That was sure to grab attention, but details buried in the court documents were bound to touch a raw nerve: One of the Latino gang's primary motivations was hatred of black residents.
It's the third time in recent years federal prosecutors have investigated a gang and found racism in its DNA, reopening a thorny debate that has publicly divided the region's top cops.
In dueling newspaper opinion pieces last year, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca maintained that race fueled gang violence while Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton said skin color was seldom a factor.
"If you do a survey within the African-American community ... you are in constant fear that your young male offspring is going to be killed because of the color of his skin," Baca said in an interview after his piece appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
In an area both proud and sensitive about its diversity, racial tension has been at the heart of some of its ugliest chapters: from the zoot suit riot beatings of Latinos by white sailors in the 1940s to the deadly Watts riots in 1965 to the riots that erupted in 1992 after four police officers were acquitted in the videotaped beating of Rodney King.
So-called brown-on-black or black-on-brown violence has been a long-standing concern in neighborhoods where black residents are being supplanted by Latinos. Acknowledging it, however, has political implications and officials often downplay the tension.
