Sunday, September 18, 2011
Five Ways To Quickly Build Backlinks (and Get Relevant Traffic)
If you're a small business or consultancy, building backlink. to your website can be an effective way to gain relevant traffic and grow your business-no matter what your industry.
Here are five ways to kick off your link-building with ease.
1. Guest-Blogging
Guest-blogging is an incredible method for building backlinks. You can go about it in several ways...
Search for guest-blogging opportunities using queries such as "write for us," "submit post," and "become a contributor." Those queries are the most basic and yield the best results, though you can try others.
You can also turn to networks that connect those looking for guest-blogging opportunities with blogs that need new content. The largest of those networks is MyBlogGuest.com . It allows you to upload your article for others to use, contact bloggers who are seeking new contributors, and chat and connect with others in the guest-blogging community.
You can also search for relevant blogs within your niche and pitch your guest blog post to them. Getting your article posted this way is more difficult, but if your content fits with the blog's theme and it's well written, you have a decent chance. Links from such sources tend to be of the highest authority and can really help your link profile.
2. PR Networks
Several free subscription services online bring together reporters, bloggers, and authors looking for answers to specific questions. Using sites such as HARO , Reporter Connection , PitchRate , and the paid service ProfNet is a simple way to earn links to your website.
The sites basically work like this: Reporters ask questions about specific topics; you respond if the questions pertain to your area of knowledge; the reporter credits you as a source usually via a backlink. Simple!
You can also try your luck on FlackList , a public relations social media site. I would liken it to Facebook for public relations.
HARO sends three daily emails, each containing 30-70 queries. Receiving hundreds of queries a day, five days a week, you will surely find a blog to contribute to sooner rather than later. Via HARO, I have earned dozens of backlink. and have been featured on the websites of FOX News and The Huffington Post, to name a couple.
Reporter Connection and PitchRate usually send one email per day. The networks are smaller with fewer queries, but equally important to your backlink-building strategy. Both are free services.
3. Reviews and Giveaways
If you run an e-commerce site, product reviews can be one of the simplest and most effective ways of building backlinks. Thousands of bloggers are looking for various products to review and give away. And once your product is featured on one giveaway site, you will likely receive emails from others asking for the opportunity to do the same on their blogs.
Search for those bloggers on Google using variations of the query "product reviews." The difficult part is deciding which bloggers are worth your time and effort.
Giveaways work the same way, although when done properly they will also get you mentions on social media sites. You can also gain links by posting the giveaway details on your own site and promoting the giveaway on sites like tipjunkie.com .
4. Blog Commenting
When done right, blog commenting can be an effective way to build links. The key is to comment only on very relevant blogs and posts. Despite "no follow" tags, such comments can help you rank, in part by sending others to your site-and if they like what they see, they'll link to you. But make sure to keep your comments interesting and useful.
You can also search for or follow blogs that are not moderated. Those will generally be much less relevant and will require much less effort. The problem is you get what you pay for: Little time and effort result in little authority. Commenting on such blogs is likely a waste of time. Not enough is known about how Google examines a link profile for me to recommend doing it. But if you have a strong link profile, you can throw a couple comments out there without fear of hurting yourself.
5. Submissions to Niche Sites
Is your site unique and visually attractive? Submit it to one of the various CSS galleries. Is your business idea off the wall, but useful? Submit it to Springwise.com .
A multitude of niche sites are just waiting to feature your brand and link back to you. All it takes is a little ingenuity and good research skills. Those sites will pass you gallons of link juice and send you traffic, providing even more opportunities for links.
Wait, There's More...
Of course, you can earn quick and easy backlinks via other methods, too, such as...
Squidoo, Hub pages, etc.
Bookmarking sites
Blogging (effective, but the links are not heavily weighted until the blog is established)
Press releases
Email outreach
Video and image submissions
Link building need not be difficult. Learn what you can by reading up on the subject, gain experience by actually trying what you read, and write articles like this to help others (and gain backlinks yourself).
Google | Google Beats Bing In Q1, Game Not Over - Facebook!
Microsoft is still chasing Google in search ads. Facebook may be its own rocket.
A report on search advertising in the first quarter of 2011 by Efficient Frontier, an online advertising analysis and consulting firm, shows that Google is still overwhelmingly dominant in the amount of money it gets from search advertisers. Microsoft's Bing, which has absorbed much of Yahoo's search business, appears to have suffered some customer leakage, but may be winning them back in important categories.
Efficient Frontier also tracked a sharp increase in activity and spending on ads in Facebook, which it counts as a category separate from either search or display advertising. The company didn't break the Facebook numbers out with much granularity "there was 40% cost per click growth in Marketplace ads (those are the ones that appear on the right hand side, and seem to sometimes know about you " they are bid at in auction, like search ads.) EF also said there was a 300% increase in ad inventory.
Given the relative newness of aggressive Facebook advertising, and the lack of any base numbers, however, it is hard to tell how significant the growth is. In another recent report, EF said advertisers get 37% more impressions on Facebook for 6% of their Google budgets. Facebook ads tend to lack Google's call to action, however, so the results aren't as good " at least initially. EF and others have found that a mix of outlets is necessary to create both initial sales and lasting relevance.
For the quarter, Google gained slightly, with 79.1% of all paid search marketing spend, versus 20.9% for Bing (Note: Other search engines like Blekko and Ask also get paid, but their shars are so tiny that putting them in might actually distort the comparative results, EF says.) That was up from 78.7% and 21.3%, respectively, in the fourth quarter of 2010. Compared with a year ago, Google killed it: Back then it had 74.2% of the paid search market, compared with 7% for Microsoft and 18.8% for Yahoo, the paid search of which has since disappeared into Microsoft.
No expert here, but that nearly five percentage point move came from marketers leaving Yahoo for Google over Bing. Microsoft surely has to win them back. The report shows that Bing had a better ROI than Google, up 10% compared with a year ago, while Google was down 12% from a year ago. Bing also increased the number of ads that were clicked on, reversing a yearlong trend that had benefited Google.
Impressions are back to year-ago levels, and have fallen at Google, so Bing may already be coming back. In particular, Bing did well in finance and retail, but lost market share in travel. Last week's U.S. government decision allowing Google to purchase air travel information business ITA Software could make it even harder for Bing to compete in travel. Google also picked up slightly in the automotive category. Of the four categories, however, Bing is picking up in the two that improved the most, in terms of spending.
Outside the US, Google remained dominant, with an unchanged 91% share of spend in the UK, and even higher in France, Germany, and Australia. Only in Japan, where Yahoo remains an important player, was there any real competition, 52.8% of spend for Google against 47.2% for Yahoo. Search ad spending was still increasing in Japan, despite the effect of the earthquake and tsunami late in the first quarter.
Internet Money | Police Nab Seven, Including Three Foreigners, For Fraudulent Internet Money Transfer
September 14, 2011 19:29 PM
Police Nab Seven, Including Three Foreigners, For Fraudulent Internet Money Transfer
KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 14 (Bernama) -- The police have detained seven people, including three foreign men, in connection with fraudulently transfering RM250,000 through the internet recently.
The foreigners are from Sierra Leonne, Jordan and Pakistan. Of the remaining four suspects, three are local women.
The seven, aged between 20 and 27, were picked up at several locations in the Millenium Square, Petaling Jaya in a three-day operation, beginning Sept 10.
A computer, savings account books, subscriber identity module (SIM) cards, copies of identity cards and other relevant documents were seized from the suspects who were remanded until Thursday.
Bukit Aman Commercial Crime Investigation Department director Datuk Syed Ismail Syed Azizan said Wednesday, the police opened an investigation paper early this year, after 12 cases involving losses totalling RM242,321.14, were reported.
He said initial investigations revealed that a syndicate had used special software to obtain a victim's internet banking information, including telephone number. He said this was done upon downloading information from a bank kiosk after the victim had carried out a transaction at the kiosk.
"Following this, a syndicate member impersonating a telecommunications personnel would telephone the victim to say that his line would be disrupted for a few hours for upgrading purposes.
"A local member of the syndicate, masquerading as the victim, would go to a branch of the telecommunications firm, with a forged police report and a copy of the victim's identity card, to cancel the said victim's SIM card and obtain a replacement."
Syed Ismail added that the new SIM card would be used to get the transaction authorisation code to perform the transfer transaction over the internet.
Further investigations revealed that the syndicate's last fraudulent transfer was on Aug 27, in Petaling Jaya, involving losses amounting to RM50,000, he said.
Syed Ismail said the procedure to replace SIM cards must be further tightened while internet banking security should be stepped up.
"Internet banking account holders must constantly inspect transactions on their accounts and avoid exposing internet banking information, whether through e-mail or telephone calls," he said.
-- BERNAMA
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Google | Google Flight Search Vs. Kayak
On Tuesday, Google unveiled Google Flight Search "a competitor to Kayak , Travelocity , Expedia and other airfare-shopping sites.
This is the first real fruit borne from Google's purchase of ITA Software , a flight and airfare-information company that Google bought in July of 2010. Since ITA sells flight information to a number of travel sites (like Kayak, Orbitz and Hotwire ), after scrutiny of the deal by the Justice Department, Google had to make assurances that it wouldn't keep ITA's best parts for its own uses.
For a quick comparison, I ran a few searches on Google Flight Search and Kayak. Here's what I found:
Google is faster. Pages loaded about eight seconds faster on Google than they did on Kayak. This may not seem like a lot, but when you're doing repeated searches and adjustments and reloads, it's noticeable.
Google is simpler. The default view you get when you search for a flight on Google are all the outbound flights. When you select one, you then see the return flights that are available with that outbound ticket. This is better than Kayak's presentation, because Kayak shows pairs of flights for the destination and date you've selected. With that view, you get all the 9:30 a.m. flights listed with all their matching return flights. There's a lot of redundancy. Google's simplified view is better.
One quibble with Google's layout: The results of the return flights are in a lightly delineated box that appears amidst the departing fares. Unfortunately, the box is not marked as clearly as it could be (you can kind of see this in the example, at right) and may cause some confusion when you are staring at columns of letters and numbers.
Kayak's results are more comprehensive. Searching for a flight from Miami to Dallas in late October, Kayak showed a US Airways flight departing at 6:15 a.m. On Google Flight Search, the earliest flight was at 6:50 a.m. That earlier flight cost twice as much as the later one, but for some people, schedule may be more important than cost. Google has said that it is aware that Flight Search is limited right now (it has no international flights, for example), and that it will be adding more flights in the future.
Kayak's fare map is better. Both services offer vacationers a useful tool - a map showing how much a ticket to various destinations costs from a selected departure city. If you live in New York, for example, you can see that the lowest fare to Charleston, S.C., costs $160, while a flight to Funafuti Atol in Tuvalu will set you back no less than $2,690. But just as Google's results are limited, so is its map at this point; Kayak's map is densely packed with cities and other destinations, where Google's is sparsely populated with places to go.
Google's filters and viewing tools are cooler. Kayak has the usual fare matrix, which shows number of stops on one axis and airlines on another, but Google slices up the data in two interesting and useful ways. The first is a matrix that has price on one axis and overall flight time on another, shown below. Sliding up, down and around the axes filters flights by cost and duration.
The other view is a bar graph that accompanies a calendar, shown below. The graph shows prices for round-trip fares on different days. It's an easy way to discover that, for example, if you leave one day earlier, your fare will be $100 cheaper, or if you fly out the next week it will drop $200. Google's approach is more revealing than the 3 day option most sites have, and while Kayak does have a fare chart showing highs and lows over an extended period of time, Google's is interactive, making it more useful.
Final verdict: Kayak (for now). Google's brought some good thinking to sorting through airfare information, but it does have an Achilles' heel; right now, it doesn't have as many flights as the competition. In the end, you can dress up the data all you want (and they are very nice dresses, I must say), but if you're looking for flights, you're a little like Gary Oldman in The Professional: You want every one . Playing around with graphs and sliders is cool and all, but it doesn't help you much if there's an earlier flight you want and you're not seeing it.
But Google's a pretty big company. They seem to have some smart people there. In all likelihood, they'll adapt. And so will Kayak. Hopefully, the biggest winners here are travelers.
Making Money Online | Russell Brunson - Do You Suck At Making Money?
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Google | Google Chairman: Stimulus Needed, Not Cuts
Google chairman Eric Schmidt today said the current economic strategy of cutting spending during a slow economy is "ludicrous," and pushed for greater government stimulus to generate demand.
The political wrangling between Republicans and Democrats have left business leaders with no certainty on economic policy, and said what is needed to encourage companies to hire more workers are "predictable, long-term plans."
"The economy is, today, stuck behind the power curve. It needs a lot of encouragement," Schmidt told "This Week" anchor Christiane Amanpour. "It needs not just something like the jobs bill, but also significant government stimulation in terms of buying power and investment. Otherwise, we're set up for years of extraordinarily low growth in the economy and no real solution to the jobless problem."
When asked if he saw "any possibility of a climate for more stimulus," Schmidt responded, "that's a political question. But the current strategy is ludicrous."
"You have a situation where the private sector sees essentially no growth in demand," Schmidt said. "The classic solution is to have the government step in and, with short-term initiatives, help stimulate that demand. If they do it right, they'll invest in income and growth-producing things, like highways and bridges and schools, new opportunities for the private sector to go then build businesses."
Schmidt, a strong supporter of President Obama, has helped lead the Internet search giant Google for the past decade, stepping down as CEO this spring while remaining executive chairman.
While many companies continue to bleed jobs in the current economic downturn, 2011 has been one of the strongest hiring years for Google, with the company planning to add more than 6,000 new workers by the end of the year, bringing its total employee count to more than 30,000.
While critics of Obama have faulted him for having a poor relationship with the business sector, Schmidt said the real problem is the lack of predictable government policy, with uncertainty holding back businesses from spending current profits on new employees.
"The real problem is not the business community," Schmidt said. "The real problem is the Democrats and the Republicans fight for one point or another in a political sphere, while the rest of us are waiting for the government to do something concrete and predictable.
"What business needs is predictable, long-term plans," he said. "We need to know where is government spending going to be, what are the government programs going to be and off we go."
Schmidt said many businesses have been operating more efficiently, allowing them to grow and profit without hiring more workers since demand for goods and services remains low, a situation made worse by the housing crisis still holding back individual spending.
"You have to solve the housing problem," Schmidt said. "Most people still have either the perception or they either feel or they really are underwater with respect to their mortgages. We need some sort of a fair deal that solves that problem, that spreads the pain around.
"Business can create enormous numbers of new jobs in America. All we need to see is more demand," he said. "And until we solve the problem, people are going to sit idle. And it's a real tragedy."
But Schmidt dismissed the idea that greater efficiency and new technology have created structural changes to the economy that have replaced workers unable to re-train for new higher-skilled jobs.
Google | Roku 2 XS Streaming Player 1080
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SEO Consult Unveil New Competitor Monitoring Technology
(PRWEB) September 18, 2011
SEO Consult, a market leading company specialising in search engine optimisation have unveiled a new addition to their collection of TRAX technologies.
The Cheshire-based agency have recently launched their new monitorTRAX technology; it combines competitor analysis and link monitoring to produce an application that tracks the linking activity of competitors, allowing for the most authoritative links to be targeted in their clients' SEO campaigns. SEO
Consult believe that integrating two crucial aspects of search engine optimisation into one hybrid technology will improve the services they offer and reduce costs.
The range of technologies that SEO Consult have built in-house include ppcTRAX, socialTRAX, callerTRAX, linkTRAX, competitorTRAX, rankTRAX,roiTRAX, clickTELLIGENCE and clickBASE CMS. They are all designed to monitor the performance of internet marketing and SEO campaigns for their clients by accurately tracking key metrics that can be used to improve the overall quality of campaigns. It is hoped that monitorTRAX is going to improve the SEO services that SEO Consult offer and increase ROI for their clients.
"Our range of TRAX technologies has expanded rapidly in recent times, and we're confident at SEO Consult that monitorTRAX is going to be another welcome addition to the collection. We know that conducting competitor analysis and link prospecting are both crucial aspects of campaigns, so developing this technology to integrate both of those features seemed logical." said Matt Bullas, Managing Director of SEO Consult. "Search engine optimisation can be a difficult, but hugely rewarding process, and SEO Consul t are always looking for new ways to improve the services we offer. By investing in these technologies we hope to provide a more transparent and holistic service that promotes success for all of our client's campaigns."
Read the full story at
Attention! This Book Will Make You Money: How To Use Attention-Getting Online Marketing To Increase Your Revenue
In todays social Web marketplace, attention equals revenue. When you direct more attention online to your brand or business, you drive more long-term revenue. Regardless of who you are or how small your business is, you can have a huge impact using free Internet tools...provided you understand and correctly apply the latest techniques.
Attention! gives you an educational and motivational guide to using social media to market your brand or business online. In three parts, you'll discover everything you need to know to get off the ground and thrive in the social mediasphere, including
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Whether you're just starting your business, just moving it online, or already established and looking to take your business to the next level, Attention! is the key to success.
- Title: Attention! This Book Will Make You Money: How to Use Attention-Getting Online Marketing to Increase Your Revenue
- Author: Jim F. Kukral
- ISBN: 0470599278
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SEO | SEO Consult Unveil New Competitor Monitoring Technology
(PRWEB) September 18, 2011
SEO Consult, a market leading company specialising in search engine optimisation have unveiled a new addition to their collection of TRAX technologies.
The Cheshire-based agency have recently launched their new monitorTRAX technology; it combines competitor analysis and link monitoring to produce an application that tracks the linking activity of competitors, allowing for the most authoritative links to be targeted in their clients' SEO campaigns. SEO Consult believe that integrating two crucial aspects of search engine optimisation into one hybrid technology will improve the services they offer and reduce costs.
The range of technologies that SEO Consult have built in-house include ppcTRAX, socialTRAX, callerTRAX, linkTRAX, competitorTRAX, rankTRAX,roiTRAX, clickTELLIGENCE and clickBASE CMS. They are all designed to monitor the performance of internet marketing and SEO campaigns for their clients by accurately tracking key metrics that can be used to improve the overall quality of campaigns. It is hoped that monitorTRAX is going to improve the SEO services that SEO Consult offer and increase ROI for their clients.
"Our range of TRAX technologies has expanded rapidly in recent times, and we're confident at SEO Consult that monitorTRAX is going to be another welcome addition to the collection. We know that conducting competitor analysis and link prospecting are both crucial aspects of campaigns, so developing this technology to integrate both of those features seemed logical." said Matt Bullas, Managing Director of SEO Consult. "Search engine optimisation can be a difficult, but hugely rewarding process, and SEO Consul t are always looking for new ways to improve the services we offer. By investing in these technologies we hope to provide a more transparent and holistic service that promotes success for all of our client's campaigns."
Read the full story at
SEO | SEO Consult Unveil New Competitor Monitoring Technology
SEO Consult, a market leading company specialising in search engine optimisation have unveiled a new addition to their collection of TRAX technologies.
(PRWEB) September 18, 2011
The Cheshire-based agency have recently launched their new monitorTRAX™ technology; it combines competitor analysis and link monitoring to produce an application that tracks the linking activity of competitors, allowing for the most authoritative links to be targeted in their clients' SEO campaigns. SEO Consult believe that integrating two crucial aspects of search engine optimisation into one hybrid technology will improve the services they offer and reduce costs.
The range of technologies that SEO Consult have built in-house include ppcTRAX™, socialTRAX™, callerTRAX™, linkTRAX™, competitorTRAX™, rankTRAX™,roiTRAX™, clickTELLIGENCE™ and clickBASE CMS™. They are all designed to monitor the performance of internet marketing and SEO campaigns for their clients by accurately tracking key metrics that can be used to improve the overall quality of campaigns. It is hoped that monitorTRAX™ is going to improve the SEO services that SEO Consult offer and increase ROI for their clients.
"Our range of TRAX™ technologies has expanded rapidly in recent times, and we're confident at SEO Consult that monitorTRAX™ is going to be another welcome addition to the collection. We know that conducting competitor analysis and link prospecting are both crucial aspects of campaigns, so developing this technology to integrate both of those features seemed logical." said Matt Bullas, Managing Director of SEO Consult. "Search engine optimisation can be a difficult, but hugely rewarding process, and SEO Consul t are always looking for new ways to improve the services we offer. By investing in these technologies we hope to provide a more transparent and holistic service that promotes success for all of our client's campaigns."
Susie Hood
SEO Consult
+44 (0) 845 205 0292
Email Information
How To Get Traffic | Tanzania: Region's Tearful Month
In an unprecedented sequence, the region has been witnessing ominous tragedies, including the sinking of MV Spice Islander 1 in Zanzibar last week, believed to have killed nearly 1,000 people, although only 203 bodies have been recovered so far.
A day later over 100 people died in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, when fire at a leaking fuel pipeline swept through a congested slum.The two disasters followed on the heels of Uganda's killer mudslides on the slopes of Mt Elgon in August, which claimed 43 lives at the same area where more than 100 died in March. Rescuers failed to account for an estimated 400 missing people, believed to have been buried alive.
The calamities, including notorious road accidents, continue to claim tens of thousands of lives every year in East Africa. The region is becoming synonymous with death at every turn. It is a tag that does not augur well for the development of its mostly impoverished people, who now wonder whether God had forsaken them.
The authorities are under censure for not acting swiftly and firmly to restore sanity in public governance to help halt the bloodletting and hold those responsible accountable for their acts of omission or commission.
There is consensus that the appalling increase in the number and frequencies of major disasters in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda is retarding progress and should be matter of serious concern. People are calling for concerted regional efforts to reverse the trend and value people's lives.
Those interviewed for this story lamented an apparently deep rooted culture of lawlessness, which has been left to reign in many spheres of public governance, and the transport sector in particular.
Before the dust settled in Kenya, the week also saw 30 more people dying and many more going blind after taking illicit brew in the country, as Tanzania's now infamous road accidents claimed about 20 people.
In addition, East Africa has suffered some of the most dangerous terror attacks in recent history as extremist elements found it an easy target: the 1998 simultaneous bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the attack on the Kikambala tourist hotel in Mombasa and last year's bombings in Uganda-- where 74 people were killed while watching the World Cup final.
Tanzania also has had its own share of scares with bomb explosions in the army barracks in Mbagala and Gongo la Mboto in Dar es Salaam. The two cases claimed over 50 lives.
Official statistics show that last year alone, horrific road accidents claimed lives of over 10,000 people in the region. In Tanzania, 3600 people perished in one of the darkest years, while Kenya came second with 3,000 lives lost followed by Uganda with 2,900 people who died on the road. The rate of fatalities in the EAC is among the highest in the world. Many other accidents go unreported.
The director of studies at the Institute of Social Welfare, Dr Andrew Mchomvu says most worrying is that the spectre of accidents has not served as a lesson, as they keep recurring year in, year out in a much deadlier form.
The "me first" culture and deep-rooted disregard for the law are to blame for the shocking state of affairs, other people say."The level of negligence in our region is so high...we have become a kind of people not cautious about yesterday, but concerned about tomorrow," said Dr Mchomvu.He says the culture has spread in the region and bred a ruling class that no longer cares to change things for the better.
Mr Mchomvu says things like reckless driving, lack of enforcement of the existing laws and principles that bring about decent life are among the clear indication that people no longer feel a sense of duty to care for others.He says disciplinary measures against perpetrators of wrong doing are weak or missing altogether.
'Sign of curse'
For his part, Reverend Christopher Mtikila, an outspoken cleric and politician, says the frequency and alarming rate of disasters in EAC is a sign of a curse. "It shows how we have kept God at bay."
He echoes the concern that lack of a sense of duty, and respect for the law has pervaded the national fabric, noting: "Everyone in his or her position does not feel the urge to fulfil his duties accordingly and feel proud of success. Rather, they consider how much they pocket."
When MV Bukoba sank in Lake Victoria in 1996 due to overloading, many hoped the same would not happen again. But for the same reason, MV Spice Islander 1 capsized last week, with local leaders now claiming up to 1,000 people may have died because they cannot be accounted for.
"We have become indifferent to disasters. We have reached a point where it is difficult to change...and anyone who attempts to question this irresponsibility is ignored and viewed as a fool," Mtikila claims. "Success in human beings must not be measured by the amount of wealth he or she has accumulated, but the amount of service and sacrifice she or he has rendered to the society."
CCM's deputy secretary general (Mainland) Mr John Chilligati, says that since most of the reported disasters were a result of disrespect to law and regulations, there is an urgent need to inculcate in the public a culture of voluntarily respecting the laws.
Says Mr Chiligati: "If you have a generation of people without a sense of respect for the law...then what you are witnessing today is expected to happen. We must strive to cultivate a culture of respect to the laws and regulations as part and parcel of our daily life" He believes the disasters are not a curse as some people claim. "I do not want to believe this is a curse, but rather a culture which we have to get rid of gradually, starting with our children."
Head of the Anglican Church, Bishop Valentino Mokiwa, says what is happing today is a depiction of failure by the responsible authorities to stand for the law, moral decay and negligence on the part of the concerned individuals.
"Rampant corruption is an outright sign of how people who have been entrusted to enforce the law have failed to perform," he says.
Lack of integrity
The top cleric says there is a high degree of laissez faire attitude and lack of integrity on the part of people entrusted to supervise policy of the region.
He adds: "The level of transparency is very low. There are a lot of such things like nepotism at places of work and laissez faire, hindering law enforcement and accountability. And this is very bad for the consumer." For him, a typical example of lack of transparency, was the release of contradictory figures by the authorities on how many people had died in the MV Spice Islander accident.
"People earn salaries but they are not performing. The reality is that our law makers and enforces are the ones who are killing us," he told The Citizen on Sunday in a telephone interview.
He says that, for instance, many vehicles imported to Tanzania and likely in other EAC countries are not roadworthy. "With the low enforcement of traffic regulations, road fatalities must be a constant phenomenon."
The recent accidents in Tanzania and Kenya prompted the World Health Organisation (WHO) director of the department of Violence and Injury Prevention and Disability, Mr Etienne Krug, to warn that preventable accidents were a bigger threat in Africa than HIV and Malaria.
"We don't call them accidents anymore. We call them injuries as that is the result, and the causes of injuries are very much preventable," said Mr Krug in an interview with German Press Agency.
Krug says governments must do more to prevent needless deaths, while average citizens too, if given the tools and knowledge, can help save themselves from painful and often debilitating bodily harm.
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Making Money Online | Tips On Making Money Today With Real Online Jobs
Finding legitimate work-at-home jobs isn't hard to do if you know where to look. In fact there are scores of businesses all across the globe that are willing to pay people to work from home. The Internet has certainly made the world a smaller place and now most people have access to much more information and job opportunities than ever before. Work from home programs are gaining in popularity as the many success stories are being realized and because of the opportunity the Internet allows us.
Throughout the growth of more people working from home, many employers have been able to attract more qualified labor at a cheaper cost than hiring a full time person to do the same work. The traditional concept of the work place has changed over the years as office space has now moved online. There are now well over 50 million home-based workers in North America alone.
The question remains can people really make money working online jobs? The answer is yes, everyone can get a job that suits his/her abilities. There are extremely simple jobs like data entry jobs, typing jobs, form filling jobs, proof reading jobs, copywriting jobs and many more. These are jobs that anyone can do. You don't need any kind of experience for such jobs.
There are many companies that allow you to work both full time and part time exclusively from home doing various jobs such as data entry, telemarketing, posting ads and customer service. These jobs are usually pay-per-project or commission-based. In most cases these jobs usually require no more than a computer, Internet access, a phone and maybe a fax machine.
Keep in mind that the percentage of people using computer is increasing everyday, with that; the demand for online workers is increasing too. People, especially from India, Pakistan and some other Asian countries are willing to work online for low rates. Buyers all around the world take advantage of online workers and they are saving a lot of money via outsourcing jobs to people on the internet instead of hiring a permanent employee.
A lot of work-at-home websites not only provide a list of companies that will hire employees to work from home but also good information on starting a home business. In case you are wondering which online job is best for you here are a few useful hints and comments.
1.Define Your Lifestyle. Defining your lifestyle is the first step to finding a matching online job. Are you a person with a good work ethic and self discipline to work independently and if so then having an online job is right for you. Online jobs would naturally be a top choice to anyone looking for a job that offers a flexible schedule, such as retirees, single parents, and stay-at-home moms who all like the idea of being able to make money while spending more time with their families.
2. Set your online career goals. What do you want to work online? How much do you want to earn? What cash and prize mix do you prefer? Online jobs differ from one another. Some online jobs are more dynamic, need you to spend more time online, or pay mainly cash. You get both cash and free services, or free merchandise. With all online jobs, you can adjust the workload to your abilities and schedule. Moreover, if you want to further your professional skills and need some extra cash, you can freelance on online projects and earn good supplementary income.
By effectively using the tools provided for you on most work-at-home websites you should be able to locate the best online job that can help you reach your personal and financial goals. However keep in mind before making the jump, be sure you fully understand what the job tasks requires. Working at home can be very challenging, especially for those lacking discipline. You can't get a whole lot done if you just can't resist watching your favorite Soap Opera or sports team on Television.
The overall bottom line is that working at home can be very rewarding for many people, but it's not for everyone. Be clear on what each job entails and after doing your own diligence you should find a number of ethical and viable online jobs that can help you accomplish your goals of making substantial money from home.
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To Live And Die In Oceanside
The Back Gate
The area around the Oceanside pier and boardwalk glistens, picture perfect: palm trees, silver sand, blue water, and crowds of people. It's easy to see how this town got its name. But there's a lot more to Oceanside than its ocean side.
To the north is Camp Pendleton, a border that marks Oceanside as the unquestionable end of San Diego County. North of that is frontier.
You can drive east, away from the ocean, covering five long miles on Highway 76, deep into the San Luis Rey Valley, past an indoor shooting range, an airstrip, an old drive-in theater, greenish fields, various neighborhoods, and countless shopping centers, and you'll think you've entered another city. But you haven't. You're still in Oceanside.
Turn left on College, right on North River Road, and you've reached the last civilian outpost before the back gate of Camp Pendleton. The maps call this neighborhood Mesa Margarita, but everyone knows it as the Back Gate.
The people who live in the $400,000 houses of the Back Gate will tell you that it's basically a good neighborhood. The place looks average enough and quiet enough to a casual passerby, with careful landscaping and green lawns.
Although...there are an awful lot of high front-yard fences...
Joanne Rush has called the Back Gate home since it was built in the late 1960s. She work. as the community assistant at San Luis Rey Valley Resource Center, a little storefront operation on Vandegrift Boulevard, right at the front gate of the Back Gate. Rush, who is white, has been at the center for over 14 years.
Her husband is a Vietnam veteran. The history of the neighborhood dates to that war, when the mostly L-shaped, single-story houses of the Back Gate were built for the wives of soldiers. "We have 32 houses on my street," Rush says, referring to Ann Street. "And when I moved in, there was only one man who lived here."
Today, the Back Gate has earned a different reputation altogether, as a hotbed of gang activity.
But Rush, and many other Back Gate residents, suck their teeth at that. "The press always portrays it as such a bad neighborhood," Rush says. "But we're good people and we work hard. We're just waiting for someone to take notice of that."
Samoans, Part 1:
A Cultural Connection
Everyday Samoan language sounds like spoken song, pouring out like liquid: an ongoing flowing flooding of open vowels.
Samoan traditional clothing is showy and colorful, everything reminiscent of bright flowers.
We've all seen Samoans playing football in the NFL. Their body type lends itself to athleticism. As a people, they are generally huge and implausibly agile.
With nearly 5000 Samoans, Oceanside is home to the second largest concentration of Samoans in the United States. The majority of these Pacific Islanders live in and around the Back Gate area.
Many of the Samoans here are descendants of U.S. Marines who were stationed at Camp Pendleton. The first wave came in the 1940s, during World War II, and now four generations call Oceanside home.
At the annual Oceanside Samoan Cultural Celebration last summer, over 200 attendees listened to traditional music, participated in traditional and not-so-traditional dancing, and watched and competed in cultural activities such as banana-peeling contests.
It was a festive scene, and many seemed to connect deeply with the activities. For example, all of the traditional contests pitted grandparents against grammar-schoolers; sometimes, a younger kid won.
Samoans, Part 2:
The Pressures
"Samoan kids are just the most respectful kids," says Joanne Rush. She's seated at a plastic indoor picnic table at the Resource Center. "They help clean up, even without being asked. And if they're vacuuming, after playtime is done, they don't just drag the vacuum around. They move the furniture and they make sure to do a really good job. I've never had a Samoan kid talk back to me or use foul language. And they seem to be pretty much like that with the other kids as well."
Wayne Godinet, a senior advisor for the Oceanside Samoan Cultural Committee, agrees. "These fourth-generation kids are getting so good at riding the fence," he shakes his head. "When the sun goes down, they can hang with the bad crowd, and in the morning, they're real good at meeting their family duties. I mean, some of these kids change into their colors on the bus on the way to school."
Perhaps the biggest and most high-profile gang in the Back Gate " the Deep Valley Bloods " is over 90 percent Samoan.
One may be led to wonder how such a God-fearing, respectful, and tradition-minded people could also make up a criminal organization like a gang.
A school bus driver took an unofficial survey of Back Gate kids, asking his young commuters what they could ever want with gangs and gang life. The overwhelming response? Protection, protection, protection.
Out of the Mouths of Babes
Dereck, 13, attends Jefferson Middle School. Next year he'll go to Oceanside High.
"I don't need protection from a gang," Dereck says. "God's my protection."
But what about the pressure from your peers?
"If someone says, 'Hey, take a smoke,' or something like that, and if I don't want to do it, then they call me names and make fun of me," Dereck says. "But it doesn't bother me. They want to call me names, they can call me names. But I'm not going to go that way."
Why do other kids go that way?
"I think because of the way they grew up," Dereck says. "Maybe the people they look up to are involved in gangs."
Jonathan, 20, is in the Navy and lives in the Back Gate.
"I usually stay inside, so I don't see much," says Jonathan. "I'm not really an outgoing person. I like playing video games, so...but I've heard gunshots before. And sometimes I'll come home, and I'll see cops around, with their lights flashing, and then I read stuff in the newspaper. But that's not very often. It's not, like, all the time or anything."
Chad, 19, graduated from Carlsbad High School and has friends in Oceanside.
"I think it's the drugs that messes up kids' heads," Chad says. "Drugs make people do crazy things, and they start going against each other. It creates competition. When I was 13, a lot of my friends started using PCP and acid, and they started giving it to me for free. And then after, like, half a year, once I was already hooked, then they wanted to start charging me for it. So that's how they got me. And how are you going to get money when you're 13? So I had to start stealing and stuff. I did what I had to, because I was just up in my head. I wasn't thinking about anyone else at the time. So I actually went with the skinhead crew for a little while. It messed up a lot of my relationships with friends and my family. But I got out of that a couple years ago, and I'm trying to change some of my buddies around now."
At the mention of gangs, one kid runs his hands back and forth over the top of his head and says, "I don't feel right talking about that."
Another kid won't give his name or age but does say, "My friends have mugged people right in front of me, but I don't get involved. We'll be walking, and they'll pull out a knife and try to take someone's money. Whenever that happens, I just want to get out of the scene."
Israel, 16, goes to El Camino High School. He lives in the Back Gate.
"I don't really go out that much," Israel says. "My parents insist on me staying inside. Especially at night. Back when that cop died, that was crazy. And when they killed that kid. That was bad, too. But otherwise, I guess I hear cop cars and gunshots sometimes from my house, but not all that much. I'm pretty used to how it is here, though. This is where I live. I don't feel unsafe. This is my home."
Back Gate Shootings
The main street running through the Back Gate is Vandegrift Boulevard. Many of the other streets in the area, including Arthur, Gold, and Charles streets, either cross Vandegrift at some point or run closely parallel to it.
ON VANDEGRIFT BOULEVARD:
Aug. 19, 2006 " A man in his 30s is shot near Camp Pendleton's back gate about 3:00 a.m. and walks into a hospital 12 hours later for treatment.
March 14, 2004 " A 23-year-old man is shot at a convenience store around 1:30 a.m. He survives.
ON ARTHUR AVENUE:
June 10, 2006 " Two men, aged 23 and 24, are shot after arguing with men in a sedan while in front of a home near North River Road. They survive.
Oct. 15, 2005 " Jimmy Malo, 27, shoots at and misses three Oceanside police detectives as they patrol a street in an unmarked vehicle. Authorities call Malo a gang member, but a jury disagrees. He's convicted of attempted voluntary manslaughter and assault with a firearm and faces up to 26 years in prison.
July 23, 2005 " Jonathan Cobb, 19, of Menifee, fires three shots at the home of a rival gang member, hitting no one. Cobb pleads guilty to shooting at an occupied home and is sentenced to eight years in prison.
April 22, 2005 " A 17-year-old is shot in the leg while crossing a parking lot in the 600 block of North Redondo Way. The teen goes to a friend's house on Arthur Avenue and calls for help.
March 14, 2004 " Shortly before 6:00 a.m., shots are fired into a garage door, hitting a 41-year-old Oceanside woman. She survives.
ON GOLD DRIVE:
Dec. 20, 2006 " Officer Dan Bessant is fatally shot while on an unrelated traffic stop. Gang members Meki Gaono, 17, and Penifoti "C.J." Taeotui, 16, plead not guilty in adult court and await trial.
June 9, 2005 " Rusty Seau, 16, is fatally shot in a fight with a rival gang. Tony Lessie, 17, is convicted of murder, as an adult, and sentenced to 40 years to life in prison.
March 16, 2004 " Lacy Charles Black, 26, fires at a former gang member and his sister in front of their home. The brother is hit four times and survives. The sister is unhurt. Black is convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 65 years to life in prison.
ON CHARLES DRIVE:
March 16, 2004 " Shots are fired into a house, missing a 34-year-old man inside.
Sources: Oceanside Police Department and the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Benevolent Street
Soldier #1
Salilo Moimoi is a huge fellow with a recognizably Samoan body type: round yet jutting face, thick neck, broad shoulders, enormous arms and legs, and big hands. He wears his dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. His goatee has begun to show strands of dignified gray.
"It all started out for me in the deep valley, looking for a place of belonging, you know," Moimoi says. "I never hung out with my parents much. So I ran the streets and found people that were lonely like me, I guess."
Moimoi sits at a cement picnic table in John Landes Park. It's Saturday morning. He's here to participate in a public antigang event called Victory Outreach. But now he's gazing off into the green trees with a look of reminiscence.
"And then I got into a gang, the Deep Valley Bloods," he says in a tone that implies he knows how stupid that decision was. "I was about 13 or 14. And me and my other friend, I'm not going to say his name, but we were the youngest out of the whole crowd. The jump-ins were crazy. On Arthur Street, we used to make two lines. And you'd have to run down the middle. You'd have to make it to the other end to get jumped in. And there was, like, 18 of them every time, to jump you in, to become a gang member. They'd kick you, punch you, and you'd be crawling through the line, and the best thing to do, I learned, was just run. Keep your hands up, and fight back, and run. Because once you fall, you're not going to make it."
He manages a pained smile. "It was pretty raw. It was so raw that my uncles were in it, you know. And me and my other friend, we were the youngest ones there when we got jumped in."
Moimoi is telling about his time as an OG, an original gangster. He's one of those OGs who went away and then came back to the neighborhood where he used to bang. Only Moimoi's come back with a definite goal and purpose.
"After I was jumped in, we moved to Vista," he says. "And that's where I live now, which is ironic. We used to do beer runs at the 7-Eleven right there in the valley. Now I'm sober and I'm drug-free and I'm living there again, you know. It's like God brought me back to the place where I started. To help the people in the community where I hurt so many people."
Moimoi continues his story, as ten or so volunteers set up chairs and tables for the Victory Outreach. Moimoi has volunteered to help by emceeing the proceedings.
"So I went to Vista," he says, "and ended up seeing one of my friends that I hadn't seen in a while, and he was a Blood. And me and him were, like, the only two Samoan gang members at Vista High at that time. And he's doing life in prison right now, without possibility of parole. Anyways, I went the wrong way. I was playing football for Vista High School, and I was pretty good. I guess I didn't think it was what I wanted to do. So I had my status as a gang banger " we were called the Valley Bloods, but it's the Deep Valley Bloods now " even though I was in Vista, and the Bloods were in Oceanside, I was still affiliated with them, but not as much, so I made some new friends too. And I got caught up doing drugs, violence, you know, and then I started going to jail."
Moimoi mentions going to jail as if it were just another after-school activity.
"I ended up doing home invasions," he says, with a sigh. "We were robbing Pizza Huts and stuff like that. Because we had drug habits now, and none of us worked. We did crystal meth. And if it wasn't that, we were drinking beers. But we had to support our habit. And none of us had jobs, so we had to go do some licks, you know."
Moimoi says there was little planning involved for his law-breaking activities.
"It was just off the top," he shrugs. "Well, we'd always have some inside scoop about who did what at where, you know. We knew that they were counting the money at night, and they'd come out the back to take out the trash and stuff like that. And a lot of us got busted for things like that. I didn't, but..."
They had one gun that got passed around, and anyone could use it for a lick if they needed it.
"But not everyone would use the gun, because some guys were scared, you know," Moimoi says. "But we were desperate, because we had to support our drug habit."
Just in case the sensational things Moimoi has been saying have started to sound a little too gangster-glamorous, he checks himself.
"I'm not proud of any of the things I did, by any means," he says. "I thank God that He intervened and changed my life around. I give that testimony not to brag about what I did, but to indicate how powerful God is. Because nothing could change me. I did all sorts of programs, and nothing worked. I did 7 years in prison for attempted murder. I got 14 years, but I served 7. And I know it was all a part of God's plan. He had a job for me to do, and that's what I do now. When I got out of prison, I went to Victory Outreach Ministry in Escondido. They had a recovery home, 24-hour supervised. I finished it. And that place restored me. There was just a lot of hurt and pain that I was going through, you know. And they restored my family. My parents didn't want anything to do with me no more at all. They'd taken all my pictures down and thrown them in a closet."
Moimoi's father is a matai, or family chief. In Samoan culture, all family business is directed and facilitated in a hierarchy beginning with the matai.
Moimoi says, "My dad's a talking chief for our family. So I'm next in line to take his standing. But that was all out the window. And my son didn't want nothing to do with me no more. When I went to do my seven years, I got arrested right in front of him. He was, like, 3 years old, you know. Just the whole ordeal was traumatic." Moimoi was 25 when he went to jail. "It just went on for such a long time. And I think I went to prison because it was part of God's plan to get my attention."
Now Moimoi is a minister for Victory Outreach himself.
"I'm restored now," he says. "My morals, my family, my goals, one hundred percent. I'm back on track. And the program at Victory Outreach, they teach you how to get plugged into things that help you not go back to your old ways. And the main thing is God. God's got to be number one. And number two is family, and number three is your ministry. Ministry, meaning, what are you doing now that you're out? And this is why I'm reaching out to the community at any cost, you know."
It turns out that Moimoi has a real gift with a microphone and a sense of humor about his own past.
At the beginning of the outreach, after 30 people have shown up, he enthusiastically takes the mike and bellows, "Give it up for the Oceanside Police! Come on, everybody. Give it up for these guys. They're the ones who kept me from jumping through your back window when you were on vacation."
He will tell a part of his compelling story to the assembled crowd, before he passes the speaking duties to others.
Victory Outreach Church is a ministry made up mostly of recovery homes, for people recovering from drugs, alcohol, prison, and gangs. The ministry has been organizing outreaches for gang members and potential gang members about every month for the past year.
Over the course of the next two hours, there will be testimonies, announcements, educational skits, informal talks, children's activities, and both live tunes and music from a deejay.
Everything at the outreach " food, equipment, live music, everyone's time " is donated.
After being the center of attention for a while, entertaining and educating the crowd, Moimoi returns to the picnic table at the corner of the park to talk some more.
Does he keep in contact with any of the OGs from his day?
"Oh, yeah," Moimoi says. "All the time. There's very few left, though. Most of them are spending life in prison, and, gee, I could say about nine died already. From my era, I'd say about five are good family men now. And there's probably five more who are in and out, in and out."
He means in and out of prison.
"My nephew was somehow linked to this shooting of [Oceanside Police Officer] Dan Bessant," Moimoi says. "And he's in prison for that right now. He called me after that happened, and he told me, 'Bro, we really need to do something about this.' And that's my nephew, that's my sister's son, who got caught up in that stuff, you know. And that's what really gave me the oomph to do what I'm doing now, you know, helping out. It's what really opened my eyes. Because it was so close. It's in my backyard now. And what are you going to do? You just going to throw dirt over it and pretend like it never happened? Or are you going to react?"
Another thought pops into Moimoi's mind.
"The thing that's really sad," he says, "is these kids are looking to find a place. They want a place where they can be loved and where they can feel wanted. That's the main thing. They want to feel accepted."
So, to feel accepted, they walk through a line of "friends" who try to beat the crap out of them?
"That's an oxymoron, isn't it?" Moimoi agrees. He laughs, a rumbling through his great barrel chest. "But you know what that means. That means you'll take anything to be a part of what they are."
Moimoi waves his arm across the park, toward the volunteers for the outreach, who are now breaking things down, and toward some of the kids who have shown up that day, many of whom are now playing basketball. On Moimoi's forearm is a tattoo, the word "Uso." Uso means "brother" in Samoan.
"One thing these kids need is another idea in their heads," Moimoi says. "They need to think about what they want to be when they grow up. It's like Junior Seau. We all grew up the same way, but he always wanted to play basketball and football. And instead, we went over there and did whatever we were doing, acting dumb. Stealing beers from 7-Eleven."
Moimoi sighs again.
"The problem," he concludes, "when you're out in your madness and running amok " no one's saying anything to teach you different. I admit I probably wouldn't have listened when I was a kid, but at least if someone was saying something " like this Victory Outreach message " it might have made me think twice."
How Do You Prioritize?
Is it God, country, family, self?
What if you don't believe in God?
What if you're displaced from your country? Then is culture second, or even first?
What if you have no family?
Where do strangers come in? When, in our prioritizing, are we supposed to consider the needs of others?
And what about the earth?
What is a person supposed to think of first?
"It has to be God first to beat this gang thing," says Wayne Godinet. He couldn't have more conviction in his voice. "With the Samoans, blood is thicker than water. And, perhaps unfortunately, blood is also thicker than the truth, sometimes. It's family first, then culture, and then God. But it has to be God first."
Godinet himself is Samoan. There are seven kids in his family. And he, like most Oceanside Samoans, is the descendant of a U.S. Marine.
"Often," says Godinet, "the tendency among Samoans, when something bad happens, is to say, 'Oh, they're from that family and that church and that village.' But then when something good happens, it's like, 'That's my cousin,' or, 'He goes to my church.' But all that has to stop. We have to realize that as a community we're part black, part white, part Mexican, part everything, and we have to try to love everybody."
Samoans, Part 3:
A Cultural Disconnect
Wayne Godinet never lets it be forgotten that the subjects he's talking about are touchy ones. "Keep in mind, I speak only for my immediate family, and for the Samoan Cultural Committee, that small group that I'm affiliated with. These are only my own opinions. I don't speak for the Samoan community at large or for the culture at large."
Godinet is careful with his words because of the high stakes and high sensitivities involved.
"This is such a sensitive situation because we live so close to all of this," he says. "We have to drive by OGs every day on our ways to work."
That being said, Godinet is bold enough to paint an interesting cultural picture from his own experience.
"Samoa being traditional," he says, "you don't see so many of the problems there with the youth. Especially in Independent Samoa, but also in certain parts of American Samoa. Because over there, it's more of a communal mindset, like an extended family. Everybody supports each other. Now, they do the same thing here, but it's hard here because in a village it's more controlled, and church is an everyday venue there. You're connected to your family."
Godinet, 54, has been involved with the Oceanside Boys Club for 18 years.
"Over here, our kids are going to public schools, many of them, and it's a capitalist society," he says. "You snooze, you lose. So it's pretty aggressive. And you have all the high-tech instruments here, and you've got the television. We don't have the kind of programming in Samoa that you have here. And then you have the peer pressure. And the lure of a gang for some of the young kids that I see is extremely strong. And a lot of our kids are confused."
There's a sadness to Godinet's voice and his demeanor, not exactly hangdog but close. But there's also fire behind the sadness, and hope.
"For the kids who are still caught up in the traditions," he says, "that lure is not as strong. The church and the family and the community can work almost as well here as it does back there. And that's why I give a lot of credit to some of the churches."
Godinet himself grew up in east Oceanside and always resisted the temptations of gangs.
"Our Samoan community has a lot of problems anyway," he acknowledges. "And where I see most of the problem is in the third and fourth generations that we have here. Because there's such a disconnect with the old traditional values of the first generation. So I think it's incumbent upon my generation, the second generation of Samoans here in Oceanside, to bring the elders and the youngest members of our community together onto a common ground of understanding."
Hail, Hail, the Gangs Are All Here
"It's not just Samoan gangs that we have here in Oceanside," Lieutenant Joe Young says. "In fact, they make up only a very small percentage of the gang activity in this town. We have Hispanic gangs and black gangs as well. And then we also have gangs that consist of different races."
Lieutenant Young heads the Oceanside Gang Unit: nine dedicated officers whose expertise is this one specialized area of law enforcement.
He launches into a daunting list.
"We have Posole, which is a Hispanic gang," he begins. "We have Mesa Locos, which is Hispanic. We have Tri-City Thunder Hills, and that's a combination of different ethnicities. We have a gang called Deep Valley Bloods, which is mostly Samoan. We have Deep Valley Crips, which is mostly black. We have another Crip set, which is called the Insane Crip Gang, which is mostly black. We have a gang that goes by the letters CMG, which is Crook Mob Gangsters, and that is mostly black also. We have Center Street, which is a Hispanic gang. We have Krook City Bloods, which is mostly Samoan, but there's others in there also. We have South Oceanside Posse, which was the original name, but they go by South Oceanside now, and they're a combination of races also. And lastly, we have another Crip set, the Westside Crips, and they're majority black. That's 11 gangs that are currently active in Oceanside."
And how many members are in those gangs?
"If you were to combine all the numbers together," Lieutenant Young says, "for all the gangs, we are looking at roughly 600 members. The smallest gang, South Oceanside, has only 3 known members, and the largest, Posole, has about 200. The Samoan gangs, the Deep Valley Bloods, have about 50 members, and Krook City has less than half of that, maybe 20."
Lieutenant Young reports that some factors seem to contribute to gang activity in an area. "Low-income housing, because there is a socioeconomic impact on it; failure in schools; broken homes; and, in some cases, that type of gang activity is firmly entrenched in their families, so it's what the kids are used to seeing, and they carry that on."
What are the police doing in the Back Gate in particular to keep the gangs at bay?
"We have three injunctions now, against Posole, Center Street, and Mesa," Lieutenant Young says. "And we're very happy with how well those injunctions have worked. Injunctions are court-ordered, issued and signed by a judge, and they prohibit documented members of a specific gang from doing a laundry list of things in their own neighborhoods. So these individuals were served papers that prohibited them from doing things like hanging out together within the boundaries of that injunction. And we've severely hampered the ability of those gangs to function in the ways they used to. Now, we haven't done this with the Samoan gangs, because they're a little more spread out and transitory in nature. But Posole is firmly entrenched in a particular neighborhood."
He goes on. "In the Back Gate in particular, we have done some different things. We've done wiretaps, for instance. But I have to tell you, wiretaps are very labor-intensive. Because once you go down that path, you have to monitor phone lines, and in some cases there's multiple phone lines that you have to monitor for hours on end. And when you devote resources to those types of things, it takes away from your ability to get out there on a daily basis and be more proactive at the street level. So wiretaps are done, but not very often. What is done often out in the Back Gate are probation checks and parole checks. We might look for something as minor as curfew violations or violations of other conditions. We're also striving to maintain a high-visibility patrol. At any given time, we have at least five officers in the Mesa Margarita area and maybe two or three in the Back Gate patrolling at any given time."
Then Lieutenant Young changes his tone. "Everybody knows that the responsibility of law enforcement is to suppress crime," he says. "But to really make an impact in law enforcement, you have to do more than suppress. You have to intervene, and you have to prevent. So that's the triangle of community-oriented policing that we swear by up here in Oceanside: suppression, intervention, prevention. Before, maybe five or ten years ago, we were relying on other agencies for intervention and prevention. But you can't do that and have successful community-oriented policing. So now we're going into the schools, we're going into the neighborhoods, and we're showing them a different side of us. And we're making a difference. I think you're going to see very little gang influence over these Oceanside neighborhoods anymore."
Lieutenant Young also stresses that there is something the average citizen can do to curb the influence of gangs.
"We've instituted a hotline," he says, "so people can call us anonymously with tips about gang activity in their neighborhoods. That number is 760-435-4985. That's the Oceanside Gang Police Hotline."
What Are Bloods?
Detective Gordon Govier has worked in the Back Gate since 1999 as a gang-suppression officer, neighborhood-policing officer, and gang detective.
"Prior to having the Deep Valley Bloods, the Deep Valley Crips were already established," Govier says. "The Deep Valley Crips are primarily an African-American gang. And it's just a normal progression that the Samoans (who were defending themselves against these Deep Valley Crips, who were African-American) would become Blood gang members, because they would be the opposite gang. So that's basically how they came about."
Govier has given expert testimony on the Bloods and Crips in superior court.
"Originally," says Govier, "and this is going back to the mid-'80s, the Samoan gang members called themselves the Valley Boys. That evolved, once the Crips became prevalent, into the Deep Valley Bloods."
How did they "become" Bloods? Did they just start calling themselves Bloods?
"More or less, yes," Govier says. "They began calling each other 'Blood.' And they started to adopt the traditions associated with Blood gang sets: wearing of the color red and the typical way of how Bloods speak to each other. Bloods will usually avoid use of the letter c, as a form of disrespect to Crip gang members. So, rather than saying that they're 'kickin' it,' when they're hanging out, they'll say 'bickin' it.' Instead of saying 'that's cool,' they'll say, 'that's bool.' It's very common that they adopt that language. I know that from wiretaps that I've listened to, jail calls, and things like that. When they write, they will either avoid use of the letter c completely, so, for instance, they'll call a movie a 'flick,' but they'll spell it 'flikk,' or, what they'll do is they'll use a small letter c and a big letter K, because that represents 'Crip killer.' And they'll take any opportunity they can get. Bloods will often wear a red Calvin Klein T-shirt with the small c and the big K, because, first of all, it's red and they're Bloods, and second of all, it says cK and they're Crip killers."
The Not-So-Mean Streets
Lieutenant Joe Young doesn't wear a police uniform to work. He doesn't drive a standard police car. He's a plainclothes officer. It allows him to operate "a little more under the radar."
Tonight, Young's in jeans and a pullover, driving his white Chevrolet Grand Prix. Underneath, the pullover hides a badge, gun, handcuffs, and a radio. Inside the car are a police radio, siren, and "wig-wag" colored police lights on the passenger's windshield visor.
Lieutenant Young spends most of his worknights in the office of the Oceanside police station on Mission Avenue. But tonight he's out patrolling through the Back Gate.
At dusk, the streets of the Back Gate look like any other suburban streets. A carpenter unloads the back of his truck after a hard day's work. Three kids throw a football in the waning light. A woman walks along, alone, holding a few DVDs under her arm.
There's no graffiti anywhere and little garbage. Winding around the sleepy streets of the Back Gate, all you might see are a couple of abandoned shopping carts and a candy wrapper or two. And even those might not be there the next time you drive through. This community obviously takes pride in its appearance.
"You look at the condition of a lot of these houses," Lieutenant Young says, "and you can really tell how much these people take care of their yards. It's not that run-down look that we used to see. And that's encouraging to me."
Lieutenant Young himself is half Samoan. His hair has receded somewhat, and his face has an inherent friendliness, as though he's always ready to smile. The only thing that might give Lieutenant Young away as a police officer is his mustache.
"I guess we're looking for any suspicious activity," Lieutenant Young says, sailing along Vandegrift Boulevard with both hands on the steering wheel. The street lights of the Back Gate have just come on for the night. "Really, what I'm looking for is someone I've never seen before. Maybe that's the person I'd stop and talk to, just to get to know them and let them know who I am."
Lieutenant Young makes it clear that he knows more about what he's looking for than he can legally say. "By now, I know a lot of the gang members, and I know where they live."
And where do they live?
"I'll tell you what," Lieutenant Young says. "I'll drive really slowly down this street, and you tell me which houses have gang members living in them."
But not one house stands out. There's no garbage in any of the yards, no show of gang colors, and no driveways with souped-up Hummers or lowriders.
Lieutenant Young makes a few slow tours around the neighborhood. Night has fallen fully now, and Young's Grand Prix turns off Vandegrift Boulevard, making a right onto Gold Drive. Then it's an immediate left on Arthur Avenue. He eases along at cruising speed. Right on East Parker Street, across Leon Street, and down toward Melba Bishop Park.
The streets are quiet. Very quiet. But not eerily so. There's a kid on a bike who just bought something, and he's riding home with a white plastic bag draped over his handlebars. There's a couple putting some boxes into the trunk of their car.
What about all the horror stories? What about the stories of police officers driving around here and being shot at in their cars?
Easing down Arthur Avenue at 20 miles per hour, Lieutenant Young reaches a dead end. As he turns the car around, he says, "As we speak, we're right at the point where officers have been shot at. We just passed it. But you didn't see any hesitancy on my part. I'm okay with driving down the street, and I'm okay with waving at everybody. Do they know my car? A lot of these guys know my car. But it's not about trying to be sneaky or anything. I just don't think it's like that anymore. That's stuff that has happened, but it's more the exception than the rule."
Then, pulling slowly away from the dead end on Arthur, he says, "It's really night and day around here. And that's a clich, I know, but it really is just night and day, the difference between what it's like now on the streets of Oceanside and what it was like back in the '80s and early '90s. I mean, it's not like the radio is silent nowadays; there's still stuff going on. But nothing of the magnitude or depth of what it used to be. It all goes back to our model of community-oriented policing: suppression of crime, yes, but also intervention and prevention."
To be sure, the police radio isn't silent, but few calls interrupt Young's words. "Car on fire with no one in it," for instance. But over the course of many evening hours, that's about it. A minor drug arrest in downtown Oceanside. "Those are my vice guys," Young says, proudly.
Whenever a police car passes, Young says, "There goes a good guy."
Four marked patrol cars and as many more unmarked ones are pounding the Back Gate beat, even as Young speaks.
Passing by Luiseo Park, Lieutenant Young stops and says, "That's a great example of the city's commitment to providing positive things for the kids." He's gazing at tennis courts with bright lights, a couple of ball fields, and a playground. "Ten or 15 years ago," he says, "this was nothing but weeds."
The parks around the Back Gate are indeed large and impressive, with good facilities and excellent upkeep.
Later in the evening, the lieutenant heads to Melba Bishop Park. This huge green network of fields, playgrounds, and courts has a state-of-the-art gymnasium at one end. Young parks the Grand Prix outside the main building and walks inside.
The gym is heated, well lit. Dozens of tiny kids are having basketball practice on the lacquered wooden courts. Lieutenant Young smiles as he looks across the sea of little dribblers and shooters. He utters a single word: "Prevention."
Benevolent Street
Soldier #2
One of the leaders of Victory Outreach Ministry, Tommy Romero, isn't Samoan. But he is from the Back Gate. And he knows about gangs.
"I arranged a few years back to have my son's apartment raided by gang members," Romero says, indicating quite a twist on the theme of concerned parenting. "I wanted to scare him away from the gang life, and I decided to try to educate him in my own way."
But when Romero showed up at his son's apartment an hour after the planned raid, he was more than surprised.
"They were all partying together." He shakes his head. "My son and the gang were drinking and laughing like old friends. And I was, like, 'What's going on?' And they told me my son was already connected. He sold them their dope. I had no idea he was so far gone."
Romero's son was eventually arrested. Three times. After a prison stay, he reformed himself.
Today, Romero's boy is on a Victory Outreach mission in New Zealand.
"You'd be surprised," Romero says. His smile lifts his graying mutton chops.
"They've started copying our ways in New Zealand, copying our rap videos," he says. "Now they have motorcycle gangs and Crips and Bloods and the whole thing. My son's down there helping out."
Romero knows about the gang life because he's lived it himself.
"I was a gang member once," he says. "And now I just want to give back. We took so much from the neighborhoods, and now I want to give some of that back."
Benevolent Street
Soldier #3
Roy Vallez, 58, grew up in Oceanside, and he helps out a lot of kids in the area.
"I moved away for about 19 years," he says, "and when I came back 2 years ago, I decided to get involved, because this wasn't the Oceanside that I knew. It was just a mess when I came back. The Oceanside I left was a community of one. Not a community of different races destroying each other's lives."
Vallez moved away to travel around the country doing prison ministries. He's a devout Christian. And now he's returned to Oceanside and has started up Gangland Ministries.
"It's just something I thought God wanted me to do." Vallez smiles. "I was over in the 'hood, dealing with a lot of the kids, and they kept asking me who I represented. And I kept telling them, 'Oceanside.' But then I was in prayer one night, and God said, 'No, you represent Me.' So I came up with Gangland Ministry, and I printed up shirts that said, 'Who do you represent?' And I listed all the areas: Posole, Crown Heights, the Deep Valley, the Tri-City, the Bloods, the Crips...or Jesus. And then I'd go out and ask the kids questions. You know, do you believe in God? Do you know any of the Ten Commandments? And every gang banger knew one commandment, and that was 'Thou shalt not kill.' And then I'd ask them, 'Well, why do you kill then?' Mostly I'd just get real dumb looks."
Now Vallez is trying to make a difference in Oceanside. It seems to be working.
"We just enrolled our first boy in Palomar College," he says, proudly. "He was involved in a stabbing about a year and a half ago, but he wasn't carrying a weapon, he was with two guys who were. So we worked with him and got his head on straight, and he graduated from high school last year. He's a real good kid. But he doesn't have a family, no mother and no father, and he actually had to raise his own eight-year-old brother. So he's a real good kid, and we helped get him into Palomar College absolutely free."
Rest in Peace:
Officer Dan Bessant
"The most incredible thing, I think, about the night Dan Bessant died was all the police cars," Joanne Rush says. "It was just incredible. I've never seen anything like it. There were hundreds of them. Hundreds."
Wayne Godinet remembers the days leading up to Bessant's murder in December 2006.
"When Officer Bessant was shot and killed," Godinet says, "he had just been named as a liaison to work with the Samoan community. But the thing was, his wife was pregnant, he was going to have a baby, so he was taking some time off to be with his wife. So in that interim period, we were anxiously waiting for him to join our effort in the Back Gate, you know. And then when he did get back, I remember it was on a Wednesday, and I'd been waiting to talk with him, but I decided to wait till Thursday. I wanted to give him one day to get acclimated back to work. And that Wednesday night, his first night back, was when he was shot and killed."
Godinet remembers his cell phone ringing off the hook.
"I didn't know it was him that got shot," Godinet says. "But then I heard who it was, and I was, like, 'Oh, man. He just had a baby.' And then I got down there, and they were trying to go into homes in Back Gate. Some of the homes were Samoan. I knew some of the families and was able to call in and peacefully get them to come out and deal with the SWAT situation on that night."
Bessant's murder turned out to be the catalyst for the recent thrust to eradicate gangs from the Samoan culture in the Back Gate.
"After that, some of the guys I grew up with who were involved in faith-based organizations and outreach had contacted me about how they could help and what they could do. We just decided we had to do as much as we could. But we also realized we had to do it locked arm in arm, culture to culture. And bring faith and a message and resources into these neighborhoods. We had to become like street soldiers fighting against the whole gang mentality. So Dan Bessant's death was a terrible, terrible thing. But we're trying to make something positive come out of it."
Rest in Peace:
Rusty Seau
Joanne Rush was just a short jog from the spot where Rusty Seau died in June 2005. She'd known him since he was a little boy.
Rush has witnessed an awful lot in her 14 years at the San Luis Rey Resource Center. Shootings in the parking lot. Dramas that have even spilled in through the doors. She's never feared for her life, she says, but she's also grown accustomed to some pretty harsh things.
"I've heard gunshots over 50 times in my life," Rush said. She's jolly-seeming, but in a quiet way, with big, thick glasses and short gray hair. She's a grandmother with grandkids who are often afraid to go to the bathroom at their own school.
By now, when Rush hears the reports of guns in the distance, she does one thing: she prays.
"When Rusty died," Rush says, "someone ran in and told us what was going on. And we shut the center down and ran around the corner. It was right here on the corner of Gold and Vandegrift. I don't think Rusty was shot there. I heard he ran after he was hit, but that's where he fell. At first, a lot of us thought he'd been hit by a car. It was the middle of the day, and it was all so visible. We were all standing there, but Rusty's family couldn't even approach him, because it was a crime scene. Can you imagine watching your son die in front of you and not being able to go to him one last time to tell him that you love him?"
Rest in Peace:
Michelle Tate
Most people trace the current gang violence to the 1990 murder of Michelle Tate, a 14-year-old black girl shot in the very same parking lot where the Resource Center now stands, on the corner of Redondo and Vandegrift. Tate was killed by a Samoan gang member.
A year later, Akeli "Junior" Kelly was convicted at age 21 of second-degree murder and sentenced to 22 years to life in prison.
"That started the whole tit-for-tat," Wayne Godinet asserts. "We've never been on an even keel since that day. And it was almost 20 years ago!"
Rest in Peace:
Murdered in the Back Gate
Pearl Seau, killed 11/12/02; Jessie Watson, killed 8/31/04; Joaquin Pruitt, killed 6/29/05; Timothy Edward Lindsay, killed 11/3/95.
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