Marvin49":3n0zb9nx said:
Ug.
I had hoped we'd escaped the thugs.
Both guys arrested have been arrested a combined 13 times and neither was a Season Ticket holder. Good news is they won't be coming to a game again.
There are more Norteños in the South Bay than in S.F. Save for Santa Rosa and Sacramento they've always traveled up.
TBF this ain't going away any time soon. It's the result of the War on Drugs coupled with California's hyper-policing through gang injunctions (see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_injunction)
Gang injunctions reduce street crime not by changing behavior, but just by locking everyone up who is even friends with a known gang member.
What ended up happening is that kids from marginal neighborhoods who got caught with an 1/8th of weed ended up serving actual prison sentences, and once in prison they had to link up with the Norteños (which historically were exclusively a prison game) just to not get beat up and raped. Those former kids are now back out and on the street, and with them, as a gang, the Norteños have migrated outside of prisons, where they were mostly isolated for over 35 years before the War on Drugs and injunction policing.
Long story short, almost every time this happens at a 9ers game it's gonna be guys with prior convictions, because 9/10 it's the time in prison on the prior conviction that got them involved with a gang in the first place. You can make it in a poor neighborhood in CA without being in a gang (e.g. Desean Jackson, Richard Sherman, Marshawn Lynch, etc.), you just can't make it in prison in CA w/out being in a gang.
(Background: I've got a buddy whose PhD work was on following a few hundred Norteños through this process)
Edit: As for why Norteños are all 9ers fans, it's as simple as the team colors (they're bloods. the 9ers uniforms are red. el fin).
Edit 2: Just because it's interesting, it's the same story with the rise of neo-nazi and white power groups in California in the last 15-20 years. Out on the streets in California there's not really any reason for a ton of people to join white power orgs, but if you're white and go to prison and want to survive, you're going to have to join the Aryan Brotherhood (founded in San Quentin) or the Nazi Lowriders (founded about 10 years later in the California Juvenile Justice System). With the rise in imprisonment their numbers in prison have ballooned, and over time, there's a generation or two of those guys who are now back out again, who don't have any interest in giving up their White Power ways (and are even raising their kids in those traditions).