Gang

Thanks to Marston for his perspective on gangs. It seems that as time goes by we as a society--instead of recognizing the need for creative and daring programs, that may or may not work--plunge headlong into redoubling our efforts at obsolete and stale solutions that we know don't work. NATALIE BROWN Beverly Hills

Re "A deeper lesson in gang rape," Column, Nov. 7 Good for Sandy Banks. She has grasped the disturbing significance of the Richmond High School gang rape. It is far more frightening than the shootings at Ft. Hood, Texas. No matter how terrible, the shootings were the act of one deranged individual. As Banks points out, the gang rape was a community event. Everyone shares the responsibility -- students, teachers and parents. It should be a wake-up call about the decay in our social values.

NEW DELHI - The 23-year-old physiotherapy student was a woman with a dream. Her tuition paid from the sale of ancestral land, she studied hard, got good grades and was on track for a successful career. The horror of her brutal rape and subsequent death - after she and a 28-year-old male friend were assaulted last month by six attackers upon boarding what they assumed was a commuter bus - has sent shock waves across India. Over the weekend, another gang rape of a bus passenger, in the northern state of Punjab, was reported, along with the arrest of six suspects.

Re "Grieving father speaks of fears," March 5 Jamiel Shaw's parents did everything right to raise a beautiful son whose strong young hand was just about to grasp the knob on the door to his future. Thanks to some thug, neither Jamiel nor his parents will have the chance to celebrate what was on the other side of that door. With so much campaign talk burning the airwaves, I have yet to hear a candidate take a firm stand for gun control. I find that odd, especially in light of the many campus killings in the last year.

The leader of a violent Canadian drug gang known as the United Nations -- which has transported millions of dollars in cocaine, marijuana, firearms and cash up and down the West Coast -- was sentenced Wednesday to 30 years in a U.S. federal prison. Officials said that the sentencing of Clay Franklin Roueche, 34, marked a turning point in British Columbia's attempts to stamp out a gang war and slow the flood of illegal drugs across the U.S.-Canada border. In the late 1990s, Roueche, who once made his living as a scrap-metal salesman and welder in the comfortable suburbs east of Vancouver, founded the notorious U.N. gang, which prosecutors called both "corporate and violent."

It began, as mortal disputes sometimes do in South Los Angeles, over a girl. On one side were the Main Street Crips, one of the more muscular gangs in the neighborhood. Main Streeters commanded respect, if only because they had a bit of money to throw around, even their own small record label. On the other side were the Hoover Criminals. The Hoovers were big, with turf that stretched from Vernon Avenue down past Century Boulevard and into "the hundreds," as the streets are known locally.

Calvin Hodges insists he is not angry at the men who shot him. "I'm angry at the mind-set," Hodges said on a recent afternoon in Nickerson Gardens, the Watts public housing complex where he grew up, and nearly died. At 35, he's seen it from all sides now during a journey that has taken him from repeated run-ins with the police to being praised by them as a hero. In the three months since Hodges was shot, leaving him partly paralyzed, he has become an emblem of all that is risky about the city's campaign to interlace traditional policing with gang intervention and street outreach.

A federal grand jury in Charlotte indicted 26 suspected members of an international gang accused in a cross-border drug ring. U.S. Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey unsealed a federal indictment that charges people believed to be members of the MS-13 gang with racketeering through a drug trafficking ring that sold cocaine, marijuana and narcotics and with committing multiple robberies.

Four youths were publicly whipped in the Somali capital Monday after an Islamic court found them guilty of gang rape, underscoring the government's inability to administer justice in the war-ravaged nation. Judge Abdul Haq insisted that the punishment would deter other would-be rapists, but two of the youths smiled and laughed as they were punished. The lashing was administered over the clothes of the accused and did not break their skin.