Residents walk dogs they go out at night. The change, say community members, is palpable. Along the way, blacks became a minority in Compton, which is 60 percent Latino today. Fridays, an outbreak of Starbucks and a natural-food store. Alongside the liquor stores and check-cashing stands are signs of middle-class aspiration: a T.G.I. There are fewer gunshots and more places for kids to go after school. But the number of homicides is at a 25-year low, slashed in half from 2005. The community is still poor, and unemployment is more than twice the national average. Two decades later, Compton has a new lease on life. The image of Compton as a defiantly violent ghetto was crystallized by the rap group N.W.A., whose 1988 album, "Straight Outta Compton," went multiplatinum, even though it was banned by many radio stations the record even attracted the attention of the FBI, which felt the group was inciting violence with its song, "F- tha Police."
In 1989, a 2-year-old was gunned down in a drive-by as he wandered his front yard a 16-year-old was shot with a semiautomatic weapon as he rode his bike. murder capital, per capita, surpassing Washington with one homicide for every 1,000 residents-and the details were numbing. Drugs were rampant, and street-gang tensions had escalated into what historian Josh Sides describes as "a brutal guerilla war." The city became the U.S. It was prime real estate-except that, well, it wasn't.īy the 1990s, the mere mention of the name Compton had become so toxic that the nearby southern California suburbs had the city of 100,000 erased from their maps. Lampposts that once illuminated new cars and sale signs stood darkened, some tagged with gang graffiti. Surrounded by an eight-foot steel gate, the once-bustling auto dealership had become a haven for the homeless a place where people dumped trash, loitered, caused trouble. “And numbers like that are clearly staggering.For nearly a decade, the entrance to the city of Compton, Calif., just off the 91 Freeway, was a huge, vacant lot, overgrown by weeds. “What’s significant is that each of those numbers represents a human being,” Gascon said.
#Compton la 1990 full
“It’s a little premature for us to analyze the numbers, but even without a full accounting for the number of murders in the city, they’re astronomical,” said Los Angeles Police Department Cmdr.
These and other factors, he said, helped boost the national crime rate by some 400% between the 1960s and the 1980s-a trend that was echoed in Los Angeles, and that police are continuing to study. Women, too, are more at risk because they are dispersed in the job market, rather than congregated in neighborhoods, he said. Burglaries are much easier and more tempting now than they were a generation ago, for instance, because televisions, radios and other gadgets are so much lighter and easier to carry off. We just have much better weapons for people to grab when they’re angry than we used to.”Īdditionally, Felson said, societal changes have opened broader opportunities for crime overall. “There’s no indication that the person who, say, hits someone, is any less angry than the person who shoots someone. “Homicide is just a fistfight when you have a gun in your fist,” Felson said. The spring’s rioting played a part, contributing 52 deaths, but so, too, did hundreds of far-less-publicized slayings in homes and on streets countywide.īut Felson says there may be overarching trends as well-not the least of them the proliferation of guns. Gang violence is part of the story, but not as big a part as many suspect: According to LAPD statistics, for instance, only about a third of the city’s homicides this year were gang-related. The numbers include not only the many people who are beaten, shot or stabbed to death, but those who die as the result of vehicular manslaughter. Last year’s rate marked yet another record, 28 per 100,000 residents. By 1980, which for most of the decade stood as the county’s most violent year, the homicide rate was 24.4 killings per 100,000 residents.įor several years, the rate dipped, but it surged up again in 1991. In 1970, the county had 10.2 homicides per 100,000 residents. Los Angeles County’s homicide rate generally has been on the rise for at least the past 20 years, statistics show. “Yes, we have a lot of homicides,” said USC criminologist Marcus Felson.
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