Leadership Quote by Bob Filner

Numbers like these aren’t offered to inform; they’re deployed to authorize. Filner’s statistic stack is doing a familiar politician’s job: turning a messy, local phenomenon into a national-scale threat that feels both measurable and urgent. “Three thousand jurisdictions” works as a map of contagion, suggesting gangs aren’t a big-city problem but an everywhere problem. Then the second figure tightens the vise: not just “gang activity,” but “gang-related homicide,” and not in Los Angeles or Chicago, but in the supposedly safer mid-sized city. The 25-to-50-thousand population bracket is the tell. It’s a direct appeal to suburban and small-city anxiety, the voters most persuadable by the idea that violence is creeping toward their cul-de-sacs.

The subtext is policy permission. By citing 2001 and 2002 data, Filner situates the claim in a post-9/11 era when “security” became a cultural solvent, dissolving the usual skepticism toward surveillance, aggressive policing, and federal-local crackdowns. The bureaucratic phrasing (“are estimated,” “reported”) borrows the tone of neutral expertise while quietly dodging the contested definitions underneath: what counts as “gang activity,” how departments classify a homicide as “gang-related,” and how reporting incentives can inflate or depress the numbers.

It’s also a rhetorical two-step: breadth (thousands of jurisdictions) followed by intimacy (your kind of town). The effect isn’t just fear; it’s consensus-building. If the problem is everywhere and escalating, then extraordinary responses start to look like common sense.