How do gangs of today compare with gangs from the 1960s?

In the 1960s, most so-called gangs in the United States were established for overt political purposes (The Black Panthers, the Weather Underground) or for purposes of community policing, particularly in neighborhoods where police presence was non-existent or ineffectual. In other words, most of highly organized armed gangs of the 1960s had a political or social conscience, aimed at bettering society at large or improving the communities from which they sprang.

The major exception to this rule was the Italian Mafia (Cosa Nostra). The Mob, as it was also known, was brutal, insular and economically motivated, but it was also a vestige of another time: prohibition. When alcohol became legal again, the Mafia used its presence in the teamsters union to run various smuggling outfits that brought contraband goods into U.S. ports. The mob also ran profitable betting syndicates, and dominated the vending machine business too.

What changed the landscape of gangs in the United States was the backlash to the Civil Rights movement, including so-called “white flight” from inner cities, which resulted in the loss of the tax base and led to urban decay and poverty. The inner cities that we know today had once been thriving middle class neighborhoods, whose residents worked at factories and other decent paying jobs. Yet once those industries left those neighborhoods, funding for schools and other social services left with them.

Into the vacuum left by this "hollowing out of cities" came the vestiges of politically minded gangs like the Black Panther and other militant civil rights groups. Some members of these groups had received ad-hoc military training, and many others were drafted to fight in Vietnam. When they returned to find no good job prospects and abject poverty in their neighborhoods, they often reformed their gangs as neighborhood watch groups to keep the peace and keep themselves busy. Soon, however, during and after Vietnam, soldiers and former soldiers began bringing heroin back from Southeast Asia and selling it on the streets of their cities in order to make a living.

With few other job prospects available to Vietnam veterans in inner cities, drug dealing became a booming business, and the hopeless, out of work people who were stuck in those inner cities became both victims and customers. Soon, the armed neighborhood gangs switched from protecting those in their neighborhoods to protecting their territory from rival drug sellers. When crack cocaine arrived in the 1980s, that changed the game completely, bringing in higher profit margins, worse addictions, more competition from South and Central America, more lethal weapons on the streets, and more brutal battles to control the increasingly profitable drug empires that came to rule many inner cities around the country. 

The gang warfare we see today in cities like Chicago, Detroit and South Los Angeles springs from battles over gang territory that peaked in the 1980s and early 1990’s, when members of the Cripps, Bloods and gangs like MS-13 killed each other and thousands of innocent bystanders each year as neighborhoods plagued by poverty, violence and drug addiction tore themselves to pieces. Meanwhile, the police mostly looked on and engaged in the tactic known as containment: keeping the violence from spilling over into more affluent, white neighborhoods.