![]() The video ends with a surprising insight into the odds of their own survival, a funeral. And the drug trade, investigators say, provides it revenue-enough money, in fact, for the gang to help produce a rap video portraying the members’ violent lives. Read all her posts here.A six-block stretch of Inglewood, directly under the approach to Los Angeles International Airport, is prisoner to drugs, guns and a gang that authorities say is supported by both of those evils.Īmerica’s virtually free market in handguns gives the Crenshaw Mafia Gang, a subgroup of the Bloods, its deadly power, according to police. Journalist and op-ed columnist Erin Aubry Kaplan's first-person accounts of politics and identity in Los Angeles, with an eye towards the city's African American community, appear every Thursday on KCET's SoCal Focus blog. ![]() Our season on Darby is finally under way, but we've still got a ways to go. Baseball, skateboarding and even owning dogs are amenities to a good life, not a good life itself. All the Little Leagues and skateboard ramps in the world can't stabilize a scenario in which people aren't working. And they have no direction, no sense of where to go next. I like him but deliberately don't engage him in too much political talk. I'm a bit surprised - I take Willie for a conservative, or at least a law-and-order type. He says things are as bad for black people now as he's ever seen them and that we're at a very critical juncture. Willie lives in a house with a white picket fence behind which grow cacti and big red roses. I visit the skateboard park and the Little League field not to forget these eruptions, but to remember-what else we are, who we could be. I also liked the fact that the whole skateboarding culture conferred a kind of suburban normalcy that Inglewood always seems to need to pull it back to the center of civic gravity after an eruption like the fatal shooting of Fred Martin that happened recently, a couple miles from the park. I liked that park and the sight of kids, mostly boys, zipping up and around the metal ramps and slides with a concentration and focus on perfecting - no slippery standards there - that never flagged, that indeed seemed to intensify with each mistake or near-tumble. He reminded me that the commission was also responsible for the skateboard park built at the other end of Darby. He was cruising through Darby on a kind of regular round, admiring its latest attraction for which he was partly responsible. The driver was my neighbor across 108th Street, Willie, who's also on the city parks and recreation commission. A car that was moving at a snail's pace along the walking path next to the field slowed up as it approached me, then stopped. The youngest of my dogs, the half-Lab, picked up her ears and looked behind us. Leaning against the new chain-link fence and looking in, I was almost embarrassed to feel something like awe that this project had come off, and that it didn't disappoint or fall short. No improvising necessary: we have a real baseball field. ![]() The new park replaces that familiar but slippery sense of expectation and ambition with something solid and unmoving. The new field is nice, even commanding Darby suddenly has a centerpiece where it used to have merely an attempt at a baseball field, a pretty good attempt by Inglewood standards. But I had used the old field for years as a play space and training area for my growing family of dogs it was the rare place that was bigger than a backyard, out in the open but contained, public but private at the same time. I wrote in a previous blog how I regretted watching the transformation of the field over the winter, despite the fact that having a Little League field in town was nothing but a good development. The regulation Little League diamond (officially Sportsman Little League) is bigger and more impressive than what was there before, a somewhat ragged grassy field with a smallish infield of red clay dirt and a haphazard pitcher's mound. I took my dogs out yesterday to Darby Park and discovered that the new baseball field is finished.
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