Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet Communications

Flash Mob Gang Warfare 325

Posted by CowboyNeal from the bloods-and-chips dept.
TexasDex writes "You've all heard of flash mobs and Flash Mob Computing. Now here's a new twist on the flash mob phenomenon: Almost 3 dozen people were arrested for a March 3 street fight. 'What makes this case unusual is how the clash was arranged: via a profanity-laced Internet chat room.' Apparently two Dallas gangs, after trading insults in a chat room, traded their keyboards for fists and baseball bats and arranged a time to meet and duke it out in real life. The gang members were later identified and arrested with the aid of a digital video tape of the brawl. According to one officer, 'Some of them actually signed in with their true names, so that helped us identify people.'"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Flash Mob Gang Warfare More

Flash Mob Gang Warfare

Comments Filter:

  • Scoop! (Score:5, Funny)

    by balthan ( 130165 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:26AM (#9147896)
    Gotta love how slashdot stays on the forefront of up-to-the-minute journalism.

    • Re:Scoop! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Glonoinha ( 587375 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @01:07AM (#9148120) Journal
      About like a bunch of computer nerds to bring baseball bats to a gunfight.

      Actually none of them sound like rocket scientists - but given that it happened in Texas I am shocked, awed, and dismayed at the complete lack of firearms in this disagreement. You would think that with upwards of 40 or so hooligans ... somebody would have remembered that rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, and a few H&K MP5A3s full of 9mm Hydroshok ammo and laser designators beats a bunch of punks with baseball bats.

      Damn kids today ...

  • With or without computers.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Pig Hogger ( 10379 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (reggoh.gip)> on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:26AM (#9147898) Journal
    criminals are always stupid.

    (This is why cops can catch them).

  • cool (Score:2, Funny)

    by brainkiller ( 41196 )
    irc gangs... haha.. how geeky is that?

  • yeah (Score:3, Funny)

    by twenty-exty-six ( 772817 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:28AM (#9147907)
    I would have used the keyboard instead of a baseball bat. Would have been sooo much cooler with keys flying everywhere with every strike.

  • You know what they sing (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:28AM (#9147910)
    When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way, from your first blogging breath, to your last journaled day.

    • You know what they sing -- Reprise (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      2 nite, 2 nite,
      I'll flame ur ass 2 nite.
      For us, the n00bz will drop where they are.

      2 day
      I'll never take a shower,
      The FPS go slowly,
      And still the sky is light...

      Oh Doom, grow bright,
      Chat turns 2 day into a fight!

      - a.c.

  • Should have let them kill eachother (Score:5, Funny)

    by aardwolf204 ( 630780 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:29AM (#9147913)
    Should have let them kill eachother, would have been Darwin at its finest

    • Especially with OSX! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Ieshan ( 409693 ) <ieshan@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:49AM (#9148035) Homepage Journal
      Yeah, especially if they were on IRC using OSX.

      (rimshot)
    • The problem with that is that the stronger/smarter members would survive. Then we'd have stronger gangs that are better at killing... indeed, very Darwinistic. But also the exact opposite of what the rest of the law abiding community wants.
      • Your logic is flawed. They all passed Darwinian selection, because they all survived.

        At least if they had fought it out, some would be removed.

        The result of what actually happened is that they'll ALL be back very soon, and possibly a little more versed in how to slide through the legal system, and with a little less respect for it.
  • Gang members can use AOL IM, too!

    News at eleven!

    -- RLJ

  • Chat logs anyone? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Does anyone have the chat-log of that chat-session?

  • Why do I think this all started with.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bryan Gividen ( 739949 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:32AM (#9147933)
    *gang 1 slaps around gang 2 with a bit of large trout

  • Communications medium was used for communicating? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RollingThunder ( 88952 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:32AM (#9147939)
    Say it ain't so!!!

    This is not newsworthy. People traded insults and got into a fight. So it happened over the internet - so what?

    Communications can be good or bad. The internet isn't going to prevent some punk from talking shit about some other punk.

  • Yo (Score:2)

    by antic ( 29198 )
    /me is bringing a bat, fool!

  • oh great (Score:4, Funny)

    by poofyhairguy82 ( 635386 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:35AM (#9147956) Journal
    of great... now our gangs are on the internet. I wonder how much longer till our crime is outsourced to india like our jobs are.

  • I'd love to read that transcript (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:37AM (#9147962)
    Nigga4Life82: fuk you mama
    FreshJackMan: u smoke dicks
    FreshJackMan: an you mama a ho
    Nigga4Life82: fuck yo mama ho
    DJMonkeyAss: sup bitches
    FreshJackMan: niga4life needs
    DJMonkeyAss: indahouse
    FreshJackMan: a cap in his ass
    Tawneesha79: sup dopeman
    FreshJackMan: GLOCK GLOCK LoL ;-)
    Nigga4Life82: gona buts a cap in jack ass
    Nigga4Life82: punk ass bitch anyway

    (... six hours later ...)

    Nigga4Life82: make you move motherfuker
    FreshJackMan: kick yo bitch ass bitch
    FreshJackMan: fuck your mama bitch ass ho

    (... two hours later... the fight begins)

  • Excuses, excuses. (Score:5, Funny)

    by RuneB ( 170521 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:37AM (#9147966)
    "For the most part, it's nothing but cursing on it. ... Some of them actually signed in with their true names, so that helped us identify people."

    I wonder how many of them will claim that it wasn't really them becasue of a worm or virus or someone else using their password.

  • West Side Story (Score:4, Funny)

    by tim_mathews ( 585933 ) <tmathews04&gmail,com> on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:39AM (#9147974)
    West Side Story meets IRC? You are now chatting in #gangfights, the topic is "Jets vs Sharks set to a wonderful musical score by Leonard Bernstein"

  • Slashdot effect street fight!!! (Score:4, Funny)

    by identity0 ( 77976 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:42AM (#9147986) Journal
    Quick, everyone! Let's have a Slashdot-effect mob street fight!

    Rusty from Kuro5hin says this - "Hey Taco, j00 sux0r! CowboyNeal is a loser AOLer! Slashcode is worse than VB code! Hemos is a homo! If j00 l05ers think otherwise, show up at the corner of 2nd and Main at 3pm with 'yo posse, and we'll settle this with a fight between us K5-krew and the ./ Horde. J00 g01n' D0wn!!"

    I'm putting money on the K5er's. Slashdotters aren't exactly tough.

  • Were they called the Sharks and the Jets? (Score:3, Funny)

    by craXORjack ( 726120 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:42AM (#9147989)
    They should have told the police they were just practicing for a performance of West Side Story and then started singing Tonight [westsidestory.com]

  • Fights on IRC are fun to watch (Score:5, Funny)

    by British ( 51765 ) <british1500@gmail.com> on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:42AM (#9147991) Homepage Journal
    Guy 1: I'm gonna kick your ass!
    Guy 2: Bring it on!
    Guy 1: Fine! Where do you wanna meet?
    Guy 2: I'll go to your place just to kick..your..ass. Where do you live?
    Guy 1: 1328 Farnsworth street in Edina
    Guy 2: Oh I'm so there. Wait, I'm in Rosevile
    Guy 1: Okay, you can take I-494 westbound, then take hwy 100 northbound.
    Guy 2: Can't do that, 494 near me is closed and there's no detour
    Guy 1: Okay, how about County road B? ....and so on, and so on...

  • Gang warfare, geek style (Score:5, Funny)

    by AnonymousTravis ( 775517 ) <thansen@NoSpaM.babson.edu> on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:43AM (#9147998)
    I hope I get an invite to the next one. I'm bringing my vorpal sword of slaying +3

  • Pun (Score:5, Funny)

    by gremlins ( 588904 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:44AM (#9148005)
    If they used molotov cocktail's it would have been a real flame war. I know horrible pun but someone had to say it

  • As the man said... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chris Tucker ( 302549 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:45AM (#9148007) Homepage
    ..."Any fool can use a computer. Many do."
    Ted Nelson

  • Online gangs (Score:5, Funny)

    by Fullmetal Edward ( 720590 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:45AM (#9148009) Journal
    Haven't they heard of Quake? what kinda (in)sane person even leaves the house to have a fight these days, we've got good enough connections to act like real men and hit each other with crowbars without having to move at all.

    • Re:Online gangs (Score:4, Funny)

      by Glonoinha ( 587375 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @01:20AM (#9148189) Journal
      Quake? QUAKE? Why I oughta bust a cap in yo ass for suggesting such an old wimp ass program. In fact if I ever catch you in CounterStrike I'm gonna ... do exactly that. I will AWP you so hard you will have my own team-mates complaining that I'm an AWP-camping aim-bot whore.

      See, that's how real nerds 'throw down', cept I have hence moved on to UT2004. And don't think I won't use that Redeemer, cause I will - and that's when things get real ugly.
  • 1. stupid "In keeping with the rumble's high-tech origins, one participant videotaped the Garland skirmish" [google.com]

    2. "I'm just wondering why the parents aren't monitoring what's going on back and forth on the Internet,", now I know the feeling of most slashdotters on this issue. Invasion of privacy, lack of trust, and for most of us our parents wouldn't have a clue what we were really doing...

  • WRONG (Score:4, Insightful)

    by anything901 ( 776409 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:51AM (#9148043)
    This was NOT a flash mob. Why on Earth would you call it that? It was a pre-arranged fight, as almost all gang fights are.
    A bunch of kids argued in a chat room and then they fought.
    This story is among the worst I've ever seen here.
    • Plus the number of people was much, much smaller than a flashmob.

  • It's about time! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by yorgasor ( 109984 )
    Everybody talks tough on the internet. It's easy to be tough and talk some smack when your opponent is safely away in another country. As far as I'm concerned if you're gonna mock and threaten someone over the internet, you better back up them fightin' words with some real blood and knuckles. Good for them.

    • WHY IS THIS INSIGHTFUL? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      We have enough violence in the world today. The last thing we need is to teach kids that violence is an acceptable means to resolve conflict. The world has enough "tough guys." We don't need anymore of them.

      Which is why I'm amazed that anyone would mod this as insightful. Advocating violence is insightful? While the world copes with the gruesome death of Mr. Berg we've got people advocating further violence and people thinking it's insightful? WTF?

  • Seriously, my first thought of gangs isn't everyone sitting around on some web-based chatroom, that all of these rival gang members just happen to frequent at the same time and arrange to get into a fight...which just happens to make it into every paper / news site around. This is more the realm of 'jackass' than some great new trend in crime.
  • match at Fourth and Main. Beat y'all with one lobe tied behind ma' back, yo.

    Oy. The humanity ...

  • Rich! (Score:5, Funny)

    by twitter ( 104583 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @12:56AM (#9148067) Homepage Journal
    ... experts agreed. "Let's face it: Gangs already have their own alphabet, their own language, their own hand signals, so why not use the Internet?"

    I'm waiting for the gang hand sign RFC.

    Parents, not police, must take ultimate responsibility, said Lewis, a former police officer in Modesto, Calif. "I'm just wondering why the parents aren't monitoring what's going on back and forth on the Internet," he said.

    Meanwhile, back at the ranch house:

    A Roadside Oiler, filled with pride, watches his son typing away. "My son is a fucking genouis with that thing. He's always working at it. Trojans, DDoS, I got no idea what it is so it must be good."

    Sonny gets out of his chair, picks up a baseball bat and heads for the door.

    Oiler: Where you going, son?

    Sonny: Uhhh, there's a game on tonight. I won't be late.

    Oiler thinks: Night time baseball? Eh, OK, a little exercise will do him some good. I wish he'd get some sunshine.

    And so it happens.

    • Re:Rich! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 14, 2004 @01:14AM (#9148157)
      uh... as a computer-stuff student at a community college (gee, I wonder what OS and software they "teach"?), I have often had to use the "CS gang sign".

      Extend left hand with a "peace sign" that falls over onto its face, as you simultaneously extend your right hand with the index finger pointing downward.

      That's right....

      Ctrl+Alt+Del, h0m33z.

  • Already done, way bigger (Score:4, Informative)

    by Asmodai ( 13932 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @01:02AM (#9148098) Homepage
    Sorry, but has already been done ages ago in the Netherlands.

    This time it was a major battle between Ajax and Feyenoord (football clubs from Amsterdam and Rotterdam respectively) supporters, to quote:

    "In March 1997 an Ajax fan died after an organised fight between hundreds of Feyenoord and Ajax hooligans in a meadow near Beverwijk."

    This lead to the death of one Ajax supporter Cario Picornie.

    They organised this fight using cellulars.
    • That was my thoughts as I was reading the topic. Hooligans have been using the internet as a means to organise fights for years now. There's a post below about the same thing in Poland as well.

      I think this is sadly widespread amongst European hooligans these days.

  • Why charge them? (Score:3, Funny)

    by SJ ( 13711 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @01:03AM (#9148103)
    The thing I can't work out why the stupid kids were charged! They all wanted to be there. There were no innocent injured bystanders.

    If these kids are flat-out dumb enough to want to fight each other for no apparent reason, then I say let them do it.

    The world is over-populated enough as it is and a bit of chlorine in the gene pool wouldn't go astray.

  • Huh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ensign Regis ( 249331 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @01:05AM (#9148114)
    "a profanity-laced Internet chat room"

    There's another kind?
  • 'Some of them actually signed in with their true names, so that helped us identify people.'"


    No shit, they should get on this stat.

    I mean, just the other day BillClinton69 was all giving me terrorist threating messages in CS, and I swear I saw GW_BUSH_BIATCH snorting a line of blow back at the rear base in Battlefield Vietnam.

    I mean, when people fucking tell you who they are, you should fucking arrest them...

    duh..

    -dameron

  • Back when my anon FTP was running and free (Score:4, Interesting)

    by KalvinB ( 205500 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @01:47AM (#9148300) Homepage
    someone uploaded "If Your Mother Only Knew" which a personal site run by some Asian "gangster" picked up on. I'm assuming he was some kind of ganster because what little I could read sounded pretty rough. Who knew AOL speak could sound tough? I know about it because they hotlinked it and my bandwidth was getting sucked up.

    So I changed it to a low bit quality version of "You Are My Sunshine."

    It didn't take long for them to lose the hot link to my site. And I didn't have to say anything to them.

    I can't help but think this mob problem could have been avoided if someone had just injected the forum with some happy fun kids' songs. Too much anger and stupidity, not enough funny.

    Ben
  • Even in a real-life fight, I bet the losing gang was still whining about the lag.

    Cheers,
    IT

  • Darwin (Score:4, Funny)

    by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @02:05AM (#9148380) Homepage
    "Some of them actually signed in with their true names, so that helped us identify people."

    Ah....Darwin works in mysterious ways sometimes....or perhaps some not so mysterious ways as found in this case.

  • The proper procedure for settling online pissing contests and insult-slinging events of this nature is to play eachother in an agreed-upon First-Person Shooter.

    Come on, don't these gangs know good internet ettiquette?

  • Nothing new (Score:2, Interesting)

    by elh_inny ( 557966 )
    Perhaps it's a shock for you American people, but here in Poland we have plenty of meetings called "ustawka" (which means "setup" or "arrangement").
    Usually, it's between football fans. They enter the opposite team's website/forum post some vulgar notes, arrange a meeting and fight.
    I've never been into such a fight because you never know what's going to happen, bunch of forty crazed people fighting each other with no rules.
    But it ain't as bad as it was in the 90's since they don't use weapons anymore. Howeve
    • Why yes, we can imagine NBA fans fighting each other over a lost game... in fact, several riots broke out in LA one year, 2000 to be exact it did happen..

      here's a 'mellow' account of what happened:

      http://www.canoe.ca/NBAPlayoffs00/jun21_nba.htm l

      " LOS ANGELES -- Conclusions arrived late Monday night after authorities locked reporters into the Staples Center for their own protection from overindulgent, so-called "fans:"

      1) Post-game statistical breakdown: Helicopters covering the breaking -- as in glass -
  • I bet the reason was a discussion about
    Vi vs Emacs ...

  • Parental control? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by troon ( 724114 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @02:30AM (#9148468)

    For goodness sake, these are kids aged 14-21. The policeman asked why the parents weren't keeping an eye on their internet usage: but what about keeping an eye on why your 14-year-old kid is going out at night with a baseball bat?!

  • Emacs vs. vi?
    Red Hat vs. Debian?
    Linux vs. *BSD?

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @04:14AM (#9148823)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Fight (Score:3, Informative)

    by wizard992 ( 176718 ) on Friday May 14, 2004 @09:59AM (#9150753)
    This is hilarious. Myself and my friends around Dallas had been talking about this fight all week, about how dumb it was in general, how stupid people were to let someone videotape it (that's how they identified the participants), and how surprised we were at the lack of knives and guns, and that most of the fights were one-on-one instead of the normal "gang up on one person" kind of fight you see around here. There has been a lot of video of the fight on local TV as well. It is amazing to see it show up on the Slashdot homepage, world colliding kind of strange.

    And no, these kids were not "computer nerds". In fact, that part of Garland is considered a low-wealth, blue collar area; these are just punk kids who happen to use computers.

Slashdot Top Deals

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

Close