L.A. Gangs Are Back

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Perhaps the biggest lesson from the rapid rebound in Los Angeles gang murders, say cops and other gang experts, is that aggressive policing alone will never break the cycle of gang violence. Father Greg Boyle, a Jesuit priest who works in gang-infested Boyle Heights, says the antigang strategy developed in California and copied elsewhere "is bankrupt. You have the three-strikes law and jail and so on, but you can't terrify a kid into being hopeful about his future." Many cops agree. "We don't need new laws," says Sergeant Wes McBride, founder of the California Gang Investigators Association and a 28-year veteran of antigang policing. "We have a penal code a foot thick. You can't just work gangs with police suppression. You need prevention and intervention programs too."

But whenever Chino gets out of jail from his latest weapons-possession charge, he will still have nowhere to go but the gang neighborhood, nobody to hang with but his homeboys--and nothing to do but shoot at his enemies.

"A gangster is someone with no fear and no goal," says Manuel Romero, a former corporal in the Marine Corps whose brother is in the Playboys. "If you fear something, you will try to move away from it. If you have a goal, you will try to go towards it. They don't go anywhere."

As the spike in murders in Los Angeles shows, the gang nightmare is back. Gangs, it turns out, can take more beatings and lock-down time than any humane society is prepared to deal out. And it is the 13-year-old girl putting on makeup by her bedroom window who has to pay the price.

TIME.com For a photo essay on gangs and a Q&A with Robert Yager, go to time.com/gangs