Most of the Gang grafitti that I see is unintelligible, so what’s the point? I can make out some gang names sometimes but that’s about it. Anybody know what that crap is supposed to mean? Some kind of code? Territorial boundary markings?
Anyone know a gangbanger and what is a typical “work week” for them? Know any gangbangers that actually work 40 hours a day at normal job, with their gang activities as a part-time hobby? I’m guessing they support themselves selling drugs, stealing cars and car parts and from homes?
I wonder if anyone’s ever tried uniting the gangs in any form or magnitude for the sake of increased profit or assembling an army or political force? (Remember the 1976 movie ‘the warriors’)? I wonder if any gangs have ever tried implementing business techniques (like lean manufacturing, kanban, continuous process improvement, flow charting, etc.) into their criminal activities?
How did the term ‘gang-banging’ come about anyway?
I know nothing of gang life. However, “gang-banging,” which now means gunplay among gang members, once meant a group sex act with one woman and several men. “Gang-shag” is another version of the word. I became aware of it in the 1960’s.
I can read most graphitti. It takes time, but it’s legible. Often they’re purposely mispelled or use letters like so called 1337 speak. Also, it’s pretty damn hard to spray paint like that.
If they united, and became all organized. Wouldn’t they be a mafia?
I think you’d be surprised at how organized some gangs are. After the fall of the El Rukins in Chicago a lot of people really got a rude awakening over what exactly was going on.
Recently the Sun-Times ran a series of articles about one gang that was recently dismantled by the Police and Feds (name escapes me right now and it’s really bothering me). These guys pulled in about $300,000/day from their drug dealing, had turned a high-rise housing project into a fortress guarded by snipers, ran several front businesses to launder money including their own record label (M.O.B. Records, which produced, among other things the hit “Cha-cha Slide” and including the group M.O.B. Squad), ran a radio station that had patrolling cars that would take requests and radio in locations of police cars so drug dealers could move their operations until the cops left. They even gave, as part of their front businesses, a substantial campaign contribution to an alderman and made some pacts to help out the neighborhood. Other gang have what I believe are called “National Days” which is a set amount of time per year that all the proceeds of their activities go into a fund that helps with court costs and family members of jailed gansters.
It’s quite incredible how organized some of these gangs are. As for why they don’t organize a la Cyrus in THE WARRIORS, I think it’s simply a matter that they don’t think in terms of that scale. The only example I can think of is, sometime in the mid-'90s the Bloods and Crips in LA merged as it were to work for social change in thier neighborhoods, write rap music and fight the Mexican gangs (a friend of mine who follows these sorts of things said it was mostly the latter).
I used to have alot of contact with a variety of gang members , mostly SE asians so my exposure is limited to that in my area. Most of them were pretty bright guys, several were even college students. Selling drugs was just a job and they made plenty of money and lived a pretty nice lifestyle. Various conversations about money put many of these guys between $40K and $60K a year. It might not seem like much, but these guys are 16-30, no degrees, no real responsibilities. They just partied alot and tinkered with their cars alot.
JIT? Granted, hollywood but, In the movie Blow one of the charachters mentions that they have a calculated probability for busts and their business models supposedly accounted for that average. Forgot the line from the movie sorry. Dunno from personal experience. The guys I knew didn’t talk shop around us much.
Most gang graffiti that I’ve seen is easy to read. It’s usually just a name written in fairly plain letters. Sometimes it’s scrawled or deliberately angular, and sometimes it has some kind of ‘code’ (usually a number), but it’s rarely any more difficult to read than bad handwriting. Gang graffiti usually contains the name of a street or neighborhood and usually a gang name. It tends to be quite long.
Most graffiti is not related to gangs. A lot of people don’t know this. Artistic graffiti, which includes the vast majority of graffiti in urban areas, is much harder to read than gang graffiti, though it usually belongs to one of a few styles. The words written are usually short; some types of pieces are almost always two letters, and the longest are maybe ten letters. Words are deliberately misspelled for artistic reasons, not to make the graffito hard to read, but to make it look better, because some letters are more conducive to the style than others. Graffiti artists (‘writers’) are not criminals (except for vandalism). Many are students, and those who are not generally have jobs. They are not members of gangs, though they may be members of a group of writers that is more like an artistic collective than a gang.
The Chicago Tribune ran an intersting article today about gangs modelling thier operations after corporations. I think it will answer some of your questions.