The gang's all here (thanks to open borders)

Los Angeles County is fighting gang warfare, it says.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky joined together at the LAPD's North Hollywood station to unveil a $500,000 program that will assign one probation officer to each of the department's six Valley divisions. The program will begin Feb. 5, they said, and will allow authorities to quickly identify and arrest suspects who violate terms of their probation. … While the mayor and Yaroslavsky focused on violence in the Valley, City Councilwoman Janice Hahn said she may ask voters to approve a parcel tax or sales tax increase to provide $50 million to fight the estimated 40,000 gang members in Los Angeles.

According to the L.A. Daily News, "There are about 100,000 gangsters in more than 1,300 gangs in Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties. They make up less than 1 percent of the population but commit at least half the region's homicides — taking the lives of nearly 3,100 people in Southern California since 1999, more than three times the number of U.S. casualties in the war in Iraq." If you want to see what this looks like in LA's suburban San Fernando Valley, click the interactive map headed "Valley homicides" in the link above and select "For 2006 homicides … " right under the map. Each of those 86 numbered pins shows the site of a gang killing. That's just the San Fernando Valley, which only a generation ago was a peaceful, if uninspiring, middle-class area; to find the real hot spots, you'd need to look at East LA and South Central.

The Daily News quotes Dr. Gary Slutkin, director and professor of epidemiology and international health at the University of Illinois at Chicago: "It's what we'd call a situation out of control; it's like war ... It's like 'Apocalypse Now."'

Yes, it is; but to the Liberal Establishment, it's business as usual. The response is scripted. Raise taxes to "fight" the gangs; hire more social workers — six, count 'em, six new probation officers.

"A report released last Friday by respected civil rights lawyer Connie Rice criticized the area's piecemeal approach to gang crime and called for a comprehensive solution with a single agency headed by a gang czar with enough 'political clout' to cut through red tape and coordinate prevention and intervention services," the paper reports.

"They are living in a pressure cooker and the way society has managed this group is by adding more pressure," says Dr. Slutkin. "The only way to relieve this is to put something around them that allows them to release it that doesn't push back. Our outreach workers are trained to do that. Somebody has to make sense to them about what's going on."

Sorry, but a half dozen more probation officers and more "prevention and intervention services" and "outreach" aren't going to to make a scratch in the widespread blood sacrifice. I can't imagine what Dr. Slutkin wants to "put around" these young thugs "to release it that doesn't push back" — the sentence is grammatically and logically opaque; but whatever his outreach workers are trained to do, it will be at best a band aid. This is war, and social services don't win wars. Even better policing doesn't win wars. You win wars by eliminating the enemy, one way or another.

No, I don't propose a campaign of killing gang bangers, even though they are all potential or actual murderers. Let's get to the … wait for it … root cause of the problem. That's illegal and legal immigration from Mexico. Sure, there are black gangs (probably having a hard time holding their turf these days) and maybe a few white gangs, but the great majority of these vicious criminals are Mexicans who either got to LA by subterfuge or attained automatic U.S. citizenship by going to the trouble of being born (in a U.S. hospital, at U.S. taxpayers' expense).

Of course, in our p.c. society, you can't acknowledge such truths. So instead of a campaign to deport illegals for any crime, from illegal drug possession to overparking, and damming up the river of "migrants" from Mexico who will not and probably cannot become honest American citizens, we play the same old scratchy record: hire more sociological bureaucrats, concoct more "intervention" programs administered by otherwise unemployable academics, tell the police to police harder and blame them when it doesn't work. Meanwhile, gang homicide continues to vacuum up lives — in many cases, of immigrants themselves. They are victims, all right, but not primarily of the gangs. Our politicians are willing to see them fall to bullets, shotgun pellets, and knives rather than break the code of silence about the real results of "diversity" at all costs.

UPDATE 1/20
I am conscious that, under time pressure, these postings are not always as logically watertight as they might be. There are gaps that ideally should be filled in.

When I wrote, "This is war, and social services don't win wars," that might have sounded like hyperbole. While no one can doubt that these gangs are at war with one another, the level of violence, which sometimes spills over into random killings of "civilians" for racial and ethnic reasons, is a war against society. No nation worthy of the name can have "no go" areas in its major cities, gangs that are so large, so well armed, and so organized that they are effectively rebel armies. It may not be their intention, but these gangs with their ceaseless clashing and killing are declaring that they are outside the law, that they make the law of the streets.

We need to acknowledge this reality if any progress is to be made. These aren't juvenile delinquents or mixed-up kids, who can be saved by counseling. They are a criminal subculture without any moral sense, unless you can call loyalty to their own gang morality. Their daily employment is hard drug smuggling and sales, spiced up with homicide now and then.

I would bet money that if the authorities checked every time they busted a gangster, they'd find that more than half of the hispanic ones are illegals. They should be deported forthwith, along with their illegal family members. And while the LA police can't do anything about our insane "birthright citizenship," which ensures that any woman who can make it across the border to bear her children guarantees them U.S. citizenship, California's representatives in Congress should lead the movement to abolish automatic citizenship for the scions of lawbreakers.

But they won't, of course. For various reasons, they want to keep the Mexican influx going. They are accessories before and after the fact. For political and financial advantage, they wake up every morning with blood -- including that of innocents caught in the crossfire -- on their hands.