All Day I Dream About Sex

The Queens Ledger attempts to answer the question gnawing at all law-abiding citizens — “Taco Maker, or Blood Waiting to Murder?”:

Just because your teenage kid wears his hat to the side, has an affinity for a certain color, and listens to rap music doesn’t mean he is out on the street gang-banging. At the same time, though, it could.

That was the message that was sent to parents at a gang awareness workshop hosted by Assemblyman Jose Peralta and Queens District Attorney Richard Brown at P.S. 89 in Elmhurst last Wednesday morning. The workshop was intended to teach parents to look for the telltale signs that their son or daughter was running with a gang.

“A lot of parents find out their kid is in a gang when the cops call and say ‘We have your kid,'” Peralta told a crowd of about 25 parents. “Believe me, you don’t want to be on the other side of that phone call.”

Peralta added that it was getting harder to distinguish between urban fashion and that subtle messages that show an allegiance to a particular gang.

“You don’t even know that a kid is wearing a Chicago Bulls shirt and that means they are part of a gang,” warned Peralta.

And it can get even subtler than that, says Sergeant Dianna Erickson of the NYPD. She told parents that even the most seemingly harmless logos or team names can have totally different meanings in the language of the streets. For instance, K Swiss can actually be an acronym for “Kill Slobs When I See Slobs,” while a kid sporting Taco Bell wear may just have a part-time job, or he may be sending the undercover message “Take All Crips Out, Bloods Eventually Live Longer.”