I now work in a district attorney’s office in an urban area (and yes, some days I do scratch my head and wonder what am I doing there). I’m not a trial attorney, so I’m not directly involved in criminal prosecution. However, I do talk with some of the “APs” (assistant prosecutors), and today I heard something quite interesting. Over the past 5 or 6 years, we’ve had a spectacular increase in gang activity in the poor neighborhoods. We now have local chapters of the Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings and some home-brewed groups too, and just like everywhere else in the nation where gangs reign, they play for keeps (with their loyalty oaths, colors, signs, drug running, and murders). My AP friend was telling me that the gangs are using some interesting tactics to defeat our tried and true prosecution strategies. DAs often offer a defendant a lenient sentence so as to obtain testimony needed to nail a partner in crime, usually a “bigger fish”. The gangs are defeating this by telling the “little fish” who get caught to go along with the deal at first, to agree to “sing” against a higher-up in the gang — but then, once the jury is empanelled in the trial of the “bigger fish”, to hush up. The little fish then gets nailed, the DA gets the judge to throw the book at him, maximum sentence. But the big fish swims off, knowing that once a jury is empanelled, the double jeopardy rule prevents the prosecution from going after them again for the crime in question.

This shows that there is some incredible loyalty going on amidst the gang members out in the bad streets. The “little one”, in his “love” (or whatever) for the group, accepts a long term in prison so that the senior members of the gang may continue their work. This is new to most prosecutors, who traditionally depend upon the lack of honor amidst thieves and murderers in order to divide and conquer.

What this says to me is that something really scary is going on in the ghettos — a lot of people are abandoning all hope in the system. They don’t see any way out, given the widening gap that our information-age techno-economy is causing between the haves and the have-nots. So, they are abandoning the ways of liberal society (given that liberal society has in many ways abandoned them) and adapting insect-like rules of living, banding together in colonies and offering up their lives for the good of the hive. Unfortunately, those colonies and hives (i.e., the urban gangs) have little sympathy for the law and the order of the civilized society that they seceded from. The dynamics of urban poverty are pushing its captives into a dangerous new phase — which, if continued, is going to create some big headlines in another 5 or 10 years. What I’m imaging here — actually, “nightmaring”, if that is a word — is going to involve National Guard troops, smoke, and of course, lots of blood.

More food for a scary thought: think about the parallels between our urban gangs and the international terrorists, including Al Qaeda and the Palestinian terror bombers. In other words, this isn’t just a local trend. There has always been poverty, but in today’s internationalized, internet-ized world, where everyone has exposure to the media no matter how illiterate or how remote they are, the poor realize that a lot of people aren’t poor and a lot of places aren’t squalid, but that there is just about no way for them to jump the gap. Hard work and self-belief don’t do it anymore. You need to grow up in educated circumstances with educated parents and computer screens most everywhere you look. If you are an 18 year old living in a village in Nigeria or the West Bank or Karachi, or on the streets of South Chicago, you know it’s way too late for that. So, you might as well join the gang or the cell and take the loyalty pledge, embrace what they drill into your mind, be ready to murder and be ready to be murdered, or at least be put away for life.

Do I really believe it’s too late to head off an impending Armageddon between the poor and the rich? If I did think that, I wouldn’t bother writing about it. But darn, we rich folk had better start thinking and doing something more about this, and soon. Our fences won’t hold; those walls being built right now by the Israelis on the West Bank are just another Maginot Line. We’re going to have to somehow reach out to the poor of the world with the education and acculturation necessary to bring them into our world. Sure, that would mean that we’d be a bit less rich for a while, maybe quite a while. And the poor aren’t going to continually thank us and make us feel all warm and fuzzy about ourselves while we’re doing it — they’re not easy to work with. But in the long run, it’s the only hope.