Renee has an interesting post on gang tours in Los Angeles. Apparently, the L.A. gangs themselves are playing a major role in organizing these tours. Which is bizarre. From the perspective of people living in those neighborhoods, you do what you have to do to make money. But the people who sign up for these tours are really reprehensible. Like the Rio favela tours, this is totally disgusting and probably populated in part by Europeans hoping to score drugs.
A couple of weeks ago, a story made the rounds about a gang in Peru killing people for their fat, which they then sold to cosmetics companies. It was macabre but strangely intriguing. Unfortunately, it turns out that the police's report of these killings was untrue, and the truth is much more disturbing:
Peru's police chief dismissed the head of his criminal investigations unit Tuesday amid suggestions that officers may have invented a story about a murderous gang of human fat thieves, perhaps to distract from allegations of police killings. [...]Former Deputy Interior Minister Carlos Basombrio suggested some police cooked up the story to divert attention from a recently published magazine article alleging police had killed 46 suspects in 2007 and 2008 in the coastal town of Trujillo.
"My hypothesis is that they were mainly trying to cover up the tremendous revelation of extrajudicial killings of criminals in Trujillo made by Ricardo Uceda ... in Poder magazine," Basombrio wrote on the political analysis blog Espacio Compartido.
Extrajudicial killings in any case are bad; the fact that some police in Peru have made up this story about a gang killing people for their fat in order to cover up the police's own illegal activities is just sad. It's really hard to find any good news in a story involving dozens killed, be it by gangs or by police, but I suppose if the police are prosecuted for this, then at least there will be some sense of justice in eastern Peru.
Albuquerque wants to fight its graffiti problem by forcing those found guilty of gang-related activities to have their names and faces on a website, like sex offenders.
Except the two things aren't the same. Are the gangsters actually ashamed of what they are doing? Or will it be, as Duke City Fix claims, a "Gangster Hall of Fame?" I suspect the latter. But hey, if any city wants to have a Gangster Hall of Fame, it might as well be Albuquerque!
