And it didn’t matter how poorly conceived and executed the gang statutes were, what with their siphoning off of millions and millions and millions of dollars into police departments and away from everything that any rational parent or adult knows a young person needs in order to succeed—good schools, creative outlets, arts and sports programs and space to just be still. But so ineffective were these laws that between 1990 and 2010 in my city, Los Angeles, with the greatest number of injunctions in the state designed, they said, to stop gang activity, 10,000 young people were killed. Which is
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