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Raleigh, N.C. — About 200 to 300 people joined a melee that began inside a Raleigh mall and spilled outside the shopping center during the fight, police said Sunday. Raleigh Police Department spokesman Jim Sughrue said the gang-related brawl began inside Triangle Town Center Mall on Saturday night at about 8 p.m.. Off-duty officers working at the mall requested assistance, and authorities from the Wake County Sheriff's Office and the N.C. Highway Patrol also responded. Sughrue said a 15-year-old was stabbed during the incident. He was taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries. A police officer was also injured...

Mall brawl gang-related, Raleigh police say Raleigh, N.C. — A massive fight that involved hundreds of people and forced the evacuation of Triangle Town Center mall was gang related, Raleigh police said. The melee poured outside the mall as the crowd spread out, and an estimated 200 and 300 people were involved at the height of the fight, police said. On-duty Raleigh police officers, Wake County sheriff's deputies and state troopers responded to the fight and fully restored order around 9 p.m., police said. Shoppers were asked to leave Triangle Town Center around 8 p.m.,

My Excerpt from multiple sources 200-300 teenagers were involved in a gang fight at Triangle Town Center mall in Raleigh last night. Multiple arrests, one kid stabbed in the butt. Thug culture invades mainstream USA.

(Updated) Mayor John DeStefano, offering new details about a dirt bike-van collision that led to a crowd beating a driver and a 15 year-old boy losing his life, renewed a call to tackle the challenge of “disconnected” teens. DeStefano made the remarks at an unrelated City Hall press event in the wake of a Wednesday afternoon incident that has shocked the city. The incident occurred between 4:30 and 5 p.m. Wednesday. A 15 year-old boy racing a stolen Honda dirt bike up and down Shepard Street ran into the back of a van. A crowd of his friends subsequently beat...

FLINT, Mich., June 27 (UPI) -- The new police chief in Flint, Mich., has a new policy on low-riding pants -- those that ride low enough to expose the rear end can lead to arrest. Interim Police Chief David Dicks said that he has been getting a lot of complaints from Flint citizens sick of looking at buttocks, Newhouse News Service reported. "This immoral self-expression goes beyond free speech," Dicks said. "It rises to the crime of indecent exposure/disorderly persons." Dicks said that any police officer who spots someone with pants that hang too low and show too much can...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Trousers that dangle way below the belt and expose what the wearer has on -- or just has -- underneath have been banned in two cities in the southern state of Louisiana, city officials said Wednesday. "We unanimously passed the legislation because we have had so many complaints from citizens who don't want to see young men with pants hanging so low, showing their underwear and, in some cases, their posterior," Louis Marshall, a city councillor in Alexandria, told AFP by phone. "The legislation is gender neutral: we wouldn't want to see young ladies walking down the...

JAMARCUS MARSHALL, a 17-year-old high school sophomore in Mansfield, La., believes that no one should be able to tell him how low to wear his jeans. “It’s up to the person who’s wearing the pants,” he said.Mr. Marshall’s sagging pants, a style popularized in the early 1990s by hip-hop artists, are becoming a criminal offense in a growing number of communities, including his own.Starting in Louisiana, an intensifying push by lawmakers has determined pants worn low enough to expose underwear poses a threat to the public, and they have enacted indecency ordinances to stop it.Since June 11, sagging pants have...

NYPD Blames Increase On Availability Of Guns Out Of State (AP) NEW YORK -- After many years of decline, the number of murders climbed this year in New York and many other major U.S. cities, reaching their highest levels in a decade in some places. Among the reasons given: gangs, drugs, the easy availability of illegal guns, a disturbing tendency among young people to pull guns when they do not get the respect they demand, and, in Houston at least, an influx of Hurricane Katrina evacuees. In New York, where the city reported 579 homicides through Dec. 24 --...

NEW YORK -- About a minute or two before the Knicks-Nuggets brawl erupted Saturday night in Madison Square Garden, New York coach Isiah Thomas mentioned to Denver star Carmelo Anthony that it wouldn't be a good idea to go anywhere near the paint, according to a member of the Denver Nuggets organization. The message was unmistakable: A hard foul was coming. And when it came, the NBA had its first full-scale fight of the 2006-07 season. As it tries to stay in the race in the Western Conference, Denver now has a huge question to ponder: How long will Anthony...

DENVER -- Denver Nuggets star Carmelo Anthony is featured in an underground DVD that is circulating in his home town of Baltimore, Md. The DVD is called "Stop Snitching" and shows alleged drug dealers talking about what happens to people who cooperate with the police, and Anthony is standing next to one of them. He is also seen on the DVD talking about his Olympic bronze medal and saying that he threw it in a lake. The man he stands next to later goes on to tell how he would take care of snitches by "putting a hole in their...

Joshua Ray Juarez A 17-year-old Kingwood man has confessed to stabbing his next-door neighbors to death after the daughter and her elderly mother repeatedly complained about his pit bull puppy, the Houston Police Department said. Joshua Ray Juarez was charged with capital murder Friday in the deaths of 53-year-old Deborah Maloney, and her mother, Lucy Maloney, 83, who were found slain in their Kingwood home in the 3100 block of Silver Falls on Wednesday afternoon by police. After being taken into custody, authorities said the teen told investigators he and the daughter had ongoing problems concerning his pit bull puppy...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- An out-of-town couple visiting a sick child encountered an unruly mob following the St. Patrick's Day parade. KMBC's Chris Nagus reported that two cars with two different couples were on the way to Children's Mercy Hospital when another car cut between them. One of the drivers asked the cutting driver not to block them. Then, things got out of control when a mob came out of nowhere, Nagus reported. "Just a whole bunch of people rushed the car. I was thinking 20 girls; my husband said more like 30," said Michelle Essig, who was driving to...

Petty spats lead to more slayings Police see greater willingness to kill over trivial confrontationsAndre Vincent Jr. was inside a Forestville carryout, joking with a neighborhood acquaintance. When the wordplay turned tense, Vincent, 19, tried to defuse the situation, waving off Wendell E. Jones and saying, "Ah, y'all a clown." Thirty minutes later, as Vincent stepped to his car with a group of friends, Jones, 22 at the time, sneaked up behind him and fired six bullets into his head. As Jones walked away, court testimony would reveal, he snickered, "Who's the clown now?" The 2004 murder was part of...

Don't let 7-year-old Nicholas Johnstone's blond hair, green eyes and middle-class upbringing fool you. This Berkeleyite may be from the 'burbs, but shorty can bust a rhyme and knows a hot track when he hears one. Raised near the base of the Berkeley hills, Nicholas' favorite artist is rapper 50 Cent. The first-grader makes up his own lyrics, raps along with hip-hop radio and even mimics the limp walk fashioned by early rappers. His parents introduced him to classical and jazz music as a toddler. But from his first day of kindergarten, Nicholas started using slang that his parents knew...

Right or wrong, the code of the street in poor, largely black neighborhoods in the Bay Area is never, ever cooperate with police. To do so, the idea goes, means risking retaliation from criminals. The ethos cuts across generations, even as some who embrace it complain police do little about crime in their neighborhoods. The mind-set is moving from the streets to the mainstream, carried by rappers denouncing rats and T-shirts declaring, "Stop Snitchin." The T-shirts have proven popular in Oakland and elsewhere, prompting a debate within the communities where they're worn and frustrating police who say they're another...

Hip-hop's code of silence hurts police NEW YORK (Reuters) - When rapper Lil' Kim was sentenced to a year in federal prison this summer for lying to a grand jury about a Manhattan shootout, she was lionized by media covering the hip-hop music scene for not "snitching." Even as prosecutors confronted her with security camera tapes showing her standing next to one of the shooters, she lied about who was involved. The media hoopla helped the rapper enter the Billboard chart at No.6 with her latest record "The Naked Truth," released shortly after her incarceration in September. Criminals have always...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Hundreds of mourners packed a south Los Angeles church Tuesday to pay their respects to a 13-year-old boy killed by a police officer at the end of a car chase. Devin Brown died Feb. 6 after the short, early morning police chase. An officer opened fire after Brown backed a suspected stolen vehicle into a patrol car. His death angered many in the black community, who have strongly criticized police. ``It's obvious an injustice has been done,'' said the Rev. Lewis E. Logan, pastor of Bethel AME Church. The shooting, which led to an immediate street...

TAMPA, Fla. -- Vanderbilt running back Kwane Doster was shot to death after his friends and a group of other men exchanged "trash talk" about their cars, Tampa police said Tuesday. Police continued to appeal for help in making an arrest in the Sunday morning shooting. Police said they have suspects, but need witnesses who might have seen who fired the fatal shot. Doster, 21, was shot to death at a sandwich shop after visiting a local club with two friends about 1:30 a.m. Sunday. While leaving the club, Doster's friends had a discussion with three other men about their...

BRADENTON (Fla.) -- A hapless would-be rapper has received an eight-year prison sentence for trying to carjack a retired schoolteacher in Ellenton with a squirt gun last year. Raymond S. Wank, 21, and Gregory A. Bell, 19, were headed from Kalamazoo, Mich., to Miami to try to break into the rap music industry after meeting a producer on the set of the Jenny Jones television show, Wank's lawyer said after the hearing. Teresa Kaklis Dees said her client and Bell decided to carjack someone after they got a citation for hitchhiking in the Panhandle. Assistant State Attorney Scott Rieth said...

A new shock song from rapper Eminem wishes the president dead, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned... On the track WE AS AMERICANS, obtained by DRUDGE, the nation's top selling rapper shockingly rants: 'F**k money. I don't rap for dead presidents. I'd rather see the president dead. It's never been said, but I set precedents and the standards and they can't stand it... We as Americans. Us as a citizen. We've got to protect ourselves'...