Baltimore ‘Bloods’ and ‘Crips’ Call Truce and Unite To Fight Police Brutality.

[Horizon]

Man, I love it when violent gang members who are generally convicted felons come together.

http://countercurrentnews.com/2015/04/baltimore-bloods-and-crips-call-truce/

Not really counting this as a great source of information, but someone had it up on their Facebook today. (Which really isn't all that great to begin with, seen a couple other more credible sites posting up about it)

Gotta love it.

Edit: Oh nooo, I posted in the wrong place. I guess an Admin might move this for me.

 

[BLADE]

Hardly surprising. In my own old neighborhood various gangs have had truces for various reasons. The Surenos, for example, generally observed Christmas truces with the Tre Tre and Five Points Crips, just a few miles away from Sun Valley or from Capitol Hill proper. Sometimes these truces are even observed for sincere reasons --Christmas, as I mentioned, or social justice as seems to be the case in this context. Sometimes they are mere business propositions, of course --street toughs know better than to campaign in winter, mais non. Sometimes both. And so it goes.

In any case, this is even less surprising when you trace the genesis of most street gangs: a goodly part the desiccated remains of the Black Panthers and various black radical cadres (smashed by state violence and its own missteps) with the surfeit constituents (the poor, abandoned veterans, the chronically unemployed, society's vanquished in short) animated and soaked in the mucus of massive poverty, alienation, and despair.

The main thing that strikes me as interesting about this type of news is the breathless reporting it tends to generate. The police have some fascist tendencies and like all fascists canst but engage in shadowplay with enemies that are the worst, the most ruthless, the most brutal, etc: there are already reports of the police vowing eternal vigilance and clutching pearls about the nig --thugs, excuse me-- rising up. It will certainly be interesting to see how much airplay this gets. There's a natural racist --shall we say habitus-- which absorbs and then psychically launders these stories to further recrudescence of police brutality.

 

[Loco]

This was pretty much debunked by every law enforcement agency except for Baltimore PD (though they may have finally come off it), now the media is just rerunning it into the ground. It was just a repacking of old, also unreliable, reports from riots past.

Is it possible? Sure. However it's certainly not the sort of organized joint targeting pact it's being portrayed as. It's just the same enemies of my enemies sort of deal that is no different than the normal every day life of cops vs robbers in this country.

 

[BLADE]

Pretty much. I seriously doubt that there's some Legion of Doom-esque meeting where these guys put up pictures of policemen on backlit walls and discuss how to take them out. But a temporary truce at several levels? Yeah, I buy it.

To me, like I said, the most interesting thing here is the media's racist sensationalism (black/brown people are organizing!) and the way the BPD has shamelessly tried to fan the flames here. "Credible threat" indeed.

P.S. Horizon I should add your title is hardly better in how misleading it is. The article is pretty explicit about peaceful marches against the police. Not sure if that was your intention or not but I would recommend changing it something less inflammatory like "Baltimore Gangs Call Truce to Observe Civil Protests" or something to that effect.

 

[Loco]

To be fair, the initial reports were that the gangs were uniting to "take out" LEOs, and I sincerely doubt that was a suggestion that no one goes to the Baltimore Policemens ball without a date.

 

[Horizon]

Old, debunked news.