Many areas of Los Angeles have gang problems.
Now ‘90210’ is returning with an all-new cast of slightly more plausible teens. I’ll be honest: I wish the old cast was back. Ideally, this spin-off would be an Ice Storm-esque exploration of the West Beverly gang’s bleak adult lives.
Why retire from something if you’re loving it so much and enjoying it so much, and you’re blessed with another group of people to work with like the gang on ‘Hot in Cleveland?’ Why would I think of retiring? What would I do with myself?
In my barrio, jobs work and money saves lives. When I have had the funds to place a gang member on a job site and pay his salary, I’ve seen him stop banging. When, on the rarest of occasions, an employer has offered a job to one of these youth, I’ve witnessed kids suddenly have a reason to get up in the morning.
On ‘This Is England,’ everyone is mates. The nice thing is that when you watch us, you’re watching a gang. They’re young, and they’re adventurous. There’s a real closeness there.
We need to send a clear message to gang members that violent crime will not be tolerated.
I’m a huge fan of mafia history – mostly the Italian mafia but also their associates, as well as Whitey Bulger and the Winter Hill Gang.
My mum wouldn’t let me go outside. Coming back from school, the gang men sometimes would say things, but I would walk by, never answer, and my mum would go tell them leave me alone.
I could have ended up in a gang or in prison because Harlesden is real rough and I was always a naughty boy. That’s how I got into boxing.
I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by ‘Guardians of the Galaxy.’ I’d never really heard of that gang before, that comic series before. And I think when you go into those, watching those sort of films, you watch them with no expectation as well, so you’re always kind of pleasantly surprised, I think.
You can’t reason with gang violence: you can’t talk to it, sit it at the table, and negotiate with it.
There’s an old little jingle: ‘The chief use of slang is to show that you’re one of the gang.’ What that means is that every social group has its own linguistic bonding mechanism. If there’s a group of lawyers, they have their own slang. If there’s a group of doctors, they have their own slang, and so on.
I definitely would like to do something serious. Not like a love story, but serious like maybe a gangster or a mobster. A gang or a mob movie would be great.
At school, I always wanted to belong to a gang, and no one would have me. So I’d have make my own gang, but with everybody else’s leftovers.
The entire island knows our father, Fred Hemmings, Jr. – kids, adults, surfers, the governor, grocery clerks, gang members who call our house at night and threaten to kill us as soon as they get out of jail. Fred was a world-champion surfer and is now a well-known, controversial politician.
I’m strong. I like to mother people, look after people. I lead the gang.
I love attention. If I see a gang of girls? That makes me dance even more!
Me, myself, I was a part of gang bangin’, you know what I’m sayin’?
I had friends at school, but I was never part of a gang and I dreamed of that sense of belonging to a group. You know, where people would call me ‘Em’ and shout across the bar, ‘Em, what are you drinking?’ after the show.
We wanted to be footballers, not part of some gang.
I would hope that government officials have a healthy respect for the complexity of the gang problem. They should never lose sight of the fact that there are human beings involved. There is no single solution.
What do we know to be true about gang violence? We know we will fail if we fixate on the symptoms and not address what undergirds it.
The employer is not going to choose the gang member who’s just been released from prison: they’re going to choose the person with the skills.
If you can believe in God, then you can believe in anything. It’s a gang mentality.
The ‘Red Hand Gang’ was a special favourite of mine. It was an American show about a bunch of kids who solved crimes.
It’s so easy for a kid to join a gang, to do drugs… we should make it that easy to be involved in football and academics.
What people don’t understand is joining a gang ain’t bad, it’s cool, it’s fine. When you in the hood, joining a gang it’s cool because all your friends are in the gang, all your family’s in the gang. We’re not just killing people every night, we’re just hanging out, having a good time.
When I was a boy, my older brothers listened to Earth, Wind & Fire and Kool and the Gang. When I would try to get into their room, they would close the door and say, ‘You can’t hear that. It’s not for a child!’ Now, I can listen to it and enjoy it.
Glizzy Gang is a real movement. They had movements back when I was younger, in the ’90s, but you don’t really have a major movement in the 2000s.
The tension between the Capulets and the Montagues is like a gang rivalry, and that has everything to do with Compton.
But sports carried me away from being in a gang, or being associated with drugs. Sports was my way out.
I want the violence among young people in this country to stop – particularly gang violence.
What a lot of people don’t realize about gangs, in my opinion, is that a gang is not there to attack you. Eighty percent of the people in a gang are there to stop anyone from attacking them. You join a gang for protection, not to go out and hit someone.
We don’t need a specialized gang unit. We need patrol officers who specialize in knowing their community.
I was raised in Mississippi, in a family and a community that identified as black, and I have the stories and the experiences to go with it. One of my great-great grandfathers was killed by a gang of white Prohibition patrollers.
I’m not really part of any group or clique or gang because that’s always been my nature.
I smile too much to be in a gang. I don’t got that ‘hit somebody’ vibe.
I know now that gang warfare is not the Middle East or Northern Ireland. There is violence in gang violence, but there is no conflict. It is not ‘about something.’ It is the language of the despondent and traumatized.
I first started rapping when I heard the Sugarhill Gang in 1979, when I was 11 years old in seventh grade.
I realized I didn’t want to make another solo record and I would be happier doing something that had more of a gang feel to it, more of a band thing.
