The Truce
Subtitle: Lessons from an L.a. Gang War
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: May 11, 2006
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9780801473050
Subjects: Causes & prevention of crime; Organized crime; Sociology - Urban; Los Angeles; Social Science; Sociology; California; United States - State & Local - West; Gangs; Ethnic conflict
Description: This ethnography of a gang war in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Oakwood provides aneyewitness account of the urban violence pervasive in the recent history of the United States. With seventeen people killed and more than fifty injured, the hostilities over ten months in 1993 and 1994 marked the peak of gang violence in the history of Los Angeles, a city once labeled the "gang capital of the nation." The conflict began as a quarrel among individuals, some of whom had gang affiliations. Over time, the feud engulfed families and soon grew into a sustained clash between African American and Latino gangs. Eventually, victims fell who were not members of opposing gangs, but who fit certain racial and gender profiles. The conflict began to take on the attributes of what one local newspaper sensationalized as a "race war." Umemoto offers a nuanced analysis of the trajectory and eventual end of this acute crisis. Her interviews with gang members, neighborhood residents, business leaders, police officers, and gang-intervention workers reveal the complexity of contemporary American urban conflict. The Truce highlights the differences in interpretations among combatants, witnesses, and law enforcement agents and others whose actions often had unintended consequences. -- from publisher information.