Vox Sentences: The gang rivalry behind Waco’s bloody biker shootout

The other one-percenters

The Twin Peaks restaurant, the scene of the motorcycle gang shootout. (Erich Schlegel/Getty Images)

• At least nine people died and 18 others were wounded in a shootout between outlaw motorcycle gangs in a Waco, Texas shopping mall.

  [NYT / Manny Fernandez, Liam Stack, and Alan Blinder]

• Charges have been filed against 170 motorcycle gang members following the incident; each has had bail set at $1 million, a notably high bar.

  [AP / Nomaan Merchant and David Warren]

• At least five gangs were meeting at the Twin Peaks restaurant to talk about recruitment. The Bandidos, a large national gang, have traditionally controlled Texas, but the Cossacks, a local Texas gang, has challenging their control, and seeking out an alliance with the Bandidos' rivals, the Hell's Angels.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• The Cossacks had recently taken to wearing a Texas patch on their motorcycle jackets, which the Bandidos took as a "slap in the face."

• Violent gangs like the Cossacks, Bandidos, and Hell's Angels often refer to themselves as "one-percenters" in reference to an apocryphal quote from the American Motorcycle Association claiming that 99 percent of bikers were law-abiding.

  [NY Daily News / Sasha Goldstein]

• Law enforcement officials treat motorcycle gangs similarly to other crime syndicates, alleging that they engage in drug dealing, weapons trafficking, and other traditional organized crime activities.

  [Department of Justice]

• Michael Miller has a great history of one-percenter gangs, which is worth reading in full.

  [Washington Post / Michael Miller]

• For a longer read, try Skip Hollandsworth's 2007 profile of the Bandidos, featuring this description of their charming initiation rites: "Once a new member received his Bandidos vest, he was ordered to lay it on the ground. The other members of his chapter then urinated, vomited, and defecated on it. The new recruit was then required to put the vest back on and dry it out by riding on his motorcycle."

  [Texas Monthly / Skip Hollandsworth]

Anbar de-Awakening

Iraqi children, who fled with their families the city of Ramadi after it was seized by ISIS, gather outside tents at a camp housing displaced families on May 18, 2015 in Bzeibez. (AFP/Ahmad al-Rubaye)

• The city of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province in western Iraq, fell to ISIS on Sunday.

  [NYT / Tim Arango]

• The Iraqi government had tried to hold the city using just the army — not the brutal sectarian Shia militias it's sometimes allied with — and came up short.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• Those Shia militias are already streaming into the area to join the fight.

  [The Guardian / Martin Chulov]

• An estimated 500 Iraqi soldiers and civilians have been killed in the fighting, and another 8,000 have fled.

  [CBS News / AP]

• Here's a video showing what the city's like now: a ghost town, with severe damage to buildings and streets.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• The fall of Ramadi further pushes off any efforts to retake Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq and an ISIS stronghold.

  [AP / Robert Burns]

• The fundamentals of the conflict still suggest ISIS will lose its foothold in Iraq (it's outnumbered and surrounded by enemies). The heavily Sunni Anbar province is just a particularly good area for them.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• It's tempting to portray this as a conflict between Sunnis and Shia, but the Sunnis in Ramadi are split on whether to support ISIS, and hardline Shias often clash with the current Shia Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

  [Reuters / Hayder Al-Khoei]

If I had a rocket launcher…

Corinthia Mitchell (second from left) and 2 year old son, Zayven Holloway (right), gather with friends across the street from where President Barack Obama delivered his speech in Camden. (Mark Makela/Getty Images)

• President Obama has banned the federal government from providing certain types of military-like equipment to local police departments, and restricted access to others.

  [NYT / Julie Hirschfeld Davis]

• Banned items include tracked armored vehicles (ie tanks), bayonets, grenade launchers, and large caliber firearms.

  [White House: Recommendations Pursuant to Executive Order 13688]

• Some police reform advocates applauded the new policy, while others claimed it merely dealt with "low-hanging fruit" and didn't address daily police harassment of minority communities.

  [The Guardian / Lauren Gambino]

• Police militarization is a long-standing problem, as SWAT units have spread to even small cities in recent decades.

  [WSJ / Radley Balko]

• President Obama unveiled the policy, and other measures on law enforcement, in Camden, New Jersey, which has seen murders fall by more than half in the two years since it completely disbanded its police force and hired a wholly new one "with a new emphasis from the top on building trust with community members."

  [Slate / Leon Neyfakh]

• The ACLU has expressed skepticism about Camden's approach, saying that while community policing is a worthy goal, in practice the city has been making more arrests for minor offenses, and excessive force complaints against police are up.

  [ACLU of New Jersey]

Misc.

• Twitter is hugely popular among adult performers. And now Twitter is reporting planning to purge millions of them.

  [The Daily Beast / Aurora Snow]

• What if The Joker is the real hero of The Dark Knight? After all, he does more to hurt the mob and corrupt cops than Batman ever could.

  [Houston Press / Jef Rouner]

• Taxing land is a no-brainer, economics-wise. So why did Fairhope, Alabama's experiment with it fail?

  [Slate / Henry Grabar]

• The fiber optic cables that form the backbone of the internet can transport 100 terrabits per second. But in five years, that may not be enough.

  [Engadget / Jon Fingas]

• Don Draper: the Harvard Business School case study.

  [Slate / Gautam Mukunda]

Verbatim

• "Misogyny is ingrained in people from the time they are born."

  [Taylor Swift to Maxim / Jessica Roy]

• "The conversation went on like that, a knife fight with icicles, the insults indistinguishable from parodies of insults."

  [New Yorker / Emily Nussbaum]

• "Sayre Schatz, PhD, noted economist, wouldn't have wanted to spend money on a fancy obit, so google Sayre Schatz obit."

  [New York Times obituary via Leigh Johnson]

• "The area south of Dupont Circle, stretching nearly from Washington Circle to Farragut Square, has 32 million square feet of office space, nearly the same amount as all of Baltimore. Eighty-five thousand people work in that downtown triangle. And yet, fewer than a hundred people live there."

  [Washington Post / Jonathan O'Connell]

• "A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a 'good' school — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks."

  [NYT / Wednesday Martin]