The police are targets, yet officials often seem confused about how to deal with the problem. In practice, however, the solution is not so simple. Because some misguided politicians have permitted themselves to be snookered by clever criminals playing the race card. To view gang activity as in any way related to the civil rights and social welfare struggles of law-abiding citizens is perverse. Gangs are organized criminal syndicates, not legitimate representatives of any political or social cause.
Citizens become hostages.
It is time to take the right of innocents in our own country as seriously as we do the rights of civilians in Lebanon, Bosnia and Somalia. Though federal and state laws provide remedies for some crime victims, the imbalance in the system is obvious to anyone who takes the time to look. Governments have deep pockets, and convicted criminals file all manner of cases asserting their right to live in safe, uncrowded prisons. The citizens gang members have terrorized should be so lucky. These eighborhood residents are prisoners too, but have no one to sue.