'Where are you from?'

'Where are you from?" is the last question many young men in Los Angeles hear. It's not a question about geography but about gang affiliation, and it is asked in the moment before a shooting. I've been around after an awful lot of these shootings, and I must've heard the phrase at least a thousand times, reported by those who have been lucky enough to escape death. Thousands more have not escaped.

It's very hard to understand what motivates street-level gang violence. I've been dealing with gangs for three decades, and I still have plenty of questions. But I think those all-too-frequently-used words -- "Where are you from?" -- go a long way toward explaining the vast majority of the cases we deal with. And here's what's most important about them at the moment: They're about gang status, not about race.

Two weeks ago, L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca wrote an Op-Ed article in this paper in which he argued that there was a serious interracial violence problem between blacks and Latinos in Los Angeles. He went even further, saying that in many cases gang members were killing people purely because of their race. In the Los Angeles Police Department, where I serve as chief of detectives, we strongly disagree.

The LAPD handles more street gang crime than any law enforcement agency in the United States -- more than 3,000 cases this year to date. The L.A. County Sheriff's Department operates the largest county jail in the country. These two facts affect the way both organizations perceive the problem of gang violence. Baca was right in his Op-Ed article to say that racial tensions create violence in the closed confines of his jails and in some of our schools. He was also right when he wrote about demographic shifts causing racial tension in our neighborhoods.

But I was taken aback when he wrote that in many cases black and Latino gangs target people for street-level violence based only on race. Each year, there are a small number of racially motivated attacks by gang members in the city of Los Angeles, but our experience shows, and data support, that these are rare circumstances.