Southeast Area is one of the more poverty-stricken areas of Los Angeles-a high-crime, gang-infested area where the murder, robbery, rape, and narcotics rates are way past what city politicians would consider acceptable. The LAFD (Los Angeles Fire Department) station across the street from the Southeast Area station house is one of the busiest in the city-and country-responding to more shootings, stabbings, and drug overdoses than any in the city. Southeast Area is also a melting pot. It is a United Nation of nationalities and gangs thrown together in a small enclave where one block is controlled by an El Salvadoran gang, the next one by a Mexican or Guatemalan gang, the next block under the ownership of the branch of the bloods or crips, and the block after that owned by cambodian gangsters. The areas's only notable landmark is Nickerson Gardens public housing project, considered by many to be the most dangerous stretch of urban landscape in the United States of America. LAPD officers are not permitted to walk its parameters alone, and every call to the "Gardens" requires at least two black-and-whites. "The gangs control the projects."
There are an estimated 5,000 gang memeber residing and operating in Southeast Area-all are into narcotics sales or thefts, all carry weapons, and all are, in the words of one seasoned LAPD Homicide detective, "trigger fingers without souls." They are not frightened of the police, undisciplined at home, and survive by a demented code of wanton violence and savagery the likes of which are incomprehensible to most. |
