The Latest L.A. Craze: Gang Tours

The city of Los Angeles has a new and unusual tourist attraction. But I don’t want you thinking Hollywood glitz or Frank Gehry. That’s not nearly gritty enough. Can the uglier side of real life draw crowds, too?

Motivated by religious faith and the belief that delinquency is a by-product of poverty, a local activist group is hoping that the world of LA gangs can also have tourist appeal, as long as it is packaged the right way. Think educational tourism, with the focus on poverty and social injustice.

The idea, says Alfred Lomas, a former Florencia 13 gang member, and principal promoter of the unusual tourism project, is to “humanize poverty” by offering two-hour tours of notorious city neighborhoods made famous by gang shootings and drug trafficking.

From now on, if you’re planning a trip to southern California and don’t really care to visit Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall or the art exhibits at the two Getty museums, and you don’t want to a tour of the Hollywood mansions of Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, etc, this may be just the alternative you are seeking.

Interested in the deceased, but looking for something more 21st century than paying your respects at the gravesites of Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra? Well, as the LA gang web site says, “You need no longer imagine,” how gang members actually live ... and die.

 Tourists can buy shirts featuring graffiti by a local artist. Also included in the $65 tour is a rap dance contest in which tourists may serve as the judges, as well as the sponsors of awards for the winner. (Another idea of having neighborhood children fire water pistols at tourists in a mock display intended to replicate what really happens on these streets was dropped. Each participant to the mock shooting would have received a commemorative shirt bearing the inscription: I was shot in South Central Los Angeles.)

The first stop on the tour is an on-site graffiti lesson to familiarize tourists with how gangs use the art form to organize, intimidate and recruit. Other attractions include a visit to the cradle of the Black Panthers, the revolutionary black power movement, as well as the original headquarters of the Bloods, one of the most notorious African-American gangs, and the turf of their Latino equivalent, Florencia 13.

For the truly curious, the list of sites included in the tour is available on the web site www.lagangtours.com.

For Francisco Ortega, one of the members of the Human Relations Commission of Los Angeles, the idea is “fascinating, although controversial.” Above all, “this would be a way of raising people’s awareness, connecting them with reality, with what’s really happening on the streets,” Ortega told the Los Angeles Times. Still, he concedes that taking tourists to see gangs in their natural habitat “could be denigrating to the gang members, and who knows how they would take it?”

According to the tour’s website, the profits from the tours will be used to create economic growth and development in the areas. Terry Jensen, a church minister and millionaire businessman who is enthusiastic about the idea, estimates the project could generate up to a million dollars in its first year. It’s important, however, that those taking the tour exempt the organizers from legal responsibility by signing a “bullet-proof” liability release, Jensen says. But that does not seem to deter participants, who have been lining up in the droves for the tours, which have attracted national media.

Even so, Lomas doesn’t want to take unnecessary risks, so he has begun talks with Fred “Scorpio” Smith to arrange a truce. “I’m not asking you to keep from killing each other,” Lomas is said to have implored. “I’m only asking that you suspend shootouts on the days when the tourists are scheduled.” As generous as he is dangerous, “Scorpio” reportedly promised that his gang would provide them safe conduct through his turf. That assertion makes some LA cops roll their eyes in disbelief. “How can anyone say such nonsense?” one policeman told me.

Fearful of offending anyone, area politicians have reacted cautiously to the tours. “It all depends on how it’s done,” seems to be the standard answer when asked about the idea.

Fortunately, I’m not a politician and so I have nothing holding me back from criticizing the questionable premise behind a project that seeks to establish a causal relationship between delinquency and poverty. The idea of glorifying gangs also disgusts me, among other things, because it shows a lack of respect for the families of the victims of their violence.

But I’ll let the reader be the judge.