With a November birthday, Michael was, like me, always young for his class. When he arrived in Claremont, he was already in seventh grade. He made a friend, Adam, but the two of them got in trouble together in school. They were caught stealing chocolate chip cookies from the school cafeteria. They made noise in class. They sometimes had to be separated. The school wanted to put Michael on Ritalin, but Karen was worried about drugs and declined.
Karen came home one day and found Michael gone. “Mama, I messed up at school again, and I know I can’t do what you want, so I’m leaving,” he’d penned in a note. He had skipped school, packed his hand-me-down suitcase, and gone to a friend’s house for dinner, before heading to his family’s church, which was my family’s church, too, to spend the night. He was found there before the night was very far advanced, and the next day he was back in school, after just a single day’s absence. His whole class gave him a card saying, “Welcome Home.” This, his mother takes it, was evidence of how beloved he was.
Michael was also caught shoplifting at a nearby mall during this time. Unlike that Georgia family, the store owner delivered Michael to my father, not the police. Michael’s pattern of petty theft increasingly worried my father. The weeding job was intended to be part of a solution to Michael’s need for money. The pattern also worried Karen. She signed him up for a program called “Simba,” run by affiliates of the Nation of Islam based in Pomona, a town just to the south, further from the hills, and on the other side of the 10 Freeway. She hoped that they could help instill discipline. With Simba, Michael stood on the street corner, selling bean pies. As with the peanut sales in Highland Park, he was good at selling things and seemed to enjoy it.
He also played on the school football team and was good at that, too. For Michael, that activity brought joy alongside the discipline.
But once again fire struck the tragedy-prone family in early 1993. This time their apartment complex went up in flames, caused by a smoker’s accident or something electrical. My parents had by now moved to Michigan, so the anchor had been pulled out, and with their unit condemned for smoke damage, they found themselves homeless. For the first week or so after the fire, they scattered, each spending the night on a different friend’s couch. Then Karen got a Red Cross voucher and began to look for a new place to live.
MICHAEL ON A JUNIOR HIGH FOOTBALL TEAM
A few months before the fire, she had started a new job, for an organization called Homeless Healthcare in Los Angeles. Wanting to keep the kids in school, she had been making the thirty-five-mile commute from Claremont to Los Angeles each day. But now, with the need to find a new place to live and my parents resettled in the Midwest, Karen decided to move back to Los Angeles, a charred city after the Rodney King riots, to be closer to her work. By May, she’d gotten all of them but Nicholas—who continued to stay with a family friend—into a house in Inglewood, a neighborhood still trying to lift its head up from the ravages of the previous year’s waves of angry violence.
We know something about Michael’s school experience during eighth grade because the State of California decided to survey its youth just then. The officials discovered something that any of the kids themselves could have told them: the kids were drowning in violence. According to the report, in the 1993–94 school year, 39.8 percent of ninth graders reported being in a physical fight, while 57.3 percent reported seeing someone at school with a weapon. The report also revealed that 16 percent of seventh-graders, 18 percent of ninth-graders, and 16 percent of eleventh-graders reported having belonged to a gang at some time in their life. This is an extremely high rate of vulnerability for an adolescent population. Even in the verdant college town of Claremont, gangs, as Roslyn learned, were a factor. We have to infer that all these statistics would have been still higher in the most urbanized settings, such as Michael’s new school in Inglewood. Of course, many students, like my brother and me, were able to deal with vulnerability without joining a gang. But for some significant number of young people, the gang was the solution to this experience of vulnerability. Gangs filled in for family.
After they moved to Inglewood, with just a few months of the year left, neither Michael nor his sister, having been uprooted so many times, could be bothered to go to school. The truancy officer, whom their own mother dispatched after them, never seemed able to catch up with them. Michael, now just shy of fourteen, seems to have flirted with a local gang, the Queen Street Bloods, a black street gang located on the west side of Inglewood that warred with the Raymond Avenue Crips.
Bloods vs. Crips. Red vs. Blue. That was the most important political division for black kids growing up in South Central. According to another cousin, kids in Bloods neighborhoods grew up with a lesson seared into their minds, “Blue is bad. Blue is bad. Blue is bad. Red is good. Red is good. Red is good.” Kids in Crips neighborhoods clung to the opposite mantra.
As he played hooky and roamed the streets, Michael was testing out a new world. But he also spent time that summer of 1993 returning to his old one. He often rode the big white RTD bus thirty-five miles back out to Claremont to hang out with Adam, with whom he stole the neighbor’s radio on one of those visits. That’s when he earned his two-year probation.
The narrative so far is recognizable. A kid from a troubled home, trapped in poverty, without a stable world of adults coordinating care for him, starts pilfering, mostly out of an impatience to have things. Up to this point, Michael’s tale includes not a single story of violence perpetrated by him other than the usual squabbles and wrestling matches with siblings. From here, any number of possible endings are still imaginable. But however broad the horizon of the imagination may be, events themselves unfold along a single track. Life may be a choose-your-own-adventure game, but we can live but one life. As we go, we shed all the other lives that might have been. From fourteen, Michael’s path ran from a broad horizon up and through difficult and merciless terrain.
In his fifteenth year, fewer than four years after he had stolen a jar of coins in Georgia, Michael’s life accelerated in its seriousness, instantly, into prison and beyond, like one of those pneumatic tubes whisking off your deposit at a drive-thru bank.
For the final year before Michael’s arrest, just to understand how that acceleration could happen, we need a new kind of narrative. This calls for the story of the parastate.
28.
CITY OF ANGELS
Consider the visible surface of Los Angeles. Freeway under-passes, bridges, alleyways, delivery trucks, service entrances, corner convenience stores, mailboxes, water towers, exhaust vents, and streets—except for those in the poshest parts of town, all are covered with graffiti. This was even truer in the 1990s, before the city achieved true expertise in pushing graffiti to the backs of signs and to the margins of freeways, instead of their main walls.
Can you read the graffiti? I couldn’t then and have only now barely begun to learn how to decipher it. But it’s a language and represents a world. It records deaths and transactions, favors done and owed, benefactions and trespasses. Laws and punishments. If you can’t read that graffiti, you have no idea what’s happening around you. How can anyone guide the young who can’t read the navigational charts?
When Karen moved her family back to Los Angeles, they hadn’t lived there in seven years, not since 1986. These were the very years in which the twisting double helix of drugs and gangs converged with an evolution in the criminal justice system. Now, under the mantle of the War on Drugs, came the state’s strongest push for deterrence. With that push, specific human beings, each victim, every wrongdoer, disappeared from the story of crime.
As I mentioned, a 1995 study found that law enforcement systematically overestimated the rate of involvement of gangs in drug transactions. As policy-makers sought to crack down on drugs, it seemed easy to do that just by cracking down on gangs. Because the drug business was erroneously attributed almost entirely to gangs, the War on Drugs morphed into a War on Gangs. The consequences of this transformation
have come to define the criminal justice system.
A full decade earlier, in 1984, as Nancy Reagan was teaching people to “Just Say No,” the Drug Enforcement Administration initiated Operation Pipeline to interdict drug trafficking on the nation’s highways through the use of traffic stops. This operation, introduced in the get-tough era of President Reagan, provided national training for police in what we have come to know as racial profiling. Between 1984 and 1988, the State of California also passed eighty separate antigang measures, many of which added “enhancements” to sentences for any case that involved a gang element, a nice euphemism for giving someone extra years in prison. It must be said that getting tough on crime was a fully bipartisan pursuit. Democrats, as well as Republicans, drove through laws like these across all the states and at the federal level. A favorite tool was to pass a law mandating the minimum sentence for a specific crime, and thereby stripping judges of the discretion to peg a penalty to the circumstances of the wrongdoer.
From 1790 to 1950 the number of mandatory minimums in the federal penal code rose from 7 to 38. From 1980 to 2000, their number rose from 77 to 284. These mandatory minimums have been a key driver in increases in penal severity.
In these years, twenty-five years after the Jets and the Sharks stormed Broadway, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department created its first gang database. In 1988, after a high-profile drive-by shooting of a bystander near UCLA, the Los Angeles police used that database to round up no fewer than 1,400 African American youth in the L.A. Coliseum and to jail over 18,000 people in six months. One year later, the Los Angeles police chief, Daryl Gates, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that “the casual drug user should be taken out and shot.” The African American prison population in California alone grew from 12,470 to 42,296 between 1982 and 1995; the Latino prison population soared from 9,006 to 46,080. This was the city ready to explode when the four police officers who had been captured on video beating Rodney King were acquitted. This was the City of Angels.
Karen and her brood came home to a war between two sovereigns: the parastate of a drug world increasingly linked to gangs on one side, and the California and federal governments on the other. When Michael stole that $10 in Georgia, and the judge dropped the charges, you might say Michael met the “forgiving world.” When he shoplifted and stole the radio in Claremont in 1993, and didn’t get any actual charges, you might again say that he met a “forgiving world.” But by 1993, back in Los Angeles, Michael met a politically transformed world that was now unforgiving. By 1995, when he was arrested for the first time for the attempted carjacking and the previous day’s robberies, the angels had already turned their backs.
Yet it is not enough merely to see the parastate or to record the emergence of the unforgiving world. We must notice something else. I ask you this: how could Karen have known the landscape into which she was now moving her family? She was coming, once again, for a job. As had been the case in 1979, the City of Angels, with its rapidly increasing population and growing service industries, drew her siren-like with its opportunity. That opportunity was clear to her. The parastate was not.
The historian’s backward gaze can capture the life-altering convergence of the drug business, gangs, and a newly unforgiving criminal justice system, but while you’re living through it, only the smallest fragments—like news reports about crime—are visible. Fragments like police willing to round up 1,400 black men at one time.
Like the Los Angeles riots or, as some call them, rebellions.
Like miles of graffiti.
But what exactly do these fragments amount to? How can we know when we’re living through it? What is the name of the problem? As Karen navigated these turbulent waters, always seeking to pilot her vulnerable boatload of kids toward refuge, she could see only a bit of the whale’s tail here, a flash of fin there, and now and then the arching crest of the back breaking from the waves. But the whole beast? Never.
What was the beast, exactly, which now and then knocked her small craft? The graffiti is the clue. It records, yes, a world of violence and vendettas, with pregnant histories and decipherable rules. With benefactions and trespasses, crimes and punishments. A world in its own valence with its own laws.
The state sought to break the global drug supply chain by rounding up the lowest-level peddlers and assigning them disproportionate penalties in order to deter them. But too much money was at stake for the producers and wholesalers merely to concede defeat and cede control of their retail and street distributors. By the estimates of federal prosecutors, the famous “Freeway Rick,” an L.A. high school tennis star and community college upholstery student, made about $850 million between 1982 and 1989 selling cocaine to both Bloods and Crips gangs. The producers and wholesalers would fight rather than cave in to the government’s efforts to strip them of their distributors. They needed retailers and street sellers who could guarantee recruits into the business and also enforce discipline. To fight back against the War on Drugs, the drug gangs who took the business seriously established their own system of deterrence.
In short, if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, you’re shot immediately. In the knee first. You try to buck again? Then maybe you’re killed. Or maybe someone you love is killed. Immediately. The drug business depends on well-documented witness suppression programs. It operates a far more powerful system of deterrence than any a lawful state could ever devise. This is, finally, what makes it the parastate.
And then there’s another wrinkle. The War on Drugs has overloaded the justice system with nonviolent drug offenses. In U.S. district courts in 2013, 32 percent of defendant filings were for drug-related cases, making this the biggest category of filings. State judicial systems, too, have been significantly strained for financial resources and personnel by drug-related casework, and this has been true since the early 1990s. An overloaded judicial system then appears to put prosecutors in a position where, with regard to violent crimes, they wish to pursue only open-and-shut cases that will generate plea deals. According to Vernon Geberth, a retired police officer interviewed on public radio, police nowadays have a higher bar to get over in trying to clear homicides, for instance, because prosecutors want only those easier cases.
This higher bar has further effects. When it’s harder for police to hand over cases to prosecutors, we see declines in homicide clearance rates, the percentage of homicide cases that result in closed cases. What’s more, even those clearance rates mask failures because cases are often closed without an arrest or prosecution. In the 1960s, for instance, the average clearance rate for homicide was above 90 percent. In contrast, in Detroit in the years approaching the city’s bankruptcy, the homicide clearance rate verged on single digits. In Chicago in 2009, police cleared only 30 percent of homicide cases, many of them without charges. And in one Los Angeles Police Department bureau, clearance rates at about 60 percent hide the low rate of cases ending in arrest and prosecution. Clearance rates are lowest when victims are black and brown.
The consequences of falling clearance rates, especially against a backdrop of a narcotics business driving increases in violence, are profound. Pay close attention to Michael’s trajectory from 1991 through 1995. He stole $10 in coins from neighbors across the street; then he shoplifted and stole a radio from a next-door neighbor; then he acquired a gun and held up at gunpoint at least three and possibly five people in a one-week stretch. The dates are linear but the increase in the magnitude of his actions is exponential. This acceleration caught the adults in Michael’s life off guard. They were working to push back at the trouble, but they thought the pace of the battle was arithmetic, a matter of mere addition. They expected that the next event might be, at worst, one unit more serious than the previous. Instead, there was a phase shift. How do we explain this acceleration in Michael’s life?
To write this biography of the parastate, we will have to turn, forgive me, to economics. Two economists, Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi, have pinpointed a
n incredibly subtle connection between the War on Drugs and violence. They argue that above-average homicide rates—that is, above-average rates of armed violence and especially gun violence—will result from low rates of successful investigation and prosecution of homicide cases. If you live in an environment where you know that someone can shoot you with impunity, you are much more likely to be ready to shoot to kill at the first sign of danger. When murder goes unpunished, it begets more murder, partly for purposes of retaliation, partly because people are emboldened by lawlessness, but also as a matter of preemption. Unpunished murder makes everyone (including police) trigger-happy. Places where murder goes unpunished operate according to the dictum that the best defense is a strong offense. In other words, in places with low homicide clearance rates, there is a phase shift in the level of violence in the environment, and not simply a linear progression. Guns spread. The world tips from one social equilibrium to another. This phase shift, the rapid descent through a tipping point, is what we experience as acceleration. This is why the experience feels like that pneumatic tube whisking us instantly up a chute. This phase shift explains the acceleration in Michael’s life.
I’ve asked people who grew up in South Central how Michael might have gotten his gun. No one can give me a specific answer. This is not because they don’t know but because, as they incessantly say, “But guns are so easy to get. He could get a gun from just about anybody.” It’s my question—of how could Michael have gotten a gun—that doesn’t make any sense. It’s a stupid question. Guns were, simply stated, a matter of course in Los Angeles in the early 1990s.
My cousin Roslyn tells a surreal story. She was at a party once, somewhere in L.A., when someone came in and dumped a black garbage bag full of hard objects out onto the middle of the floor. Guns spilled out. Another girl grabbed one and held it to Roslyn’s head.
Cuz Page 14