How to Make a Financial Killing : But deplore the rise of gang violence more than the entrepreneurship

As if there were any doubts about the growing prevalence of gang violence in today’s crime-torn neighborhoods, meet a district manager of the Inglewood office of a large national insurance company. Life, he says, has never been better.

“We are doing fantastic business,” he says, referring to the booming new industry of selling low-cost, low-yield life insurance policies to residents frightened by all the gang violence out there. Parents “are finding out that a lot of young kids are dying from gangs, shootings and accidents. We pay out $70,000 to $80,000 a month on violent deaths.”

The story here is not so much that insurance-company entrepreneurs are capitalizing on misery. That’s true but it’s not illegal and it’s certainly not unprecedented. It’s not even surprising in a way: Any number of businesses to some extent profit from apprehension or even fear. Simply observe all the insurance-policy vending machines at airports, despite the fact that air travel is a very safe form of transportation.

The real story here is that gang mayhem is becoming so deeply embedded in the culture of some of our communities that it is possible to make a buck out of it. When industry moves in and sets up sales booths, in effect, you know that something is really happening. Statistics about the rise in youth-gang violence are one thing. When a company sets up shop to make money on the situation, however, we are talking about a phenomenon so pervasive that astute business operators sense a way to make a financial killing.

That should warn us, if nothing else will, that we have a serious problem in our society that we have let slip long unattended. Sheriff Sherman Block addressed the issue the other day by noting that the gang problem goes even deeper than drugs, that it drives into the fabric of adolescent behavior and the youth culture in America, and that our proposed remedies had better not be facile or cheap.

A spokeswoman for the California Assn. of Life Underwriters deplored the life-insurance huckstering, saying that it was “a sad commentary on our times. This is not the kind of practice we would support or what our code of ethics outlines as an appropriate business. It is inappropriate to play on people’s fears.” No doubt noble sentiments. But rather than deploring the entrepreneurship of a few brazen insurance salesmen, it really would be better to aim our disgust at a gang problem so pervasive that there is big money to be made off the fear its violence brings.