Jumped In

by Jorja Leap

  Of course, there is little chance of this. I rarely see homies with their baby mamas or their children. No one invites me to come over to his crib. Like gang members all over Los Angeles, many homies in the Harbor really don’t live anywhere. They crash together at different apartments. The homies who actually possess a permanent address find themselves operating a crammed safe house, six or seven people to a room, often without heat or electricity. There is literally no place for visitors. And of course, there is always criminal activity. I may not be police, but no one wants me to know what they are doing. Instead, I meet homies on the street or in local parks where the outdoor basketball courts are always in use. Hoops go on 24/7 in the hood. I see youngsters playing all hours of the day and night. They look carefree.

  But not even the basketball games escape neighborhood tensions. There are ten-year-olds wearing Nikes with red or blue shoelaces. The colors are subtle, nothing overt. But everyone watches carefully—it’s a matter of life and death. No one wants to make a mistake with what they’re wearing. It’s not just that red represents the Bloods and blue the Crips—all these shades reinforce the hood esprit de corps. The colors are everywhere—it’s a badge of honor. Kenny tells me to look at the piping on their baseball cap brims. These kids are young—in the last year of elementary school.

  “I don’t worry about the kids who show up every day and play. They are okay,” Sean Robinson tells me. With his polo shirt and whistle, he is readily identifiable as the local park director. But he also has both ears pierced and his forearms are sleeved. He sees me studying his tattoos, which are all decorative and not gang-related.

  “I grew up here, I know what’s goin’ on. If the kids show up every day they’re fine. If, all of a sudden, I notice they’re gone, not comin’ to play, not comin’ out, I know they’re gettin’ into trouble.”

  Trouble can mean all kinds of things. Three days earlier, two young homies broke into his office and stole eighty dollars from his desk drawer. Sean did not call the LAPD. Instead, he called Kenny. Kenny found the two youngsters, got the money, and told them to quit stealing. It’s local justice, and the authority figure doesn’t wear a uniform. When I ask Sean about the theft, he laughs.

  “They’re just youngsters. Why would I call the police? God only knows what would happen to them then. So I get Kenny. And he takes care of it. And he makes sure these youngsters will learn the lesson not to steal. In a good way.” It’s clear that Kenny Green is the long arm of the law in the Harbor. But Kenny is very careful to explain that while he maintains his street credibility—his license to operate—his former life is long gone.

  “My days with the neighborhood happened when I was just a youngster,” he tells me. “I said good-bye to all that a long time ago.”

  “But what made you able to leave the gang? How did you let go of your neighborhood?”

  “You never leave the neighborhood—you just stop participatin’. I guess I’m like an alumni. I graduated. But I still check in with my old homies—we visit—it’s not a lot different than you.”

  Over and over again, homies equate leaving the neighborhood with graduating college. So where do I fit in? I “graduated” UCLA three times—ending up with my PhD in 1988. But I am still there. I have now been on the faculty for nearly twenty years. Does that make me an OG of sorts? This may be my own version of “you can never leave the gang.” I am beginning to understand that leaving—like joining—is not a hard-and-fast process.

  Kenny and I meet up with Dead Eye. He is out of prison just six months, and I would bet my two-bedroom cottage that he still bangs. He makes $1,000 a month at Starbucks. Along with this, he catches a few shifts unloading cargo at the Wilmington docks.

  “I need work,” Dead Eye complains. “I’m not makin’ enough money at Starbucks. It’s bullshit, man. I can’t serve another fuckin’ latte.” I am trying hard not to laugh at the visual of this 250-pound tatted-up gangbanger working as a barista, but Kenny doesn’t blink.

  “So stop bangin’ and look for a better job. Full-time.” Kenny spits out the words. Dead Eye tells Kenny he will “check it out.” He leaves, saying he needs something to drink.

  “He’s still active,” Kenny observes.

  “Why doesn’t a job stop anyone from hangin’ out with the neighborhood?”

  “If it’s only part-time, if they got nothin’ else, they’re gonna keep bangin’,” Kenny tells me. “Just a job isn’t enough. They need help.”

  “It’s quiet right now,” Dead Eye observes when he returns, nursing a beer. The smell of bud is in the air. Kenny is the lead announcer tonight, and Dead Eye is the color commentator.

  “There’s not much going on,” Dead Eye begins. “Tonight’s an injunction night. The cops come through to enforce the gang injunctions, right on schedule, Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday. So on those nights, we all stay in. The other nights they don’t come out here. Then we come out to play.” He doesn’t bother to correct the pronoun, adding, “On injunction night, we come out but we gotta be out alone—there can’t be three or more together. They bust us.”

  There was a major overhaul of public housing in the mid-1990s. Farther north, in East LA, the Pico-Aliso projects were demolished. Here, on the east side of the Los Angeles Harbor, the projects that were home to many African Americans were leveled, pushing residents into areas traditionally inhabited by Latinos. In a miscarriage of urban “planning,” this renovation of public housing caused gang warfare. Over the past decade, battles between the neighborhoods in the Harbor had claimed many lives.

  “This is ground zero for hate crimes,” Kenny says soberly. “Like I told you a while back, it’s the blacks and the browns.” I have heard these words already. A year before, at Hollenbeck Middle School, where I have worked evaluating a gang-prevention program, Felipe Mendez and I had talked about racism, in and out of prison. Felipe is a sensitive man. But I could tell by the three tears running down his left cheek that he’d had multiple prison stays. When I asked him about how the races operate in prison, he was embarrassed to admit he sometimes still followed the rules of behavior.

  “If you give someone black the can that you’re drinking from—you can never drink after them,” Felipe explained. “Or if you give them some of your food, you can never eat from the same plate. When you get out from being locked up, the rules stay the same.” It sounds like the prison version of apartheid, and it is alive and well in post-racial America.

  Compared to the relative stability ensured by prison politics, the atmosphere in the Harbor is far from tranquil. No one abides by any rules. This little sliver of gang territory, unknown and overlooked, is where the browns and blacks fight incessantly. They don’t eat from the same plate. Instead, they try to kill each other.

  “The gangbangers out here don’t get a lot of attention,” Kenny told me. “And we don’t get a lot of resources.”

  Someone shoots from between two parked cars. It’s a random shot, to whom it may concern, and everyone slowly looks up. I crane my neck to see, and Kenny reaches over and pushes me down. There is one more blast of gunfire before the street goes quiet. Later that night, I cannot sleep. It’s a delayed reaction, and I recognize it as a nascent sign of PTSD. Greg Boyle frequently refers to “our PTSD,” as if discussing a difficult family member.

  After spending time with Kenny, I am convinced that things are slowly changing—maybe even starting to get better. I tell this to Ronny a week later, when we meet in Watts. Ronny, however, disagrees.

  “There’s a lot goin’ on, but you just don’t know about it. There are still people dyin’. But here’s what happens. The LAPD don’t record nothin’. If they don’t record nothin’, they don’t report nothin’. If they don’t report nothin’, it’s like it never happened. Simple.”

  I didn’t subscribe to the conspiracy theory of LAPD statistics, but I knew that more crime was occurring than was being reported. And oddly enough, a criminologist who consulted with the National Institute of Justice—the r
esearch arm of the Department of Justice—confirmed Ronny’s theory, albeit confidentially.

  “Bill Bratton relocated gang crime—that’s what happened,” she explained. “You look at the city of Los Angeles and crime went down. Go forty miles due east to the Inland Empire and they’re talking about a gang epidemic. This isn’t resolving the problem—it’s relocating the problem.”

  What this particular criminologist, along with many others, has noted is that gang violence is no longer exclusively urban. Suburbs have grown more socioeconomically diverse—making way for gang migration. Researchers have identified “chronic gang cities” and “emerging gang cities.” In my own non-scientific universe, I receive more and more calls from gang-prevention and -intervention programs in the Inland Empire, a region centered on two cities, Riverside and San Bernardino, that sprawls out until it reaches Los Angeles County, connected by the freeway systems of Southern California. Kenny and I talk about the spread of the neighborhoods two weeks later when we go out again.

  “The gangbangers goin’ everywhere,” he remarks while we watch a basketball game in Banning Park. There are a few homies out drinking forty-ouncers and smoking bud. Shots can be heard sporadically. Homies who are blown or angry shoot up houses and parked cars with casual abandon, trying to avoid the living. “But the other problem,” he adds, “is that we can’t stop the guns—they’re everywhere.

  “These youngsters,” Kenny continues. “They got someone to give them guns but they got no one to teach them to be a man.” I want Kenny to talk with Kevin Williams. Nothing is working with Kevin. Neither Greg nor Hector has been able get through to him. Maybe an African American former gang member can connect. I ask Kevin to meet Kenny at these basketball courts the next day. Kenny and I both show up.

  There is no sign of Kevin.

  “Maybe he should just move out of the neighborhood, maybe that’s what he needs—to leave LA,” I begin.

  Kenny disagrees. “You can’t be a part-time homie. You gotta heal the community you tried to destroy. Otherwise you’ll never have any peace. You gotta live next to the neighborhoods, work in the community—let people see you livin’ there. It’s a sign of respect.”

  I think about Big Mike as he says this, but I keep quiet. These days Big Mike is working night and day in Jordan Downs. Despite the downward trend of crime in Los Angeles, gang violence doesn’t decrease in the projects. But once he finishes counseling and intervening and organizing and preaching, Big Mike climbs into his tow truck and drives back to Cherry Valley, in the Inland Empire. He chooses not to live in the community he serves. Until recently, the same applied to Bo Taylor, who labored in South Los Angeles but lived in Riverside County. In a way, each of these men is the mirror image of the police officers fighting crime in Los Angeles, who scramble into their SUVs at end of watch, driving off to Santa Clarita and Stevenson Ranch, far from the communities that they pledge to protect and serve. Kenny Green is an anomaly.

  I don’t know who is right. I’m stuck trying to figure out what would be best for Kevin.

  Big Mike calls while I am with Kenny and tells me that Marlo Jones, aka Bow Wow, the interventionist who once worked for him, has been arrested for burglary. “I’m glad Bo fired him,” Big Mike tells me. “I hate to say it but Bow Wow was just no good. Bo knew it. I knew it. Aquil knew it. Now he’s locked up where he should be. I just wish Bo were here to help with handlin’ this.”

  Bo Taylor has been dead a little over six months—after a long struggle with cancer that included alternative therapies and trips to Tijuana. Too much has happened. Mario. Bow Wow. Even Alex Sanchez, who is still being held by the Feds, waiting for an appeal on the denial of his request for bail. The motives and activities of the street interventionists are constantly under suspicion.

  I’m not worried about gang intervention being a front for criminal activity. I’m worried that it is only palliative. It helps in the alleviation of symptoms that are responsible for a great deal of pain and suffering. But it doesn’t heal in any permanent way.

  Kenny and I talk about Bow Wow and the future of intervention. I try to call Kevin, but he never answers. We wait.

  One week later, I drive down to KUSH, a gang-intervention program whose acronym stands for absolutely nothing, in Watts. I have asked Kevin Williams to meet me there. I am still hoping that he will attach to a former gangbanger. I keep thinking the right father figure can help Kevin. Maybe he needs an African American role model. Someone other than Tupac Shakur, for God’s sake. Every black homie I know looks up to Tupac—the martyr of hip-hop. Ronny has told me, “If he lived, Tupac would have been bigger than Dr. Martin Luther King.”

  The interventionists meeting at KUSH are still recovering from the journalist Anderson Cooper’s visit the week before. The CNN cameras focused on the agency, broadcasting interviews from its headquarters—an empty house directly across the street from Nickerson Gardens. Today, one bedroom serves as a makeshift meeting room where the interventionists huddle around the table. There is no discussion of gangs. Instead, everyone is talking about money. Big Mike is in a state of financial panic.

  “I jus’ don’t have enough fundin’—I can’t help these children. I’m livin’ in Cherry Valley. It takes me a coupla hours to get into town, and I’m usin’ a lotta gas. I don’t have any fundin’. I don’t know how much longer I can go on.”

  I am speechless. The loss of Big Mike would be devastating for Jordan Downs and South LA. His role in things should be expanding, not dwindling.

  More interventionists arrive and the bedroom at KUSH quickly fills up until people are sitting on the floor. I call Kevin, but he does not answer. I call Elena, who tells me he is gone. After I let Kenny know that Kevin is not going to be meeting us today, we relocate to the William Nickerson Gardens Recreation Center.

  “This is the only recreation center in the projects,” Big Mike observes. It is also the place where, a few months later, an interventionist will be shot and paralyzed from the shoulders down. But this happens during the dark early-morning hours—now it is light and the place looks like your average community homework-center. The room is equipped with a bank of computers along one wall, awaiting kids for after-school tutoring. The problem is that it’s now 4:30 p.m. and no one is here. We meet in the tidy stillness.

  “I need money. I told the Mayor’s Office but they don’t wanna give it to me. They say I’m too small, my agency isn’t big enough. And even if they give me the money, I don’t know if I want it. They might think I’m a snitch, my life is gonna be in danger.” Big Mike is worried about the immediate future. In three months, it is rumored that forty thousand prisoners are set to be released from California prisons. It is estimated that half of them will descend on Los Angeles County. This is an old rumor, but the interventionists are on edge.

  “Our lives are gonna be in danger, ’cuz we gotta lotta dry snitchin’ going on,” T. Rogers volunteers. “Dry snitching” occurs when law enforcement compiles bits and pieces of information from informants until it adds up to a case. Everyone looks uneasy. The interventionists walk a fine line; they are at risk if their relationship with the police is seen as collaboration. Their attitude swings between bravado and fear. But like Rashad Davis and Blinky Rodriguez, they believe “we are the only ones who are out there. Without us there is gonna be blood in the streets.”

  I am tired of this refrain, but I also know that it is true. I am learning that street peace and justice extends down a spectrum—from the truces I don’t see or understand to violent retaliation when there has been child abuse. But things are happening within these disenfranchised communities at a grassroots level. There are OGs and community organizers who are beginning to work at healing their streets from within. Although the LAPD has worked hard in recent years to rework its tarnished image and build community relationships, here in South Los Angeles, mistrust of the police remains. In Rampart, there are still protests against police brutality and suspicion reinforced by the violence that erupted
during the May Day melee—the incident in MacArthur Park in 2007 where LAPD used excessive force to break up a lawful immigration demonstration. People who live in these communities don’t always want to deal with law enforcement. Sometimes they would rather deal with the intervention worker who takes the place of the “beat cop.” I don’t voice this opinion today while I’m sitting in Nickerson Gardens. But later, when I get home, I am brought up short by something Mark says.

  “You’re so interested in the interventionists—don’t you realize they’re the law enforcement arm of gang intervention? They have to go to an academy. They have to get special training. And they’re the only ones who feel qualified to handle violence in the community.”

  I am speechless. Shannon is greatly amused.

  “Dad is right. All you have to do is take out the word ‘interventionists’ and put in ‘police’ and it’s practically the same.”

  Suddenly, I am too tired to think about all of this. Then Shannon tells me, “Uncle Chris called. He said Nick is in rehab.”

  Fifteen. Business

  Rule Number One: Shut the fuck up.

  Rule Number Two: Shut the fuck up.

  That’s how you do business.

  —Felipe Mendez

  I am sitting in a restaurant in Chinatown, waiting for Joanna. She is late and I use the time to problem-solve. For once, my dilemma doesn’t involve a gang member. Instead, it’s family. My cousin Nick has left the Betty Ford Center after two days and no one knows where he is. I am trying to figure out who to call when Joanna walks in and the room shape-shifts into a confessional. The trouble is, I’m not a priest.

  “I’ve gotta tell you something.”

  “I know,” I say levelly.

  “What do you know?” she asks, suddenly suspicious.

  “Just tell me.”

  I wait.

  “I’m hustlin’ again. I can’t go to Homeboy. I can’t even look G in the face.”