Typical Activities
The United Nations estimates that gangs make most of their money through the drugs trade, they are thought to be worth £352bn in total. The United States Department of Justice estimates there are approximately 30,000 gangs, with 760,000 members, impacting 2,500 communities across the United States.
Gangs are involved in all areas of street-crime activities like extortion, drug trafficking, both in and outside the prison system and theft. Gangs also victimize individuals by robbery and kidnapping. Cocaine is the primary drug of distribution by gangs in America, which have used the cities Chicago, Cape Town, and Rio de Janeiro to transport drugs internationally. Brazilian urbanization has driven the drug trade to the favelas of Rio. Often, gangs hire "lookouts" to warn members of upcoming law enforcement. The dense environments of favelas in Rio and public housing projects in Chicago have helped gang members hide from police easily.
Street gangs take over territory or "turf" in a particular city and are often involved in "providing protection", often a thin cover for extortion, as the "protection" is usually from the gang itself, or in other criminal activity. Many gangs use fronts to demonstrate influence and gain revenue in a particular area.
Read more about this topic: Gang
Famous quotes containing the words typical and/or activities:
“A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
—Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)