Category Archives: Gangs

“What we are seeing, a large majority of the stuff seems to be linked to organized crime. You can’t get these items in California. It creates a black market. What we think we are seeing as a trend is gangs running them as fundraisers.” said Bryan Gouge, a senior arson and bomb investigator in the state Fire Marshal’s Office.

The illegal fireworks that have been entertaining, bedeviling and injuring Southern California residents heading into the Fourth of July weekend are increasingly arriving in the state via smuggling, often by criminal street gangs that use the same techniques they employ to distribute drugs, investigators say.

Fireworks that explode, spin along the ground and launch balls of fire high into the air are often purchased legally in other states before being snuck into California, where they are prohibited. They are concealed in passenger cars, trucked in using rental vehicles and driven in caravans sometimes escorted by armed gang members.

Other such fireworks enter through the port of Long Beach from Mexico and China and are ostensibly headed out of state to be sold legally, but some somehow never make it to their intended destinations.

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“Often these violent crimes are happening in broad daylight — indiscriminate violence with hundreds and hundreds of bullets in our neighborhoods,” he wrote.

Amid what one law enforcement official has called a “seemingly indiscriminate cycle of violence,” the police union in Portland, Oregon, has a dire prediction for the city.

“We are on the precipice of a gang war,” Daryl Turner, Executive Director of the Portland Police Association, posted Thursday on the union’s Facebook page.

“Right now, our community has a sense of hopelessness. They have resigned themselves to the fact that things will get worse, not better. Residents are moving out of the City, businesses are being forced to relocate, and good, hard-working police officers are leaving the Bureau to work for other agencies,” he wrote.

Turner said Portland politicians cannot hide from the truth any longer.

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