Sunday

Sunday morning once more; the last day of the week. A day of rest here in Orland. And I am awake at the usual hour and not resting at all. Oh well, At least it’s normal…for me. And I can see that the moonlight is illuminating the orchard and that means that the clouds are gone for the day.

What else is new? Not a lot. I’m almost caught up on my reading. I have begun Anne Rice’s new book, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, and I’m about halfway through it. I really enjoy her writing style. Sparse sentences that seem to speak volumes. The Economist had a very large New Year’s special edition that had me reading overtime and I have just begun last week’s regular edition. I hope to have it finished before I receive the current edition on Tuesday. And I found a new book to read while I was pricing books for the Friends of the Orland Library. It’s the story of Maggie Greeno; A Historical Narrative on the Unusual Life, Adventures, and Achievements of a California Pioneer Woman. It was published by Lahontan Images in Susanville. Greeno is not a name that I remember from my studies of Northeastern California history and so I’m looking forward to reading it.

The Economist had a very interesting special article on the spread of gang violence by the two gangs that infest Central and North America; Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha. (I’m not sure if the Economist link will work if you’re not a subscriber.)

One of the more disturbing things I read was all about the efforts of Frank Flores, head of the Hollywood sector of the anti-gang task-force of the Los Angeles Police Department. “Mr. Flores is proud of Calgangs, a database which uses digital photographs and other information to track gang members; but national law-enforcement officers have no access to it. Calgangs stores the details of 928 Salvatruchas, a tiny fraction of the estimated size of the gang; and more information sits, unread, on file-cards in cabinets in Mr. Flores's office. He lacks the staff to sort through it. Moreover, of the four detectives in the anti-gang task-force, only two speak Spanish. Of the 12 uniformed officers, only one does. What are they thinking? It’s as if they held a contest to see how best to fail and the LAPD won. “This is in Los Angeles—a city where the maras arguably originated, and which has a large Latino population.” And they can’t find more than one uniformed officer that speaks Spanish? No more than two detectives? “Local police elsewhere in the United States are even less prepared to deal with the maras, says Mr. Flores, who has been teaching police in other jurisdictions about the gangs. The Washington, DC area, which has the second-largest concentration of maras in the country, is approximately where Los Angeles was ten years ago, says Mr. Flores. Everywhere, the statistics on gang-related crime are not remotely reliable. The same fear that makes it difficult to recruit informants means that most gang crime goes unreported.”