gangs – praag.org

Black residents butcher thugs

Chilling stories about enraged black kasi residents butchering thugs who terrorise them are increasing.

People sweep aside police pleas not to take the law into their own hands. Their answer to thuggery is death by panga, stoning and fire!

Daily Sun has horrifying video footage of residents slaughtering alleged thugs. In the Free State capital, kasi residents went on the rampage this Wednesday against the Maroma gang, who are accused of taking pupils from schools and disrupting exams.

Three men were killed with pangas, spades and knobkerries.

And in Mpumalanga, enraged residents killed two men who allegedly raped and killed a pregnant woman and robbed her family of R8 800. A gruesome video shows a Mangaung kasi resident stabbing a man as he lay on the ground.

The raging crowd chanted: “Maroma gang members are cowards who target pupils! We will show them how we deal with cowards!”

A 40-year-old taverner was killed at Mangaung’s phase 4 on Wednesday morning after residents stormed his house looking for his son, said to be a gang member.

Then, as night fell, two unnamed men were killed in Mangaung’s phase 3 and phase 7 kasis. A parent said: “Today the grade 11 and 12 pupils were supposed to be writing exams but the lunatics stopped them.”

Brigadier Billy Jones said 14 people were arrested for public violence. “Cases of attempted murder, murder and malicious damage to property are being investigated.

In Saselani outside Dwaarsloop, Mpumalanga, residents went on the rampage this Tuesday after the horror five thugs allegedly unleashed on Friday night, when they forced their way into a family’s shack. Family member Stanley Mashaba (24) said: “The gunmen demanded the R8 800 my mum got from her stokvel. They hit me with a plank and the butts of their guns until I fainted.”

Stanley said they threatened his seven-month pregnant sister Charlotte (20) with a gun, slapped her around and threatened to shoot her if she didn’t hand over the money. Begging for her life, she gave them the money. The thugs left but returned a moment later, wanting to kill Stanley. The sisters begged for mercy.

Then, calling Charlotte a magosha, they dragged her to a nearby stream. They allegedly stripped her, raped her and shot her dead. This Tuesday, angry residents went looking for the thugs. They caught Bongani Mkhabela (24) and forced him to point out his friends.

He led the people to Lloyd Moon (20), and they beat him to a pulp with rocks and sticks. Brigadier Selvy Mohlala said residents took Bongani to the spot where they allegedly killed Charlotte. “They assaulted him and burned him with a tyre.”

Source: Daily Sun

Two murdered on school run in Cape Town

The morning school run erupted into chaos in Mitchells Plain, Cape Town on Monday when a parent was shot dead outside a high school and, in an unrelated shooting, a taxi driver was killed near a primary school a few metres away.

Gilianno Smith, 34, was on his way to meet the principal of Cedar Secondary School, where his son is in Grade 8, at about 7.50am when he was shot several times, allegedly by gunmen in a passing vehicle.

“It is believed that the deceased was standing on the street corner when unidentified suspects in a Toyota Quantum fired several shots fatally wounding the deceased,” police spokesman Captain FC van Wyk said.

Smith’s death and the subsequent shooting of a taxi driver near Spine View Primary at about 8.30am have left pupils and parents traumatised.

Van Wyk said the taxi driver is believed to have stopped his minibus in Spine Road to pick up commuters when he was shot by an unidentified suspect.

Smith’s distraught mother, Veronica Smith, said he had been on his way to Cedar Secondary to meet the principal, David Charles, when the shooting occurred.

Mother’s Day was the last time she spoke to her son.

“I am very, very sad. He made me a card (for Mother’s Day) because he believed a bought one wouldn’t express the words he wanted to say to me.”

She said her grandson had walked ahead of his father and arrived at the school unaware of his father’s death.

Source: IOL

Child killed in Coloured gang cross-fire

A seven-year-old boy was shot dead when he and his mother were caught in crossfire in Atlantis, Cape Town, Western Cape police said on Saturday.

“The young victim was accompanied by his mother when criminals opened fire, supposedly at another group of criminals, and [they] were both caught in the crossfire,” Lt-Col Andrè Traut said.

The boy’s mother was wounded in the neck and two men were also wounded in the shooting on Friday night.

“Many people have been questioned, and we will continue to question criminals until we find those responsible for the attack,” Traut said. – Sapa

Crime pays: International crime ranks as top economic player

Police find it hard to compete with international crime syndicates who rake in $870 billion a year via activities from drug trading and human trafficking to identity theft, a top UN official said Wednesday.

“This is an enormous amount of money,” Yury Fedotov, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, told AFP in an interview.

If crime syndicates were classed as an industry, their collective clout would rank them among the world’s top economic players.

Crisis-era cuts have widened a longstanding financial gulf between criminal gangs and those who fight them, Fedotov said.

“Gangs are better funded than any law enforcement institution. That is clear, and especially if we compare the huge amount of illicit revenues with limited budgets of many law enforcement institutions,” he said.

But funding is just part of the problem, Fedotov explained, as law enforcement agencies struggle to keep up with shape-shifting networks that move faster than the traditionalist mafias of the past.

“Contemporary organised crime is also sophisticated and highly adaptive,” Fedotov said.

“We should be more flexible, and not only follow the flow, but also prevent and anticipate developments in terms of organised crime,” he added.

Cybercrime is a major growth area, he explained, given that around one third of the world’s population now has active access to the Internet.

The annual proceeds of online identity theft alone are estimated at $1.0 billion, he noted, though that is still outstripped by $20 billion generated by trafficking in endangered species.

In the narcotics trade, meanwhile, concerns focus on the rising number of designer drugs.

Fedotov also flagged worries about rising drug trafficking via the troubled Sahel and West Africa — notably through lawless Guinea Bissau, which he dubbed the “weakest link”.

The trade through the region has been stoked by notoriously violent central American cocaine-running gangs whose north American markets have shrunk. – The Citizen

Gangs have increased by 40% since Obama took office

Newt Gingrich appeared on Candy Crowley’s State of the Union with Democratic Congressman Bobby Rush.

Throughout the 1960s, Rush was involved in the civil-rights movement and worked in civil-disobedience campaigns in the Southern United States. After co-founding the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers in 1968, he served as its “defense minister”. Rush has made statements saying “We needed to arm ourselves” and referring to the police as “pigs”.

He is U.S. Representative for Illinois’s 1st congressional district, serving since 1993. The district is located principally on the South Side of Chicago with its population percentage being 65% African-American, higher than any other congressional district in the nation.

A member of the Democratic Party, he holds the distinction of being the only person to defeat President Barack Obama in an election, as he did in the 2000 Democratic primaries.

NEWT GINGRICH: This fits perfectly with what I was going to say earlier. You have a congressman — and I respect Bobby Rush. You have a congressman who represents the most violent city in America. You have a congressman who represents the city in which over 500 people were killed last year, 74 percent of them African-American. You have a congressman who represents the city which is 80 percent of the killings, according to police, are by gangs. Gangs have increased — let me finish. Gangs have increased by 40 percent since this president was elected. There is no federal program to stop it. No one wants to have an honest conversation about it. And so you have a congressman whose own district is bleeding, who puts on a hoodie as a symbolic act, but he doesn’t do anything about the gangs in his own district.

REP. BOBBY RUSH (D-IL): Wait a minute.

CROWLEY: Hang on. First of all, congressman, let me let you —

RUSH: That’s a charge, Newt, that is not going to hold, doesn’t hold water. I have been working relentlessly since I’ve been in Congress, even when you were the speaker of the House and didn’t want to hear any of these matters. I have been working on trying to deal with this violence. I’m astounded and ashamed about this violence. But this is also systemic to an overall problem. Chicago will take care of this violence. That’s one of the reasons why on a Friday, the 26th, we’re having this National Summit on Urban Violence. This was before the verdict we had planned this. The congressional black caucus is coming into Chicago so that we can work on solutions to this problem.

Now, what I challenge you to, Newt, especially today, I want to challenge you and your Republican cohorts. Today is a Sunday. Today is a day of worship. We serve and worship the same God. In Michael 6:3 and 8, the words tell us that we should love justice, do mercy, and walk humbly with our God. Now, for those folks who are cheering the George Zimmerman verdict, I would challenge you and the rest of the, let us honor, and let us lift up the spirit of the words of Micah 6:8 to work together to have the conversation, but not just have the conversation. Let us deal with the disenfranchisement, and let us deal with the distortions as it relates to our nation.- Real Clear Politics

Chaos and violence on the rise in UK

bobbiescroydon — British police in Croydon, South London on August 8, 2011

Chaos and violence are on the rise in the UK a year after the PM declared a war on gang culture, a study revealed. Police aggression and a refusal to tackle the root causes of delinquency are reportedly the main issues hindering the initiative.

On Monday, the Center for Social Justice (CSJ) released a damning report titled ‘Time to Wake Up.’ The study criticized the steps taken by the UK’s coalition government over the last year to curb the problem of rising social unrest and delinquency.

The investigation roundly condemned the government’s heavy-handed approach as exacerbating the problem, citing a perception in the government of the riots as a “random one-off” that can be managed by an elevated police presence.

“They could not be more wrong. The alarming fact is that many streets across the country are besieged by anarchy and violence. There is no control in such neighborhoods,” the report said. It also notes an increase in violence among younger gang members, and in the number of women joining gangs.

In the wake of the mass rioting that swept the UK last summer, PM David Cameron launched an “all-out war on gang culture,” maintaining that gangs were at the root of the social unrest. The CSJ report cited statistics showing that “individuals who have links to gangs are believed to be responsible for 16 percent of London’s total drug supply, nearly a fifth of stabbings, half of all shootings and 14 percent of all rapes.”

The CSJ argued that the 10 million pounds the Home Office allotted last year to combating gang culture had been poorly distributed. Some organizations designated for funding did not receive money due to a lack of awareness, which the report describes as indicative of a “complete disconnect between what goes on at the policy level to what goes on on the ground.”

The CSJ said that aggressive policing could be one of the main drivers of the increase in gang crime over the past year.

“Negative, discriminatory and aggressive police behavior, if not perpetuating gang culture, actively hinders attempts to tackle it,” the study said, adding that according to a CSJ survey, 57.7 percent of respondents believed the police’s relationship with young people had not changed since the riots, while 13.5 percent said it had worsened.

The organization expressed particular concern with the police policy of targeting gang leaders. Referencing the arrest of over 200 ringleaders in London over the past year, CSJ said their removal had led to the creation of volatile power vacuums, potentially paving the way for chaotic power struggles between younger gang members.

The UK government’s attitude towards gang violence will only yield short-term results, the CSJ argued, adding that the underlying issues need to be addressed if there is to be any long-term resolution of the issue.

The study described the current strategy as ignoring the root causes of the violence, such as family breakdown and dysfunction, drug addiction and unemployment: “It takes years to work with gang nominal. Preventative work to discourage young people from joining gangs has ‘fallen off the radar.’

The growing gang culture in the UK hit the headlines last year when thousands of young people took part in riots across the country, looting shops and damaging property.

Mass riots in London were triggered by the police shooting of suspected criminal Mark Duggan, The circumstances surrounding the incident are highly controversial: Some claim Duggan was unarmed when he was gunned down by an officer. The government attributed the ensuing violence and social unrest to a degraded youth culture.

Death toll rising from Coloured gangs in Cape Town

Cape Coloured ganster — Cape Coloured gangster. Sometimes residents have to stay indoors when they flash their guns in broad daylight

Initiations into gangs and the release of gang members from prison may be causing a surge of shootings in Cape Town, it was reported on Tuesday.

The Cape Times reported that at least nine men had been killed in apparent gang-related shootings around the city in about two months.

Manenberg Community Police Forum spokesman Kader Jacobs said that in the past six to eight weeks, roughly five shootings had been reported in his area.

He said one of the reasons for this could be that “high-flyer gangsters” had been released from prison, had returned to their power base, and needed to “stamp their authority”.

He reportedly said another factor could be the gang initiation process, in which a person had to kill someone to get into a gang.

In the latest attack, Rashied Fortune, 20, was killed in Manenberg in a drive-by shooting on Saturday.

Gangsterism is particularly high on the Cape Flats where Coloureds live and it does not involve the organised crime syndicates of the Godfather with Armani-suited men saying “kapeesh” but more a volatile mess of street-gangs, hungry for blood and the next ego trip. Status and fear is the driving force behind these gangs, where moving up the ranks involves killing a rival gang member or even your own mother. It’s brutal.

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Sometimes gang members rule whole neighbourhoods and residents are put on ‘lockdown’ by police, due to gang members whipping out their guns and going trigger-happy in broad daylight.

But is there really a solution to this mess? Police and local government have tried in vain to clamp down on gangsterism, but it goes hand-in-hand with poverty and drugs so where does one even begin to find an end? As always it is a vicious cycle with the youth on the Cape Flats seeing nothing but glamourised gangsterism. To these kids joining a gang is an admirable and predestined thing for them to do. With a lack of role models due to mostly absent fathers, children growing up on the streets of the ‘ghetto’ are impressionable and often misguided. Many of them claim to see gangs as a sort of family structure that they’ve never had. It has become a culture, a way of life with its own lingo ‘logo’s and hand signals. One could argue that joining a gang is a means of survival for these men. But even thinking of it that way makes it all seem more hopeless. – Sapa and other sources