LAPD officer’s killing brings attention to one of L.A.’s largest gangs

 Seven decades ago, Latino youths in South Los Angeles banded together to form a gang. They called themselves Florencia, after the east-west thoroughfare that ran through the heart of their territory. Years of violent conflict over that territory with other gangs lent Florencia an identity and reason for being. Over the years, demographic and social shifts have weakened many street gangs and caused some to die out altogether. Florencia did the opposite, law enforcement officials say, absorbing smaller gangs and expanding their extortion and drug dealing rackets on the orders of its leaders, who are incarcerated many hundreds of miles away. The gang is now at the center of the killing earlier this month of an off-duty Los Angeles police officer. Officer Fernando Arroyos, 27, was shot to death the night of Jan. 10 near the intersection of 87th and Beach streets. Police say he was with his girlfriend, looking at a house that he was thinking of buying, when two men robbed him at gunpoint of his wallet and jewelry. Arroyos and his assailants exchanged gunfire. The officer collapsed in an alley, mortally wounded.

Luis De La Rosa Rios, Jesse Contreras, Ernesto Cisneros and Haylee Grisham have been charged in federal court with Arroyos’ killing. The three men are members of Florencia-13, according to the FBI. Grisham, the girlfriend of Rios, is described as a gang associate. None could be reached for comment, and they have yet to enter pleas.

The particular charge that prosecutors have brought against the four — violent crime in aid of racketeering — means they must make the case that the defendants robbed and murdered Arroyos to maintain or increase their standing within Florencia-13. 

Juries have found in a number of recent trials that Florencia-13 amounts to a racketeering enterprise, but in those cases, prosecutors had evidence — recorded calls, intercepted letters and jailhouse notes — that its leaders had directed the drug deals, shakedowns and murders that formed a pattern of racketeering activity.

According to an FBI agent’s affidavit, one of the defendants has admitted that they were driving around, looking for someone to rob, when Rios spotted Arroyos and remarked, “He has a nice chain, let’s get it.”

The historic core of Florencia’s territory is bounded by Slauson Avenue to the north, 101st Street to the south, Central Avenue to the west and State Street to the east, Lt. Hector Velasquez of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department testified in 2016. In time it absorbed smaller gangs, many of which became cliques, or subsets, of Florencia-13. The gang now has at least two dozen cliques across South Los Angeles, Huntington Park, South Gate and Maywood. 

Its ranks are knitted together by blood. It’s common, authorities say, for members of the gang to have followed an uncle, a father or a grandfather into it.

‘They’re Shooting Live Bullets at Us’: Guards Keep Firing Guns at Edmonton’s Federal Prison

Inmates, corrections guards, and advocates tell VICE World News that they’re extremely worried at the rapidly deteriorating situation. 

Tensions are mounting in one of Canada’s most dysfunctional federal prisons after corrections officers fired their service weapons for the second time in a matter of weeks. Since reporting on a chaotic brawl that sent two inmates to hospital and wounded a third, VICE World News has been contacted by a number of inmates, corrections officers, and advocates to raise the alarm on worsening conditions inside the maximum-security Edmonton Institution. Multiple sources described the situation as a powder keg, with warnings that violence could flare if things don’t improve. According to those sources, a fight broke out between two inmates on Jan. 8. After verbal warnings, officers intervened by firing multiple rounds from their carbine rifles—sources estimate that between four and seven rounds were fired. While the Correctional Service, Canadian’s federal prison agency, confirmed that “warning shots” were fired, one corrections officer, speaking under condition of anonymity, claimed one round was aimed at the inmate who instigated the fight, but it missed. VICE World News is not identifying the corrections employees because they were not authorized to speak to the media and feared consequences from their employer; nor are we identifying the inmates and their families, who feared retaliation from the corrections officers. VICE has also been given Access to Information documents, court records, and audio tapes that corroborate the toxic, violent, and dysfunctional state of the institution. Inmates have also spoken to the Edmonton Journal, describing how the current climate inside the prison makes them fear for their lives. The Correctional Service confirmed that one inmate remains in hospital “as a result of serious injuries he sustained in a physical altercation with another inmate.” They specified that his injuries “are not a result of the action taken by the Correctional Service of Canada to end the altercation.” The Union of Canadian Correctional Officers (UCCO) said that neither of the inmates was hit by a bullet. The shooting set everyone in the prison on edge. Inmates say firing live rounds in the relatively small enclosed space was reckless. On Thursday, another shooting happened after an inmate was taken off suicide watch and returned to his cell, on the same unit where the shooting had taken place less than two weeks earlier. Within 10 minutes of him returning to general population, the inmate attacked someone in the unit, multiple sources say—it’s unclear if they attacked a guard or another inmate. “When that happened, they started shooting,” said an inmate who was sitting in a nearby cell. “They’re shooting live bullets right at us,” he said. Given that the area is “wall-to-wall metal,” he said, the risk of a ricochet is very real. He said officers fired two live rounds, then dispatched tear gas. There were no reported injuries as a result of the shooting. The Correctional Service confirmed to VICE World News that officers fired their weapons again on Jan. 21. They wrote in an email that the officers tried to resolve the conflict “using the most reasonable interventions” and that “munitions are a last resort when someone’s life may be threatened.”The Service would not confirm how many rounds were fired in either incident.

‘We don’t feel safe’

Things inside Edmonton Institution have been getting steadily worse for months. The environment goes in a vicious cycle: A lack of programming, services, and family visits have made the inmates bored, frustrated, and angry. Invariably, that frustration explodes into violence. Corrections officers respond to that violence, which provokes further tensions. Overcrowding and understaffing exacerbate those problems. The temperature continues to rise, however. The corrections officer says that the unit in question is a “Gong Show.” The inmate on that unit says inmates are growing increasingly frustrated with the conditions: “​​On a good day, we get one hour out. We’re locked up like 23 hours a day.” He adds: “You can’t even get to see a doctor, or psychiatrist, or anybody to talk to for your mental health.” Numerous court rulings have found that keeping inmates in their cell for more than 20 hours a day constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, causes significant psychological and mental harm, and is unconstitutional. Federal law is supposed to forbid that practice. But everyone who spoke to VICE News says those limits are not being respected inside Edmonton Institution.“This is very simple,” one former Edmonton Institution corrections officer told VICE World News. “When you push an inmate, they [can only] get pushed so far. They can't get their mail. They can't get on the phone to their loved ones, they can't get a shower: They start to eat themselves, they start to stab themselves. They start to banter back and forth between their cell doors because they have no coping strategies.” It’s a struggle just to get inmates access to the recreation yard, they said. “There's no library. There's no schooling.”In Canada, security designations are not static; inmates can be classified higher or lower based on their behavior inside the prison. Inmates in maximum security can be moved down to a medium-security facility if they can show a commitment to rehabilitation: Taking classes, working in the prison industry, or participating in programming for addiction can all contribute to an inmate being classified down. But without programming, those moves become more difficult.  “You need inmates cascading down to medium. That's how you have more control over the inmates,” the ex-officer said. “You want an inmate to go from a max, to a medium, to a minimum, to a halfway house, and to have control mechanisms in place to protect the public. “What does the public want? An inmate that was just involved in a group stabbing, and released the next day?” the former officer continued. A family member of a current inmate at Edmonton Institute agreed. “Inmates are being released from max, which is unacceptable—some who are dangerous,” they told VICE News. “There's a reason why a maximum-security inmate is in a maximum-security penitentiary. OK? So if you really want to see what a maximum security inmate can do, you take everything away from them,” the former officer said. As tensions mount, the job of managing the prison falls onto corrections officers, who are often left with few mechanisms to respond. “The reality about the maximum-security population is that it is so, so difficult to manage,” Bloomfield says. While many in the prison may be trying to do their time peacefully and transition out of maximum security, others are gang-affiliated and looking to cause trouble.

Nipsey Hussle Was Apparently Targeted By The LAPD Before His Death Despite Saying He Wasn’t In 2019

 

After Nipsey Hussle‘s death in 2019, the Los Angeles Police Department denied that he was the target of an investigation into the neighborhood of his Marathon Clothing store. The investigation was aimed at trying to curb gang violence in the Central LA area around the store, but representatives for the LAPD said that Nipsey wasn’t being investigated.

However, in a new episode of Guardian‘s Today In Focus podcast, the initiative, called the LASER (Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration) program, Nipsey’s brother, Samiel Asghedom (aka Blacc Sam) revealed that many of those anti-gang efforts centered on the Marathon store, despite the positive work the rapper had committed to. “The agenda was, ‘Whatever they’re doing over there, crush it,” he said.

Meanwhile, law professor Andrew Ferguson described the program, explaining its title as a “metaphor that they were going to, like laser surgery, remove the tumors, the bad actors from the community” via “predictive policing technology.” According to Los Angeles Times, the program used data to identify “anchor points” were more officers could be concentrated. In 2019, the program was ended by the LAPD after community criticism, with a spokesperson saying, “We discontinued LASER because we want to reassess the data. It was inconsistent. We’re pulling back.”