Gangs Investigation

David Brotherton

Aggressive police anti-gang activity in the late 20th century can be dated to the mid-1970s, when the law enforcement campaign against gangs called Total Resources Against Street Hoodlums (TRASH) was initiated in East Los Angeles. This movement toward a robustly proactive approach to street gang crime represented a shift from the social controls traditionally used for dealing with juvenile violence, particularly in urban areas, since the turn of the century. Such a shift in tactics mirrored a hardening in attitudes across local, state, and federal governments toward gang populations in the post-1960s period as gang violence and crime increased dramatically across the country. As a progressive, reformist phase of U.S. history waned, an era of neoconservativism was fully instituted with the first Reagan administration at the beginning of the 1980s. During the decade that followed, the generalized belief that the increasing crime rate, often attributed to the very real signifying ...

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