Rob Ford Quotes

Anyone who knows gangs knows that lawmakers cannot conceive of a law that would lead a hard-core gang member to 'think twice.'

I know people in gangs; I could have went down that route.

I think 98% of gang members in Los Angeles would agree that being a gang is just like being part of a community.

What a lot of people don't realize about gangs, in my opinion, is that a gang is not there to attack you. Eighty percent of the people in a gang are there to stop anyone from attacking them. You join a gang for protection, not to go out and hit someone.

What people don't understand is joining a gang ain't bad, it's cool, it's fine. When you in the hood, joining a gang it's cool because all your friends are in the gang, all your family's in the gang. We're not just killing people every night, we're just hanging out, having a good time.

Gangs are a part of living in Los Angeles, but you can exist in Inglewood or Culver City or anywhere else, without joining one.

When you're in a gang, you go through life like any other individual. You have certain obligations, but you are not forced to do anything.

I wanted the attention I missed at home, so I became the leader of a gang. That way, I got attention and was recognized as being important. It wasn't a bad gang - you know, in poor districts in New York, there's a gang to every block. We never robbed at the point of a gun; we'd steal potatoes from a grocery store, or crackers.

In Los Angeles, the gang capital of the world, we have 1,100 gangs and 120,000 gang members so it is a daunting, complex social dilemma.

I've never been in a gang. None of my friends have been in a gang. I've never rolled around with big entourages.

People have to see that there is a high degree of complexity about belonging to a gang. It's a symptom, not a problem.

I'm trying to get other niggas off the streets.

If you do nothing, that just empowers the gangs.

We ought not to demonize a single gang member, and we ought not to romanticize a single gang.

I've written a book on gangs, taught a course on gangs at Occidental.

I was a gang leader. Although, it was a gang for defensive purposes. It was not a gang to sell drugs.

Three thousand jurisdictions across the U.S. are estimated to have had gang activity in 2001. In 2002, 32% of cities with a population of 25 to 50 thousand reported a gang-related homicide.

My earnest hope is that what we started in terms of building partnerships with communities across America will continue, that we will continue our efforts to reduce crime and violence.

Gangs are bastions of conditional love, and one of the ways to counteract it is to offer community, which will always trump gang, and that's what happens at Homeboy Industries.

I founded Homeboy Industries in 1988 after I buried my first young person killed in our streets because of gang violence.

What do we know to be true about gang violence? We know we will fail if we fixate on the symptoms and not address what undergirds it.

Gangs have evolved. The stereotypical gang member covered in tattoos and wearing colors does not really exist any more. There's this fear that it could be any kid, but by any kid, that means any Latino kid.

I was in middle school right around the time the Bloods and the Crips started taking root in Compton and a lot of the other neighborhoods around me. I saw way too many of my peers - smart, kind, good kids - who got drawn into gangs and violence, and their futures were going to be forever scarred by that.

In my barrio, jobs work and money saves lives. When I have had the funds to place a gang member on a job site and pay his salary, I've seen him stop banging. When, on the rarest of occasions, an employer has offered a job to one of these youth, I've witnessed kids suddenly have a reason to get up in the morning.

If we grow up in these communities where we have gangs, well, what do you think we're going to belong to? That's what happened to me and what's still happening to hundreds of thousands of other individuals.