18th Street Gang in Los Angeles County

By Alex Alonso, Staff Writer, Streetgangs.Com Magazine
updated December 22, 2002

In Los Angeles the 18th Street gang is considered the largest gang in Los Angeles County. It is estimated that there are close to 20,000 members in Los Angeles County. Most of them are Mexican and Chicano with some Salvadorean membership and a few Blacks. Some estimates of the 18th are as low as 8,000, but this low estimate still makes them the largest gang in the county if you include all their barrios as one.

The 18th Street Gang is actually a collection of several smaller gangs, making them the most fragmented gang in the County also. The individual factions can number from 50 to several hundred members each. Factions of the 18th Streets are dispersed throughout the county in San Fernando Valley, the San Gabriel Valley, the South Bay, South Los Angeles, and Downtown Los Angeles just to name a few. Their strong hold and their oldest barrio is located east of the Staples center between the Harbor 110 Freeway (east) and Hoover Ave (west). There are also two significant size 18th Street Barrios in South LA, one between Vernon (north) and Slauson (south) along Vermont Avenue and second one being between Florence (north) and 91st Street (south). To say that the 18th Street is the largest gang in LA is a bit misleading, because what makes them so big is a collection of about 20 different gangs. The largest single Hispanic gang interms of turf size and membership would be one of 18th Street's main rivals, the Florencia 13 gang that has a turf that stretches from Western Ave (west) to Compton Ave (east).

DVD about the 18th Street Gang

The Los Angeles District Attorney's Office has three gang injunctions against the 18th Street Gangs; two in the Rampart Division and one in the Southwest Division of the LAPD. The 18th Street gang in the Southwest division was implicated in the murder of an LAPD officer in 1998. The Rampart injunctions were under review and temporarily halted in September of 1999. In 2002 these injunctions were refiled by the City Attorney's Office.

Certain factions in South Los Angeles are fueding with Black gangs, such as the Black P Stones from the West Adams area and the Black P Stones from the Jungles of Los Angeles. They have also been fueding with the NeighborHood Rollin 20s Blood.

Caption on the Map

"The spread of 18th Street's violence is shown by 154 murders linked to the gang from 1985 to 1995. This only plots homicides within Los Angeles where the killings have been tied to the gang." The killings on the map show 18th Street as both victims and assailants of murderand one can see a concentration west of the 110 Freeway near downtown Los Angeles.

This maps comes from a Los Angeles Times series published on November 17-19, 1996.