Posted on 06/08/2007 8:23:54 AM PDT by george76
LOL Badches? Badches? We doneed no steenking badches
Are you saying that there are hundreds of thousands of highly organized Hispanic gangs? Or are you saying that there are hundreds of thousands of illegal Hispanics gangsters?
If the latter, would you guess closer to 200,000 or 900,000?
What do hey punks do for money besides sell drugs and work construction?
Or to really cloud the issue, answer the question with 3 questions.
Good move.
You asked me if I was equating (1) the historical reality of the past with (2) your nebulous version of the present. I am not going to say that I am or am not equating the two if I don't know what you mean by (2).
Or to really cloud the issue, answer the question with 3 questions.
Far from clouding the issue, I was clarifying it: I want to know precisely what you mean when you talk about our current situation.
You were very vague and imprecise in your description - cloudy, even.
Good move.
If we want to get at what the real answer is, we have to understand the question - which in addition to being a good move, is the only move.
Here's a clue into what I mean: according to the FBI there are roughly 375,000-400,000 acts of gang violence reported in the US each year.
This is a broad number, including any crimes that are only suspected to involve gang violence and are not actually proven to involve gang violence.
There are inevitably false positives in the sample, but even if we assume there are no false positives and 400,000 is the number we have to ask: how many gangsters do 400,000 incidents require?
Probably far less than 400,000 - since gang members presumably engage in violence routinely and do not restrict their activities to a single crime each year.
LOL
It took you some time to admit that you'd given the matter literally no thought before you opened your mouth.
Your two posts seem to suggest or imply that what we have today, with hundreds of thousands of highly organized Hispanic and illegal aliens gangs, can somehow be compared, or is on scale to what was occurring in the U.S. in 1020s.
Is this what your suggesting?
You asked me if I was equating the historical reality of the past with the present. I am not going to say that I am or am not equating the two if I don't know what you mean
Too funny!
That's definitely not what I posted.
Too funny!
Perhaps you find it amusing that you are a clumsy liar. I find it to be sad.
Of course it is. Here's what you posted.
There have been Hispanic street gangs in America since the 1920s.
I asked you the simple question below.
#59. Are you suggesting or implying that what we have today, with hundreds of thousands of highly organized Hispanic and illegal aliens gangs, can somehow be compared to, or is on scale to what was occurring in the U.S. in 1920s.
Is this what your suggesting?
____________________________________________________________ You were asked a very simple, direct question in #59, and you've yet to answer it. Instead, you set off on a diatribe talking about false positives, FBI statics etc.
Note to self: Avoid asking this person easy, direct questions
No, it is not.
You deliberately edited what I actually posted.
You are claiming that there are either hundreds of thousands of illegal Hispanic gang members in the US today or you are claiming that there are hundreds of thousands of Hispanic gangs in the US today. Your wording was ambiguous - but problematic in either formulation.
It was not like that in the 1920s, of course, and it is not like that today either.
You have created a fantasy world instead of the real one we inhabit.
Statistics show that there cannot be as many gang members as you allege.
They further show that there cannot be as many Hispanic gang members as you allege, since a significant percentage of gang violence in America is undertaken by African-American gangs.
You are basically asking me to sign off on numbers you invented.
Fantasy words eh?
Statistics show that there cannot be as many gang members as you allege.
Hmmm. What about this?
"The number of cities reporting gang problems went from 270 in 1970 to more than 2,500 in 1998—an increase of more than 800 percent.[3] In 2002, the National Youth Gang Survey estimated that there were 21,500 gangs and 731,500 active gang members in the United States."
(http://www.heritage.org/Research/UrbanIssues/bg1834.cfm)
Here is a real difficult, complicated question for you. What has occurred since 1970s in regards to people entering this country illegally?
These stats are from 2002.
>>Some estimate now exceed well over 1 million gang members within the United States.<<
No not all are Hispanic or illegal alien gang members, but they clearly number into the hundreds of thousands AND growing.
Let's look.
In 2003, there were 41.6M 10-19 year olds in the US.
6.2M of them were black and Hispanic.
If 731,500 were active gang members, that would translate to one in every 8 of these kids being active gang members or - adjusting for sex - something like one in five of the boys being active gang members. More like one in four if you use the one million figure you touched on.
This seems extremely high - especially given the FBI crime stats on gang-related violence.
If 731,500 active members of violent gangs only manage to commit a crime once every 1.8 years on average (2.5 years if you use one million), then these are benign criminal organizations indeed.
Either gangs aren't very violent, or the FBI numbers are way off, or the National Youth Gang Survey's numbers are way off.
The number of cities reporting gang problems went from 270 in 1970 to more than 2,500 in 1998—an increase of more than 800 percent
This is not a particularly meaningful statistic. Between 1970-2000 there was an exodus of ethnic minaorities from center cities to the suburbs as real estate prices in center cities moved up.
If a hundred gang members in Queens, NY moved with their families to Nassau and Westchester Counties because of rising rents, you would go from having one city (NYC) with a gang presence to potentially a dozen cities with a gang presence - and yet the gangsters would be the same people and they would only have moved 20-30 miles from where they were before.
Not exactly an explosion of gang crime.
I think our conversation has come to a close.
What's wrong is putting words in someone's mouth - like the way you edited what I posted.
and then you dispute the stats
So you believe there is no inconsistency between the stats you cited and the FBI's crime stats?
You really think that gangs have grown dramatically and that their propensity for violence has increased - but that there is some kind of conspiracy to keep criminal reports of their activity low?
If there are a million gang members, do you really think that one out of every 6 minority teens are in a gang? Do you really think that gang members typically wait 2.5 years between crimes they commit?
Really?
It’s matter of perspective. Gang activity has grown in areas where it did not exist previously. In some urban areas it has declined for the reasons you mentioned as well as booming local economies that offer other opportunities.
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