Gangs of New York

Gangs in the United States have evolved from malignant neighborhood groups into lucrative businesses and brutal vigilantes. Harvard University Professor Roland Fryer concludes the Crack Epidemic fundamentally transformed gangs because the booming drug trade incentivized larger and more sophisticated gangs (9). Similarly, the rapidly increasing opioid market in rural and suburban America explains the development of gangs in those areas (Whalen). Unfortunately, addiction and drug sales often bring…

Street Gangs: The Great Migration Gangs have increasingly become a serious problem over the past few decades. A report from the FBI’s 2011 National Gang threat assessment states that there are 1.4 million active gang members comprising of more than 33,000 gangs in the United States (MacBradaign, 2013). Many believe that the first street gangs started with the formation of the Crips and the Bloods between 1971-1972, but the first active street gangs in western civilization were reported by Pike…

fifty active gangs. Many of those gangs have existed for more than fifty years. When combined, the gangs have a membership of over forty-five thousand individuals. Growing up and living in Boyle Heights, gang problems like graffiti in the alleys and homicides have somewhat decreased but not disappeared. One of the reasons why gang activity has decreased where I live is because of police patrol. However, police patrol and painting over gang graffiti aren’t going to entirely solve gang problems.…

illustrates New York with a large number of Puerto Ricans so the film can be historical source. In fact, New York Times articles from the 1900s and secondary literature of the history…

Life was especially difficult in Chicago because of Al Capone and his gang/mob. Al Capone’s gang was one of the most dangerous ones in the US, and if any rival gang came across them in a bad way there would be consequences like the St. Valentine's Massacre. This shows that all alcohol would go through Al Capone and his gang and pretty much nobody could stop him. Al Capone was born on January 17, 1899 in Brooklyn, New York to poor Italian immigrant parents Gabriele and Teresina Capone. They came…

Tennes who changed the history of Chicago. But it was Al Capone who made Chicago one of the most ruthless and crime ridden towns in the nation (Lyman & Potter, 2015 p. 88). Capone started off in New York City, but after he was suspected of committing two murders, he had two options; to either leave New York or risk being killed. When Al Capone first moved to Chicago, he worked for crime boss “Big Jim” Colosimo. Although this didn’t last long, as Colosimo was killed because he saw the…

affluent residents of New York’s Lower East Side neighborhood began to move further north, leaving their low-rise masonry row houses behind. With the huge influx of people, buildings that had once been single-family dwellings were increasingly divided into multiple living spaces to accommodate this growing population. These buildings became known as tenements. They were narrow, low-rise apartment buildings, a large number of them concentrated in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City…

lettering combined with images and icons from a popular culture to create a complex composition. Graffiti art was connected with the hip-hop culture, which included rap music, break dancing, and disc jockeys. This culture attracted a lot of attention in New York magazines, movies, and films like the movie “Break In” which helped the society have a better understanding of this culture. Many graffiti artists became very well known at the time. Hip-hop had become accepted in the United States and…

police in New York have adopted a new method of cracking down on gang violence. Instead of, as the article described, “spending a great deal of time pounding the pavement for information that might lead to arrests”, they have begun using the internet to their advantage. Their reasoning in doing so is that criminals can incriminate themselves by bragging online or classifying themselves as gang members. There is, however, some controversy surrounding the use of the internet to catch gang bangers.…

Saturday Night Fever, the iconic 1970’s disco film is really a tale of two cities, Manhattan and Brooklyn. It’s a depiction of people trying to break out of dead end lives. While both Manhattan and Brooklyn are a part of New York City, in the 1970’s they were worlds apart. Manhattan was White Collar while Brooklyn was blue collar. Manhattan was a borough full of hopes and dream while Brooklyn, the setting of the film, was the home of broken dreams. The characters in Saturday Nigh Fever, most…