Bounty hunters blood gang11/12/2022 ![]() “Bridging that divide is the most urgent task for American policing today.” Even the most successful police departments struggle with the perception of racial bias. “The communities that need police protection the most, trust police the least,” John Laub, the former head of the National Institute of Justice, says. A 2009 Pew Research Center study found that just 14 percent of African-Americans had a great deal of confidence in the proposition that their local police officers treated blacks and whites equally, compared with 38 percent of whites who thought so. Yet, for a variety of reasons, minority perceptions of the police have not improved. By all accounts, police departments today are more professional, less corrupt and more effective than they were 30 years ago. Since 1994, violent crime in the United States has fallen by more than 40 percent. The Los Angeles Police Department, which for most of Mendenhall’s life has been the enemy, was now working with her - almost for her - to ensure the day was a nonviolent one. Satisfied, Mendenhall tells Cato she’ll see him that afternoon at the repast at Imperial Courts, a 498-unit public-housing project that has long been the PJ Crips’ home base. The goal is to provide enough of a law-enforcement presence to prevent a drive-by shooting - funerals make for tempting targets - without angering family members by overwhelming the occasion with police officers. She even specifies their gear (“soft tactical,” meaning short-sleeve shirts and a more casual look). She then reviews where she wants Cato to deploy his officers - these intersections, this many cars, this close to the church where the service is taking place. “O.K., O.K., listen to me,” Mendenhall tells him. He’s calling to talk about arrangements for the funeral and the three repasts that will follow it, each of which is occurring in a different part of the city so that mourners from rival gangs won’t have to cross into each other’s territories. When Mendenhall’s cellphone rings a half-hour into breakfast, it’s not a PJ Crip calling to plan a counterattack rather, it’s her favorite police officer, Sgt. But things have changed in South L.A., somewhat. #Bounty hunters blood gang code#The code of the streets is clear: You kill one of mine, I’ll kill one of yours. (Mendenhall is not to be confused with Sister Souljah, the rapper Bill Clinton made famous on the 1992 campaign trail.) Mendenhall is better known in South Los Angeles as Sista Soulja, a name earned in the 1980s when Watts was practically a war zone. “They say, ‘Oh, my God, we did not know who he was.’ ” Meaning: they didn’t know about me. “Now they just found out they shot the wrong person,” Mendenhall said. But when Evans stepped out of a friend’s house wearing blue in a part of South Los Angeles controlled by the Swan Bloods, a member of the gang pedaling past took offense and opened fire on him. As a result, a blue or red shirt no longer signifies gang membership in the way that it used to. Gang members now wear their colors mainly on YouTube (where they conceal their identities with bandannas) or on special occasions. Today, computer databases, gang injunctions and enhanced criminal sanctions for gang-related crime have driven such obvious, outward expressions of gang affiliation underground. In the 1980s, members of the two dominant gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, flaunted their affiliation by dressing in blue (Crips) or red (Bloods), even though doing so made them targets. Gangs in Los Angeles don’t fly their colors the way they used to, but the rivalries persist. “He thought he could go anywhere.” Frank, who was nicknamed “Peace,” was wrong about that. #Bounty hunters blood gang free#“Frank was a free spirit, an African-American white boy, a hippie,” she said. We sat down at a booth, and Mendenhall began to talk. During the 1980s, Mendenhall was a high-ranking member of the PJ Crips, one of the oldest Crips gangs in Watts. A 51-year-old mother of four, she had lost two sons to gang warfare in Watts, something she knew well. Even though it had been almost two weeks since Frank was shot, she still couldn’t accept that he was dead. In fact, she nearly refused to come to the funeral. Her sister-in-law, she said, was taking it hard. We were seated in the booth of a Denny’s on the edge of Watts, eight miles south of downtown Los Angeles. I first met Cynthia Mendenhall two hours before the funeral of her nephew, Frank Evans Jr. ![]()
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