Crip advisor – fancy an LA gang tour?

 

Will Dean
Sunday 02 December 2012 14:30 EST
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Sean Penn in 'Colours', the film about the gangs of LA
Sean Penn in 'Colours', the film about the gangs of LA

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Log on to LA's official tourism website and you'll be guided towards anything from Mexican street food festivals to Universal Studios. What you won't find is a link to LA Gang Tours, which drives curious tourists around some of South Central and East LA's most notorious gangland sites. Los Angeles has around 45,000 gang members – many of the notorious Crips and Bloods. Not among that number, though, is ex-gangbanger Alfred Lomas, who founded the tour (the $65 tickets go straight back into crime-prevention groups). The tour allows punters to gawp at the settings where more people – as novelist Leslie Jamison, who took the tour for a recent piece in the LA Review of Books points out – have died than in Northern Ireland's Troubles. (Belfast has its own conflict tours too, incidentally).

It might be infinitely more interesting than Disney Land – but should we be really touring through other people's tragedies?

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