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small. Respite at a nearby park was out of the question when the picnic tables were dominated by gang members with their beer cans and pit bulls. Now families flock there, and nearby houses are appreciating in value. It's a barely noticed yet radical change, and its benefits redound mostly to working-class families. This shift is important beyond providing access to more outdoor space. Parks were part of the primordial soup from which gangs emerged here. Parks were open areas where members could be the occupying force that police could not. Several gangs took their names from nearby parks. Establishing a presence in them added to a gang's reputation. Because members were out in the open, some parks became crime magnets — places where shootings happened and long-running feuds could erupt. In the 1990s, when the Mexican Mafia prison gang imposed a truce between feuding Latino gangs and instituted a system in which gang members "taxed" local drug dealers, the meetings happened in parks in Chino, San Bernardino, Santa Ana, South El Monte, Pacoima and Echo Park, to name a few. 00017,"M • @teacherinLA > Stop blaming cops. They deserve a lot of credit for this& often work in conjunction with ex-gangstas: http://news.sky.corn/story/1416260/la-gangs-join- forces-in-fight-against-killings "Andre Christian, a former member of the Grape Street branch of the Crips, says the Gang... ZeroDarkThirty at 5:34 PM February 12, 2015 Add a comment See all comments 21 After that, Latino gangs undertook a kind of ethnic cleansing in many of the surrounding neighborhoods, attempting to rid their areas of black people, whether they were affiliated with a gang or not. That terror was often spread at parks. Pacoima's Humphrey Boyz gang made the Hubert Humphrey Memorial Recreation Center — Humphrey Park, as it's known — off-limits to blacks for several years, according to residents and members of that gang I have interviewed. In Montecito Park, just across the 110 from Sycamore Grove, Avenues gang members staged assaults against black Highland Park residents;