Violence for Hire

Los Angeles has no police, twenty million people and a great deal of work that needs doing off the books, so the market for violence is large, competitive and surprisingly formal. It is a labour market, and it behaves like one: tiers, rates, references, and people who are very good at it wondering why they are being paid so little.

What it is not is a map of who lives where. Nobody's territory here is defined by the neighbourhood they came from. Territory is infrastructure — a water riser, a power tap, a hole in a fence, a stairwell, a salvage route. People fight over things that produce income, and in this city those things are utilities and access.

What the crew knows

Four tiers, cheapest last:

• Ex-uniforms. The top of the market and the most dangerous. Los Angeles is full of people who used to wear somebody's badge: Lone Star contractors who were here in 2057 and stayed under other names, laid-off Knight Errant hires, plant security from fencelines that closed, whole units that were decommissioned together and never stopped drinking together. Trained, equipped, disciplined, and available. They come with a former employer's habits, which is how you recognise them and how you predict them.
• Crews. The crew's own market, one rung down. Freelancers who take the jobs nobody will pay properly for. Most of the people who get sent at you come from here, and it's worth holding onto: a rival crew is doing exactly what you're doing, for less money, for somebody who lied to them too.
• Subcontracted patrol. The strangest tier and the most Los Angeles. A district hires a security contract; the contractor subcontracts the awkward shifts; the subcontractor hires day labour at the base of Oceanwide Plaza for cash. Somewhere in that chain the work stops being security and becomes whatever the client actually wanted, and every step of it has an invoice. You do not hire a gang here. You hire a staffing agency.
• Utility cartels. Street level, and the answer to what a gang is in this city. A group that controls something that produces money:
  • the Risers — water and power in a set of stacks. Rent collectors with wrenches and a genuine claim to be providing a service. What they actually sell is lift, not water: mains pressure stops at the third floor, so a booster pump and a roof tank are what make floors four to six habitable, and a pump needs a power tap to run. Holding both means holding forty households. Explained on Koreatown and Mid-City.
  • the Gaps — specific holes in the El Infierno cordon. They charge for passage, they maintain their own hole, and they are violent about competitors opening new ones.
  • salvage crews — organised, armed, and territorial about buildings rather than blocks. They know the flats better than any map.
  • pump crews — the people who keep Long Beach above sea level, who therefore know every tunnel and vault under the harbour, and who have been paid badly for thirty years.

And a talent pool rather than a faction: the Wednesday card at the Coliseum, which is where the hard and unaffiliated get seen, and which is a promoters' association with books rather than anybody's turf.

Standing with the crew

Neutral, and competitive. Every one of these people is either a colleague, a rival bidder, or somebody who took the job the crew turned down.