Gangs in Los Angeles have grown significantly in Los Angeles County during the last twenty-eight years.  Most of my research is focused on Black gangs in Los Angeles, specifically the Bloods and Crips, which have their beginnings in 1969.  Some of my research I conducted is on the proliferation of gangs and gang territories in Los Angeles, and I began to collect data on the Bloods and Crips that would be able to explain how much gangs have grown in LA and in what parts of LA did they spread to.  In my Masters thesis I presented the spatial distribution of the Bloods and Crips for three different years in a cartographic representation.  I gathered data for 1972, 1978, 1983, and 1996, to show the spatial distribution of these gangs, and created maps for 1972, 1978, and 1996, that show the growth of these gangs from  the core area of South-central Los Angeles and Watts, to suburban communities such as Pomona, Pasadena and West Covina.  On the maps, I used blue areas show where Crips are located and red areas to show where Bloods are located on 8x11 paper.  My methodology varied in collecting the data for the different time periods.

1972 Gang Territories of Black Gangs in Los Angeles This map shows the spatial distribution of Black gangs in Los Angeles for 1972. A small numbers of gangs covered a small part of the city, but the gangs tended to have larger territories than today's Bloods and Crips. These gangs had only existed for three years, and many of the questions asked was if these gangs were going to continue to develop. Two maps for this time period were constructed; the first map shows all the gang territories on a South Los Angeles County base map, and the second map is a zoom-in of the gang territories showing more detail. Both maps are in color and are accompanied by a color transparency.