In a piece called L.A.'s Streets of Death on the op-ed page in the New York Times, Bob Herbert writes: " I don't know which is more bizarre, the agonizing extremes of violence, much of it gang-related, in places like South and East L.A., or the passive acceptance of this enormous tragedy by so many people inside and outside the blood-drenched neighborhoods, who view it as simply 'the way things are.'... If this were happening just a few miles farther north and west — in the tonier neighborhoods closer to the Pacific shoreline, for example — it would be a national scandal."