Crip advisor – fancy an LA gang tour?

Sean Penn in 'Colours', the film about the gangs of LA

Log on to LA's official tourism website and you'll be guided towards anything from Mexican street food festivals to Universal Studios. What you won't find is a link to LA Gang Tours, which drives curious tourists around some of South Central and East LA's most notorious gangland sites. Los Angeles has around 45,000 gang members – many of the notorious Crips and Bloods. Not among that number, though, is ex-gangbanger Alfred Lomas, who founded the tour (the $65 tickets go straight back into crime-prevention groups). The tour allows punters to gawp at the settings where more people – as novelist Leslie Jamison, who took the tour for a recent piece in the LA Review of Books points out – have died than in Northern Ireland's Troubles. (Belfast has its own conflict tours too, incidentally).

It might be infinitely more interesting than Disney Land – but should we be really touring through other people's tragedies?