wear white and bring your own vest
LA Gang Tours Are Just Around the Corner
On Monday, we will go on the hop-on, hop-off Double Decker Hollywood fun tour. Tuesday, we will take the Movie Stars Homes Tour. Wednesday, we will tour the Strip and Beverly Hills. Thursday, we will tour the streets that gave rise to the Crips, bloods, Florencia 13 and the 18th Street gangs. Friday, we will just leave that day open.
In January, this conversation can actually be legit as Alfred Lomas, a former Florencia 13 gang member and current intervention worker in South Los Angeles, is spearheading a movement to make the tours possible.
"This is ground zero for a lot of the bad in this city. It could be ground zero for a lot of the good too," said Lomas. "This is true community empowerment."
The nonprofit group plans to offer two-hour tours at an initial cost of $65 per adult, with profits funneled back into the community through jobs, "franchised" tours in new areas and micro-loans to inner-city entrepreneurs.
Initially, the routes will focus on South L.A., with forays into Watts and Florence-Firestone.
Lomas, who will lead tours at first, plans to talk about important chapters in the development of the city's core, such as how racist housing restrictions shaped ethnic enclaves and the formation of gangs.
The planning took months and the details are still being ironed out, according to a Times report, but some plans might need to fall to the cutting room floor.
"It's going to be fascinating -- but really controversial," said Francisco Ortega, a staffer with the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission and a neighborhood adviser in South L.A.
The concept may have some value in "sensitizing people, connecting them to the reality of what's on the ground," he told the Los Angeles Times. "But the other side is that it could come across like a zoo or something. You're being carted about
: 'Look at that cholo over there!' It could be perceived as demeaning for the people who are living in these conditions."
Similar tours have cropped in Mumbai's slum of Dharavi and in Rio de Janeiro's "favelas." While operators say they help humanize poverty, critics say they are further exploiting them.
"It's not right to put people on display," City Councilwoman Jan Perry told the Times. But Perry's colleague Bernard Parks, a former police chief, was open to the concept, saying: "It depends on their intent and how they balance it."
....read here