The environment where David’s crime matured. Shootings + 16%. After the era of zero tolerance, the warriors of the night are back
FROM THE CORRESPONDENT FROM WASHINGTON. “Violence? We breathed it in every corner, we felt it coming, it was everywhere, the air was imbued with the smell of battle ». It is in the documentary Rubble Kings that Lloyd “Torpez” Murphy, a thug of the Ebony cartel Dukes, tells what it was like to live on the street, in the ghettos of New York in the 1970s, where being part of a gang was a pact with the other to defy death. In those years, the Crisp and the enemy Bloods – the first with blue colors, the others with handkerchiefs and red symbols born in 1972 in Los Angeles and then exported to the East – tried to make a truce, the Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting . Cyrus was the benevolent leader hatched in the cult film Night Warriors, he was the one leading his rowdy Bravoes up and down subway cars to try to stem the spiral of deaths in the Bronx. But Cyrus is a leader, listened to by everyone.
Ron Barrett, one of the greatest American scholars of the gang phenomenon, today does not see Cyrus around, but only a speck of groups, micro-bands that proclaim faith to historical groups, but then act alone. “It’s like the Wild West, there are no rules, no restraints, no limits.” Loose dogs, lone wolves, unable to respect orders. There was an old adage in Harlem bent by violence in the 70s and 80s: first you shoot, then you check how many dollars a person has in his pocket. It is the absurd end of Davide Giri. His assassination, Vincent Pinkey, a 25-year-old African American, a slew of precedents for assault and robbery and on probation, is a member of a gang called EveryBodyKiller, affiliated with the Bloods. A little over a month ago, 21-year-old Saikou Koma was shot in the head by Steven Mendez, 17, and Samson Watson, 25, just because they thought he was a member of a rival gang: he was a student. Like Eithan Williams, a 20-year-old from Indiana University who landed in New York on a budget of $ 12 a day and ended up sprawled on the sidewalk outside an Airbnb in Brooklyn. He too was killed by mistake by baby criminals with an already exterminated record. Mendez in 2020 pointed the gun to his mother’s temple, then participated in an armed hand assault for which he was sentenced to 4 years in prison. It was supposed to be released in 2024, but on October 24, 2021, he killed Koma.
The Trinitarios Gang blew Queens’ dreams of normality last summer. Blood and Crisp challenge each other, knives and guns for the territory and the drugs and together they would have scattered 50,000 affiliates across the country. The other group in New York is Ms-13 (the group of Salvadorans led by Mara Salvatrucha): it counts followers in a dozen states of the Union and boasts a simple and effective slogan: “Kill, steal, rape, control “. All with machetes. Around these groups, in addition to the Latin Kings, Nietas, Five Prisoners, Silenciosos, Matatones, Rat Hunters and Zulu Nation, the resurgence of violence in 2021 reached very high peaks in New York. The shootings have grown by 16%, the nightmare of returning to the clock 50 years ago is real. Gang members are between 17 and 25 years old and women are 20%. In a year in New York the members of Crisp and Bloods would have reached 15 thousand, compared to 11 thousand last year. Growing numbers. So much so that this summer Biden raised the alarm level by summoning the mayors to try to stop the wave. The old recipes – starting from the hard line of the police who today must reject the requests for the cut in investments wanted by progressive fringes of the Democratic Party – are not enough because the identity of the gangs and the nature of the phenomenon has partially changed. Which are no longer those of Bill “the Butcher” Poole, head of the Bowery Boys, or the “Black Spades” of the 90s.
In the New York of “The Warriors” there was a fight for the territory, the corner between the “streets” was the insurmountable border. We were divided on an ethnic basis (which remained even if more nuanced). At the beginning of the twentieth century you remember either you were Irish or you weren’t, this was enough to place you on one side of the street. Today the road does not measure strength and ferocity. Two factors have transformed the very nature of the tribal conflict, causing the danger to the community to skyrocket. First of all, the illicit drug racket – from heroin to crack to cocaine – has turned gangs of jealous thugs in their neighborhood into “business ventures.” Kids are hired by drug lords to deliver goods from one place in the city to another, and gangs are involved in a quarter of drug arrests. A second cause for concern is the ease of access to weapons: gang-related killings have quintupled in recent years compared to the period between 1987 and 1994.
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