against major crimes.

26

Note also that in both cities, throughout this fifteenyear period, the direction of change in police practices runs either independently of or opposite to the direction ofchange in crime. At the end of the period, in 1998, thenumber of adolescent homicides in LA is about equal to thenumber in 1984 (65 and 69, respectively), but the averagenumber of adolescents arrested per adolescent homicide isless than half what it was in 1994. In New York, as murdersof adolescents more than doubled in the late 1980s, thenumber of adolescents arrested per adolescent homicideremained constant. There was little change in this measureof police activity up to 1994. It was only at the end ofthis fifteen year period, when adolescent homicide rateswere at a celebrated low point, that youth arrests perhomicide reached their height. To put it conservatively, itis far from clear that the intensification of lawenforcement in New York preceded and caused rather thanfollowed the decline in violent crime, at least foradolescent homicides. One might reasonably suggest that inthe 1990s, the NYPD become more active only after crimebegan to drop dramatically.

It is arguable that rises and declines in criminalactivity control the confidence and vigor of policeactivities more directly and obviously than that policeaction controls criminal activity. For the police to detercrime, they must reach an audience that is diffuse,indefinite, and at best only partially and looselyorganized. With regard to the police, there are much moreeasily identifiable hearts and minds to control. The policecontinuously engage in a closely inspected discourse withthe local media and politicians about official versions ofcrime realities. And a declining crime rate makes it easierfor police to arrest more suspects per offense. Instead ofimagining that what the police do affects the level ofcriminal activity, we should investigate how the historicreputations of law enforcement leaders are indirectly shapedby criminals as they cumulatively produce what becomes anofficial image of the ebb and flow of the sources ofdisorder.

3. How Metropolitan Contexts Shape Crime MythsIf a comparative examination of the histories of crime

and policing in LA and New York does not justify thedistinctive stories developed in the two metropolitancultures, why have they taken such divergent forms? Thatthe answer is far from simple is indicated by theimpermanence of the dominant themes. The image of gang

27

organized crime and chaotic law enforcement is no morerooted in the southern California landscape than is theobverse image of chaotic street violence and professionallyorganized law enforcement in New York. Indeed, today’smyths reverse earlier images.

In the 1950s and 1960s, New York, not LA, was theethnic city where gangs flourished. Organized crime coverednot just the current entertaining interest in marginalremnants of mob “families” but labor racketeering on TheWaterfront, a successful movie in which Marlon Brando playeda longshoreman caught between loyalties to a neighborhood-based gang, a girlfriend, and the welfare of his coworkers. West Side Story, first a Broadway musical and then asuccessful movie, depicted interrelations of school, urbanyouth and immigrant cultures shaping street gang violence. Social research followed suit [Bloch, 1958 #2331]. Writingin the mid 1970s about New York Times gang stories, WalterMiller noted that:

Media coverage in New York ... has been characterizedby a period of considerable attention to certain typesof gangs, a period of virtually no attention, and aperiod of renewed attention. [Miller, 1976 #3126], p.98.16

Los Angeles was still a predominately non-“ethnic,” “white,”native born American city well into the 1960s. Carefreeblond surfers not black and Latino street gangs dominatedthe image of LA youth. This image changed abruptly duringthe Watts riots of August, 1965, but even as late as 1970,the county population was still 80% “white” [Waldinger, 1996#1985]. Miller found an “upsurge” in LA gang stories in theearly 1970s.

On the law enforcement side, for decades after thesecond World War, the LAPD enjoyed a reputation forprofessionalism, lack of corruption, and disciplinedinternal management. Indeed, popular culture in LA oftencontrasted the LAPD with the corruption and slovenlyappearance of the NYPD. There were six major scandals aboutbribery, contraband sales and brutality by policemen, and attimes about prosecutors and judges as well, over the period1894-1994, known under labels that described the heads ofinvestigating commissions: Lexow, 1895; Curran, 1913;Seabury, 1932; Hefland, 1954; Knapp, 1972; and Mollen, 1994.Mollen Commissioner Harold Baer noted that over “the pasthundred years, New York City has experienced a twenty-yearcycle of corruption, scandal, reform, backslide and freshscandal in the New York City Police Department” [Chin, 1997

28

#3125], vol. 1, pp. xvii-xviii.

The LAPD, in contrast, enjoyed a relatively pristineimage for over half a century, stretching from a corruptionscandal in the 1930s to the Rodney King beating in the early1990s, much of it under the leadership of a police chiefrevered for imposing militaristic discipline within thedepartment, William H. Parker. The image of the LAPD wasestablished nationally by the t.v. show, Dragnet, whosestar, Jack Webb, wrote scripts in close association with theLAPD.17 As the neatly attired detective “Joe Friday,” Webbeach week would confront the disorganized lives of LAresidents. Often still dressed in house robes at midday,the witnesses Webb/Friday confronted were routinely messy inreporting the relevant evidentiary details, and thepoliceman as routinely had to exercise patient indulgenceas he pressed witnesses for “the facts, Ma’am, just thefacts.” The chaos was out there in the socially unorganizedsprawl of LA, not in the police department. Arrests,controlled by careful preparation, were relativelyinconsequential parts of the show.

It is, however, not simply a matter of chance that theurban cultures of crime have developed in a contrastingfashion in the two cities. In the late 1980s, criminalviolence shot up across the nation, and all organs ofpopular culture were exercised in trying to make sense ofthe very real heightened level of terror on many citystreets. The materials available for weaving narrativeswere distributed differently on the two coasts.

In southern California, the extraordinary demographictransformation documented elsewhere in this volume was wellin progress. From 1980 to 1990, in Los Angeles but not inNew York, there was a dramatic change in the percentage ofthe adolescent population that was born outside of the U.S. In LA County, the figure changed from 14% to 39% in only tenyears; in New York City, there was a modest rise, from 23%

29

to 27%. Figure 1 gives a sense of the stunning contrastthat emerged in the histories of the two areas.

Figure 1: Proportion of 15 to 19 year olds in Los Angeles County and New YorkCity who were Born Outside the United States, 1970-1990

Year

LACounty NYCity

1970 1980 1990

0

.1

.2

.3

.4

Source: 1970, 1980 and 1990 Census of Population andHousing, U.S. Department of Commerce, Washington, DC. Basedon 1-in-100 Samples Extracted from: Steven Ruggles andMatthew Sobek et. al. Integrated Public Use MicrodataSeries: Version 2.0 . Minneapolis: Historical CensusProjects, University of Minnesota, 1997. “Born Outside theUnited States” means that the person was not born in the 50states or D.C., and includes people born in U.S. territories(including Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, etc.).

It has long been a pattern in U.S. cities that rapidincreases in migrant youth population (which after the firstand second world wars significantly included blacks comingto northern cities from the rural south), lead to gangformation [Thrasher, 1963 #3132]. Even though the evidencehere indicates that gangs may not raise the level ofviolence beyond what it otherwise would be, gangs are, ifnothing else, flashy symbolic vehicles that dramaticallychange the urban cultural landscape [Katz, 1988 #63],chapter 4.

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Gangs should be understood as one crystallization of amuch broader phenomena. Immigrant youth are brought beyondneighborhood boundaries and into contact with each other,and with adolescents from older resident populations, by theurban school system. Home styles reflecting adultsensibilities, both immigrant, “country” and bourgeoisidentities, are massively replaced after primary school.“Middle” schools or “junior high” schools become steaminggrounds of cultural creativity, where adolescentsenergetically devise new cultural clothes, seeking tomediate their interactions with masses of peer strangersthrough daily efforts to block, provoke and dominateemotionally powerful attentions. The collective activity offashioning new styles for wearing clothing, encoding handgestures and novel body postures, writing graffiti anddesigning bizarre hair styles, offers compelling audio-visual materials for popular culture, whether in the form ofmusic videos, Hollywood movies, or city news coverage. Evenwhile adolescent violence in LA jumped in parallel withadolescent violence in New York, it was the LA area that wasfeatured in entertainment culture, such as Compton (MTVmusic videos on “gangsta rap” and hip hop music), East LA(the movie Colors), and south Central (the movie Boyz ‘n theHood).18 Gangs are a small part of this feverish culturalcreativity, but a part disproportionately represented by allpopular culture institutions.

The demographic and cultural changes in the LA areaover the last 30 years have been without parallel. As putby Sabagh and Bozorgmehr in this volume, LA has experienced“the most dramatic increase in the foreign-born populationfor any large metropolitan area in the US, and one of thelargest in the world.” A snapshot comparison of the NewYork and LA regions reveals significant differences in theimmigrant population: “...currently over half of NewYork’s and about two-thirds of LA’s population are ofimmigrant stock (foreign born and children of the foreign-born).” But, as they note, the cultural impact on LA hasbeen far greater when the contrast is seen historically. The New York city population was x million in 1960 and grewonly to 8? million in 2000; 20% were foreign born in 1970 ascompared to 23% in 2000. LA County grew from x million in1960 to 9? million in 2000; and the two-thirds “immigrantstock” of the current LA population contrasts with the 7%foreign born of 1960. [but that’s not the same...] [in 1960about 7% were foreign born, in 1990, 28% (in 2000?). In1960, 10% of LA County residents were foreign-born; in 1990,32% [Bozorgmehr, 1996 #3153],Table 1, p. 348, or almost 3

31

million people.

The institutions of popular culture in LA have beenheavily pressed to provide some summary understanding ofthis sea change in the region’s collective life. The veryswiftness of the increase in population size and in theimmigrant population has created a vast gap between socialreality and the official representation of LA, for examplein political office. Moreover, a great segment of thearea’s population remains in shadows because of illegalresidential status. By 1992, “1.5 million people [had]either received amnesty...or were still unauthorizedresidents in LA.” If the immigrant population was not beingofficially counted or represented in the area’s public life,still in everyday life LA residents, or anyone who movedaround the city outside of the most affluent, most westernneighborhoods, were confronted on all sides with blaringevidence of these changes. In New York, by contrast, muchof the new Spanish-speaking residential population was neverhidden in the shadows in a similar manner because, as PuertoRicans, they entered as citizens. The extraordinarilyseductive appeal of the “gang” trope in LA must beunderstood against a background of a huge demographic “darkfigure.” In lieu of alternative representations of thearea’s new realities, the colorful visibility of youth gangsstruck an especially high profile.

The social worlds of immigrant and minority youthproduce more than just an entertaining culture, of course. They also regularly produce a range of what are defined asproblems, not only by the police but by school and othersocial welfare authorities. Even neglecting the stories ongiven acts of interpersonal violence, gang news would be amajor phenomenon in LA because, in what has become arecurrent American pattern, the funding and mission ofnumerous urban social intervention programs are tied to thegang metaphor. The city council often supports, as “gang-intervention programs,” a variety of social welfare services(job training, personal counseling, recreation facilities)that in other Western societies would not need the guise ofcrime prevention to get governmental support.

Gang news in LA is thus elaborately fabricated, but notout of whole cloth. It is, in fact, supported by adistinctive if ironic pattern in LA’s crime. As we haveseen, although youth homicide rose and fell in LA as in NewYork, in LA the remarkable decrease in adolescent homicidewas exceeded by an even more remarkable decrease in homicide

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in other age groups in the population. In the 1990s, youthcrime ironically became an increasing problem in LA even asit fell dramatically.19 In these circumstances, thevisibility of gangs as ubiquitous social phenomena in LA hasbecome an irresistible explanatory resource.

What, then, of the contrasting images of lawenforcement professionalism? In LA, the disgrace of lawenforcement in the 1990s has been closely related to thegang myth. As noted, the County District Attorney, which isthe office with the immediate responsibility for supervisingand enforcing legal constraints on the police department,was deeply complicit in the civil liberties abuses of theLAPD’s anti-gang campaigns. Local district attorneys arealways somewhat complicit in police abuses, since theydepend on police generated evidence in their routinecriminal prosecutions, and since the police apparentlyroutinely fabricate or misrepresent evidence (e.g., by usinganonymous “informant” evidence to ground requests for searchwarrants) throughout the nation. But in LA, when the CountyDA is compromised, there is no realistic alternative officeto supervise the police department.

Consider the comparative structures of the criminaljustice systems in New York and LA, particularly therelationship of police to prosecution offices.

--Insert Maps 1 hereThe LAPD is only one of 49 police departments overseen bythe LA County D.A., and the federal prosecutor, the CentralCalifornia U.S. Attorney office, has an even largerjurisdiction. In contrast, the NYPD is within thejurisdiction of seven prosecution offices, one for eachborough (or county) that makes up New York city, plus twofederal-level, U.S. Attorney offices. Just across theHudson River, the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Jersey hasoccasionally come across evidence of official corruptioncrossing state lines and worked with New York prosecutors. The Attorney General in New York state has occasionallyplayed an important role in supervising the NYPD, forexample in a recent investigation on racial profiling[Spitzer, 1999 #2930]. And special prosecution offices areestablished from time to time to focus on officialcorruption.

One might think that the monopoly status and largersize of the county prosecutor in LA would make it morepowerful with regard to the city police department, ascompared to the smaller offices whose jurisdiction covers

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only parts of the NYPD’s operations. But the socialinteraction within law enforcement offices in the two citiesworks in a manner opposite to this common sense view. It isrevealing that, within recent years, the LA law enforcementofficials who have made political careers have come from thepolice department (Tom Bradley, Ed Davis), not theprosecution offices. In New York, the opposite has been thecase, with Rudolph Giuliani first coming into the public eyethrough anti-corruption prosecutions he conducted as anassistant U.S. Attorney in Manhattan.

In both metropolitan areas, the district attorney’soffice is an attractive stepping stone in a politicalcareer. But in LA, there is essentially only one stoneavailable. There is no need to take the risk of taking theinitiative to bring innovative or controversial cases. Onecan rely on sensational murder cases or, if they are notconveniently available, anti-gang actions, to launch namerecognition. If the LA County D.A. can survive his tenurewithout scandal, he is virtually guaranteed a clear shot atstatewide office. The inability of LA District Attorneys toavoid implication in LAPD scandals unexpectedly underminedtheir political prospects in the 1990s.20

In New York, the situation is more complex. Sevenprosecution offices, each with its own public relations orpress officers, each with its own social network in legal,business and political communities, continuously jockeys forprofessional, sometimes public esteem. As in LA, New Yorkprosecutors are compromised by the routine necessity to relyon police evidence that they cannot independently test. Butthere is a tradition in some of the New York prosecutionoffices of taking risks in bringing cases against other lawenforcement agencies.21

The revelation of police misconduct generates adistinctive ambivalence in the image of law enforcement inNew York. On the one hand, New York has been as scandalizedby brutal police action as has LA; there is no good evidencethat police corruption or brutality is better controlled inNew York than in LA. On the other hand, whenever the NYPDis officially condemned, some other part of the area’s lawenforcement community emerges with more prestige, and theimage of law enforcement often takes on new appealingelements. Thus the recent Diallo and Louima cases, in whichblacks were brutalized or killed by white policeman, werehandled by African-American led prosecution offices, at thecounty level in the Bronx and at the federal level in

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Brooklyn. The Thomas Dewey model of advancing a politicalcareer through targeting official misconduct is deeplyembedded in New York culture but virtually unknown in LA.

A dialectical relationship between the themes of chaosand organization, as applied to crime and law enforcement,has emerged within each metropolitan area through systematicif not inevitable processes. LA’s immigration history hasgenerated a youth culture represented vividly by streetgangs, whose visibility provided the basis for a thorough-going, open conspiracy in local law enforcement to violatethe civil rights of minority youth. When the lawenforcement conspiracy unexpectedly backfired, the gang mythbecame the basis of law enforcement’s disgrace.

In New York, the rapidly rising wave of criminalviolence demanded some metaphoric effort at comprehension,and the relative lack of growth in the immigrant youthpopulation during the 1980s and the early years of the1990s, plus one of the recurrent periods of resistance inthe New York Times to describe youth violence with the gangmetaphor, led to “chaos” as an interpretive solution.22 The“zero tolerance” law enforcement policy of the Giulianiadministration made compelling local sense against thispopular cultural background. And even when extraordinaryevidence of extreme police brutality indicated a lack ofmanagement control and professionalism in the NYPD, somearms of the unusually differentiated local law enforcementsystem have emerged out of the ensuing climate of outragewith even brighter images of professional respectability.

That there is a dialectic of dialectics in the mythsgenerated by the two cities is also not accidental, becausethe image of each city has not developed independently ofthe image of the other. Many of the “gang” stories in theNew York Times have actually been about LA gangs, especiallyin the early 1990s. New Yorkers understood the chaos oftheir youth violence against the background of LA’s gang-organized violence. And in LA, New York’s strange “wilding”assaults highlighted the long-familiar outlines ofcomprehensibly motivated “drive-bys.” Meanwhile, as LA hasemerged as the nation’s second largest city, popular culturein LA has quietly switched alter ego from San Francisco toNew York. (Would the current volume be as obviouslycompelling a project were it a comparison of LA and SanFrancisco?) Looking at the two cities, it becomes clearthat the relative lack of management leadership in LA is notsimply myth. Apart from agencies representing artists, LA

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is now the central home office of virtually no majorinstitutions. Even the Hollywood studios are increasinglyrun out of New York, having been bought up by multinationalsover the last decade,. The leadership gap in prosecutoriallaw enforcement in LA receives little comment because itfits smoothly into the invisibility of political power,which resides not in the city’s recent affable mayors but indistant and low profile County supervisors, and with theinvisibility of economic power that is exercised in distantinstitutional headquarters.

That the crime stories in New York and Los Angeles havebeen myths is not, however, due to any difference in theresidents’ gullibility. Crimes that are statisticallyrepresentative are always systematically unrepresented incrime news, because crime news everywhere is neveressentially about crime [Katz, 1987 #2330]. Like crime inthe movies, crime in the news is about portrayingexistentially ambiguous features of personal identity and ofthe social landscape, for example the nature of urbancollective identity. It is not surprising that the popularcultures in LA and New York generate distorted views of thearea’s criminal realities. When looking at sensationalcases of deviance, people are not so much curious to seewhat is most typical but what is most hidden in thebackgrounds of their lives. In both cities, theinstitutions of popular culture offer people a series ofbroken mirrors to catch a reflection of faces they cannototherwise see. What may be a bit surprising in all of thisis that New York and Los Angeles seem to be working out adialectical culture of fantasies in which they willincreasingly find each other as their distortedreflections.23

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1. Ref to NYPD official who spoke at the Neiman conference.

2.. We are most familiar with myths as described byclassicists and by anthropologists. In those contexts,myths explain troublesome events and patterns in a people’scontemporary life by reference to cosmological andprimordial causes from pre-historical times. But we shouldalso recognize that science itself is a myth system, atleast on its theoretical side. Theory does not simplysummarize empirical findings, it also, and more importantly,explains how the current state of knowledge became what itis and shapes the path of inquiry by grounding the bets thatare inevitable in research. This essay is a not a generalbrief against myths. Indeed, elsewhere I have argued thatwe should exploit religious myth as a source for socialpsychological theory [Katz, 1996 #610]. Troublesomeproblems arise with myths only when they cannot beacknowledged as the basis of social policies.

3. In writing of “New York” and “LA,” I am followingcolloquial usage, which truncates the West coast name tocreate a two-syllable parity. No-one says “NY,” an awkwardformula to execute which offers no syllabic economy, buteven Los Angeles residents who otherwise are disgusted withthe area find the familiar shorthand irresistibly charming. The masses appear to agree with an Armenian family friendwho once commented, when complaining about the lack ofcommunity in the area, “In LA, only name o.k.” There is asmall and seemingly hopeless campaign, carried on by somewho would claim old-family status or mark their awareness ofthe Spanish origins of the city’s name, to use the fullform, which offers a speaker the opportunity to give the “g”a hard pronunciation.

4. In Los Angeles, the association of crime, ethnic minorityyouth and gang organization dates from the 1940s and the“Sleepy Lagoon” murder case. For a brief report on thisinfamously racist prosecution of Mexican-origin young men,see [Verge, 1993 #2334].

5. The figures reported in Table 1 were produced by excludingarticles that did not meet any one of three criteria. First,“gang” had to be used as a noun or adjective. Stories about

Notes

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“ganging up” on someone were excluded. Included werestories that mentioned a gang problem, gang crime, gangs, agang member, a “gang beating,” “gang attack,” “gangshooting,” “gang rape,” or anti-gang organizations in lawenforcement, communities, or schools. Second, an article wasexcluded if it lacked an indication that a persistent ororganized group was responsible (e.g., stories about “a gangof youth attacked”). Still included under this criterionwere stories about anti-gang law enforcement or anti-gangcommunity organizations or activities; organized crimegangs and drug gangs; "gang shootings" and "gangretaliation." Third, the story had to indicate that the gangwas local to the newspaper’s home area. This criterion wasnecessary to exclude counting as “New York” stories the manyarticles that were published in the New York Times aboutgangs outside of New York, for example in LA. For the NewYork Times the article had to be relevant to New York City;for Los Angeles Times, to Los Angeles County. These areareas of roughly similar population size. The story had torefer to a "gang" event or member in the area, or, if it wasa national or state story, mention some relevance to localissues. The initial, pre-sifted figures were LA, 3080, NY,1517. The two “Times” papers hold similar positions in thelocal media framework. It is possible that other localnewspapers, such as the New York Daily News and the LosAngeles Daily News, use “gang” more often. A check of NewYork Daily News stories for 1998 did not show a patterndifferent from that in the New York Times (There were about20% more “gang” stories than the New York Times but stillonly about one-quarter of the number for the Los AngelesTimes, and, again, many of the Daily News “gang” stories,about one third, were about “drug gangs,” “mafia” gangs, ora “gang” of corrupt city workers/Sanitation supervisors). In any case, the newspaper counts are offered as indicatorsof local culture. Even if the New York Times has shied fromusing “gang” as a sensational term, city differences ineditorial style would not explain why “gang” has been arallying cry in political discourse in LA but not in NewYork over the last 15 years. I mention, both to disclosebias and as supportive evidence, that, in the early 1990s Ipublished Los Angeles Times Op Eds critical of the “gang”focus in local culture and law enforcement and that,fortunately at least for the current argument, they hadabsolutely no apparent effect [Katz, 1991 #3142; Katz, 1992#3140; Katz, 1992 #3141].

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6. Experts Say Gigante Had Reduced Role, So Conviction Won'tHurt Crime Family, By SELWYN RAAB. July 26, 1997, Saturday.Section 1; Page 25; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk

7. 39 Charged in Crackdown on Lower East Side Drug Gang, ByKIT R. ROANE May 16, 1998, Saturday Section B; Page 3;Column 3; Metropolitan Desk

8. My awareness of this appreciation was developed in partthrough extensive interviews that I conducted with the U.S.Attorney in Brooklyn in the late 1970s. Warren Christopher,who served as head of the commission investigating the LAPDafter the Rodney King riots, fits this model; theexceptional nature of his professional career in LA provesthe rule.

9. Carter described the attack on Louima as “‘the mostdepraved act that’s ever been reported or committed by apolice officer or police officers against another humanbeing’”... and “said that the court system is making ‘someprogress toward getting police officers–-at least in thisextreme circumstance-–to testify against the police officerswho were responsible.” Giuliani “praised the verdict ... asa shining example of police officers who were willing totestify so that justice could be done.” New York Times June9, 1999. P. 1, Metropolitan Desk.

10. Other logically useful data are produced in ways thatmake them too problematic for confident interpretation. Conviction data, which would be useful to compare witharrests to assess overcharging practices, are generated byother agencies (courts, prosecutors) and, as a practicalmatter, are not easily meshed with police generated reports. “Offense” data are primarily constituted by arrests, butother, less systematic factors are added to produce figuresdiffering from arrest, which we have in any case; anddifferent agencies, city and state, produce differentoffense figures. Supplemental homicide reports, whichprovide a richer array of data on given cases, are notproduced by systematically similar processes across policedepartments. And data on robberies, assaults, etc., orstatistics that summarize the rate of commission of alltypes of crime, are too subject to victim and policeinterpretations, which are close to the very matters we wishto investigate.

11. California’s Attorney General’s office found almost adoubling of gang-related homicides in the period, 1978-1987.

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The proportion of homicides in which the contributingcircumstance was gang-related increased from 6.0 percent in1978 to 11.4 percent in 1987 (Bureau of Criminal Statisticsand Special Services 1987). From about 1988 to 1992, “LAPDsGang Tracking System (GTS) [grew]...-- over 50% per year,from 12,000 records to 65,000 in only four years“ (Reiner1992, xxvii).

12. For a similar finding about the decline of non-gunhomicides from 1985-1997 in New York City, see [Zimring,2000 #3130]. Zimring and Fagan suggest that the decline ingun homicides after 1994 is substantially explained byregression to the mean (what I discuss below as the unusualhigh point reached in New York in 1990), but might in partbe credited to police policies, although the timingindicates that if policing had an effect, it was by thesubstantial increase in the size of the New York force from1991-1994, not necessarily because of changes in managementstrategy or administration philosophy. See also [Fagan,1998 #3150], which compares New York’s declines with thelargest decline experienced in any five year period, from1950-1996, in the 12 other largest U.S. cities, and findsNew York among the top 5 and LA among the bottom two. Theyconclude: “How much of the decline [in gun deaths] can beclaimed by law enforcement alone simply cannot bedetermined....The trend in nongun homicide for more than adecade remains a pleasant mystery that shrouds the wholeexplanation of variations in New York homicide in fog.” (atpp. 1322-1323). The comparative picture I am presenting istailored to factors relevant to the current argument (the16-19 year old age group; the fifteen years from 1984-1998,which roughly capture a distinctive period in popular andpolitical cultures in LA and New York) and will thereforediffer from comparisons made for other purposes.

13. After the 1992 riots, LAPD officers were openlycontemptuous of expectations that they should try to bringcrime down through arrests. One Sergeant was quoted in theLos Angeles Times as follows: “An officer can go down analley where gangsters hang out or he can go down a mainstreet where nothing is happening. Why would you choose togo down the alley when the public doesn’t seem to supportyou for your efforts?”. [Cannon, 1997 #3133], p. 25. Isuggest we read this as evidence about how the LA public wasblocked from crediting the police for the subsequent declinein crime, not as demonstrating what the LA police actuallydid or, more precisely, did not do.

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14. For assessing gang influence, male figures are moretelling than combined sex figures. Of the adolescentsarrested for homicides, about 95% are male, and amongadolescent homicide victims, about 90% are male. For NewYork, for the four years in question, the percentage of 16-19 year old homicide victims that were male ranged from 87%in 1984 to 93% in 1994. In LA, the range was between 91%-92%for these four years. Population rates that combine maleand female figures would unnecessarily dilute and obscurewhat is going on in contemporary American urban youthviolence.

15. As to the lack of opposition from community groups, thisstory went on to cite Paul Hoffman, legal director of the SoCa chap of the ACLU, as saying they were looking into thepossibility that police had acted improperly. Six monthslater: "Black leaders, including frequent critics of the LosAngeles Police Department, said Wednesday that a panelcreated last year by Chief Daryl F. Gates has improvedcommunication and crime-fighting efforts in the city's blackcommunities." These included Joseph Duff, president of theLA chapter of the NAACP; a spokesman for the Nation ofIslam; Mark Ridley-Scott of the Southern ChristianLeadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles, and UrbanLeague president John Mack. LA Times, Thurs. Jan. 18, 1990;B, p. 3 (Metro) "Gates' Forum Credited for LAPD-BlackDialogue"

16. Miller writes that “The Times maintained what wasessentially a moratorium on the use of the term ‘gang’ torefer to regularly congregating youth groups for a period ofapproximately six years between 1966 and 1972....in late1971, the moratorium was lifted as suddenly as the Times hadclaimed that gangs had vanished.” .... “A year prior to theTimes report of one hundred gangs in the Bronx and many morein other boroughs, police and Youth Authority officialsstated conclusively [to Miller in interviews] that the lastgang had disappeared from the streets of the city and thatthere was no gang problem in New York.” [Miller, 1976#3126], Pp. 96-97.

17. Parker loved the show. In his words: “Dragnet was one ofthe great instruments to give the people of the UnitedStates a picture of the policeman as he really is. It wasmost authentic. We participated in the editing of the

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scripts and in their filming.... This program showed thetrue portrait of the policeman as a hard-working, selflessman, willing to go out and brave all sorts of hazards andwork long hours to protect the community.” [Cannon, 1997#3133], P.23

18. The connections between Hollywood and the LA policies ongangs were not indirect. I draw here on comments over theyears from acquaintances who have been in high positions inthe music and film industry. “Industry” executives, some ofwhom were leaders of the southern California branch of theACLU, were personally intimidated by “thug-like” minorityvendors of gang culture who would regularly bring armedassociates to business meetings. Through sometimes bitterinternal struggles, they pressed the civil libertiesorganization to lay low while they encouraged lawenforcement to conduct “Operation Hammer.”

19. Cf Blumstein on national pattern here.

20. And the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles has nevertaken initiative in overseeing official misconduct in lawenforcement. For law graduates with bright careerprospects, the federal prosecution office in LA offersunrivaled possibilities for obtaining trial experience,especially in large narcotics cases, that is invaluable inthe market for civil litigation jobs in large law firms. Forpersonal career advancement, there is no need to take risksin opening controversial cases against the police, or, forthat matter, against any target. Unless the JusticeDepartment or public outcry creates the initiative, LA’sfederal prosecution office never takes responsibility foroverseeing the LAPD or any other significant part of thearea’s governmental life.

21. My understanding of the different cultures inprosecution offices in LA and New York is based oninterviews I have conducted with federal and countyprosecutors on scattered occasions, and, in particular on anobservational and interview study in the U.S. Attorney’soffice located in Brooklyn in the late 1970s and interviewswith assistant U.S. Attorneys in L.A. in 1980. In onememorable case, the federal district attorney in Brooklynsuccessfully prosecuted then-Queens district attorney Goldfor corruption (the charges included embezzling money byfalsely claiming expenses for a trip to a National DistrictAttorneys’ Conference in Las Vegas). Gold, whose defenseincluded the claim that exculpating documents were in a

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briefcase which was stolen while he was urinating in apublic restroom, had himself risen to prominence yearsbefore by prosecuting a NYPD brutality case.

22. As noted earlier, Walter Miller in the early 1970s foundthat the New York Times and other newspapers changed theiruse of the gang metaphor in abrupt fashion not grounded instreet realities. The Times and the Daily News have recentlybeen running an increasing number of “gang” stories. We maybe on the cusp of another sea change in New York crimecoverage.

23. Such relationships are common. Usually, however, thedialectic is that of a city which, as an economicpowerhouse, pits itself against what is seen as a corruptceremonial and political capital, for example Milan, withits anti-corruption crusading magistrates, and Rome;manufacturing elites in Lyon rebelling against corrupt royalParis in the late 18th century; Monterrey, Mexico, a base ofthe anti-corruption PAN party that promoted Vincente Fox,and Mexico City; and, at the start of U.S. history,financing and marketing New York versus ceremonialWashington. In the U.S., the lack of a city that is both apolitical and economic center enables these collectivetensions to play out culturally in less constant directions. In the current juxtaposition of coastal cities, LA, despiteits politically neutered status, is cast in the role of afrivolous, ceremonial, superficial cultural capital by thepresence of “Hollywood,” while New York plays the role ofthe professionally righteous, managerially elite city.