by Jeff Chang
So gang members met with the Korean American Grocers Organization, who immediately got the point but could only promise a handful of jobs. That was a path Ice T had already known to be useless. “They aimed at Korean people because they felt Koreans were one step above them, so that’s the closest step to the system,” he wrote of the burners and looters in The Ice Opinion. “They didn’t know the Koreans are just as broke as them.”5 In time, many more Black and brown faces appeared behind the counter of these stores, but most of the 2,000 destroyed Korean-American businesses would never be rebuilt, and tiny markets and laundromats could never replace the hundreds of thousands of jobs that corporate flight had spirited away.
Gang peacemakers seized on Minister Farrakhan’s up-from-the-bootstraps optimism and leapt into entrepreneurship. Two men from Jordan Downs secured a contract from the Eurostar shoe company to sell a “Truce” brand sneaker. With funds from Congresswoman Maxine Waters, they opened a storefront they called the Playground, where they sponsored basketball games, created a community hangout, and sold the shoes. In a year, the venture was over. The burden of economic and community development, one of the shoe company’s representatives later said, was “more of a job for the president of the United States than for a shoe salesman.”6
The most audacious idea came from Daude Sherrills, who had come to the first peace meeting at the Masjid with a proposal for a nonprofit organization that he called “Hands Across Watts,” a government-funded group that would create jobs for former gang-members and sponsor job training, child care and recreational programs. A week after the Uprising, when the Crips and Bloods publicly announced their truce at a press conference at Jordan Downs, Sherrills and Tony Bogard presented the plan, announcing $100,000 as their fundraising goal. When corporate money did not rush in, they took to the streets to sell car-washing solution, soft drinks, and peace treaty T-shirts. The organization secured federal, city and private grants and job-training contracts, but Sherrills left after disagreements with Bogard over its direction.
Soon after, Bogard was shot dead by another PJ Watts Crip, allegedly as the result of a dispute over cocaine profits. The deal had nothing to do with Hands Across Watts, but grants, contracts, and donations evaporated, and the organization crumbled. “Economics plays a major role in maintaining the peace,” Bogard had once told a reporter. “If we had industry and venture capital, we wouldn’t have all the drug selling and robbing that’s going on. Economics is the key to everything.”7 It was a tragic epitaph.
At the corner of Florence and Normandie, three of the four corners remained burned down. Tom’s Liquors was the only building that remained. Behind it, one billboard advertised the television talent show, “Star Search.” The other read: “Looking for a new career? Join your LAPD. Earn $34,000 to $43,000.”8
“A lot of things was promised,” Daude Sherrills says. “They didn’t put a billion dollars in the truce movement. So this is where we’re at today.”
Pressure Drop (Yet Another Version)
But against all odds, the gang truce held in Watts and spread. In the weeks after the uprising, gang homicide tallies plunged, and stayed there.
Police were skeptical. “I’m concerned as to the true motives of the gang members as to why they would make peace,” one policeman said. “Is it so they can better fight with us, so they can better deal dope or so they can better be constructive in their neighborhoods? That would be the last item I would choose because gang members have a thug mentality.”9
Peacemakers came to believe that police were actively trying to undermine the truce. Hours after the National Guard had left town, newspapers reported the appearance of a crude flyer that read: To all Crips and Bloods: Let’s unit [sic] and dont [sic] gangbang and let it be a black thing for the little black girl and the homie Rodney King. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. If LAPD hurt a black we’ll kill two. Pow. Pow. Pow. From there, the anti-gang rhetoric accelerated. The sheriff’s office issued a gang intelligence briefing which stated Black Muslims had organized the gangs to loot and burn, and warned that Crips and Bloods were preparing to attack police stations. Mike Davis scoffed, “This is right off that movie Assault on Precinct 13.”10
Was there a disinformation campaign afoot? On May 22, the CBS Evening News reported a bizarre story alleging gang members were trading drugs for military weapons from local U.S. Army bases.11 No one was ever arrested in connection with the alleged transaction, and the story sunk like a rock. But the next day, the Washington Post reported that four thousand weapons had been stolen and were probably in the hands of gang members. By May 27, outgoing Chief Daryl Gates was spinning on Larry King’s CNN show, “You know, I’d love to see peace in the city, peace among gangs,” he said. “But I just don’t think it’s going to happen. These people simply don’t have it in them, I don’t believe, to create peace among the gangs or in any other way.”12
Gates was contradicting at least one of his own officers on the ground. Deputy Chief Matthew Hunt, the police commander of the South Los Angeles area, admitted to the Police Commission, “There’s no question the amount of violent crime has decreased. People in the community say they haven’t heard a shot fired in weeks. They are elated.”13
But it had become clear to peacemakers that LAPD was out to disrupt and harass peace meetings and parties. At some events, cops appeared in large numbers without provoking an incident. At others, they forcibly broke up the meetings. In Compton, Congresswoman Waters and City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas came in person to intervene with police who were harassing gang members leaving a peace meeting.
At Imperial Courts, police helicopters and riot squadrons swooped in to break up truce barbecues. When they did the same thing at Jordan Downs, residents and gang members sent thirty police officers to the hospital. With this clash as a pretext, LAPD created a special “crime suppression task force,” transferring forty police officers from the San Fernando Valley and the Westside to the South Bureau.14 Then, in what feds touted as their largest anti-gang effort ever, the FBI beefed up its Los Angeles office with twenty-six additional agents and the ATF added ten. They announced they would use racketeering laws to sweep up the gang leadership.
In August an important peacemaker was taken off the streets. Dewayne Holmes, the cousin of Henry Peco who became one of key architects of the peace, was convicted and sentenced to seven years for a ten-dollar robbery that community organizers and politicians like former Governor Jerry Brown insisted he had not committed. Community leaders wondered if he and others had been targeted for political reasons, not criminal ones.
Author Luis Rodriguez and peacemakers Cle “Bone” Sloan, from the Athens Park Bloods, and Kershaun “Lil Monster” Scott, from the Eight-Tray Gangster Crips, wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “The Los Angeles Police Department told the media that the gangs were going to turn on police officers, even ambush them. Yet no police officer in South-Central has been killed or severely hurt since April 29, the day the King-beating verdict came down.”15
“Now that we’re chilling, they want to attack us,” Scott said in an interview. “Isn’t that ironic?”
Farrakhan put it more bluntly, “Why is there an apparent conspiracy to destroy the youth? In 1992, our fearless Black youth are ready to move for liberation.”16
The Politics of Containment
After the riots, a generation raised on the politics of abandonment saw that it now also faced a sharply evolving politics of containment.
From the beginnings of the juvenile justice system in America, a central doctrine had been that youthful indiscretion could be corrected through proper rehabilitation. The juvenile justice system was there to save as much as it was to punish. This was a benevolent and essentially paternalistic view of how the state should treat youth. With the arrival of the boomers, a more liberalized, permissive view emerged.
But by the late 1980s, a reversal began, and after the riots, the trend accelerated. Forty-eight states made their juvenile crime statutes
more punitive. Forty-one states made it easier for prosecutors to try juveniles as young as twelve as adults. A number of states began to consider the death penalty for juveniles as young as thirteen. Teens were too young to hang out, but too old to save.
Social ecologist Mike Males explained the source of the reaction:
The Census Bureau reports that 80 percent of America’s adults over age forty are whites of European origin (Euro-white). Thirty-five percent of children and youths under age eighteen are nonwhite or of Hispanic (Latino) origin, a proportion that has doubled since 1970. In most of America’s big cities, white elders govern nonwhite kids. In California, two-thirds of the elders are Euro-white; three-fifths of the youths are nonwhite or Latino.17
The Los Angeles Uprising had clarified these abstractions in a dramatic, unavoidable way, fanning fears of a browning nation, and unleashing a political and cultural backlash of massive proportions. The War on Gangs expanded into what young activists came to call “the War on Youth.”
The 1988 killing of Karen Toshima had precipitated the War on Gangs. That year, California Governor George Deukmejian signed the Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act (STEP), the broadest legal criminalization of street gangs in history. Gang-related offenses received enhanced punishments, and new categories of gang crimes were created. Under STEP, gang membership itself was punishable by up to three years in state prison. By the end of the century, most major cities and at least nineteen states had laws similar to STEP, and anti-gang units to enforce them.
One of the most profound implications of STEP was its attempt to write into law a process of determining who was a gang member, a move that helped fuel the growth of gang databases. In 1987, the Law Enforcement Communication Network and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had begun developing a large database—the Gang Reporting, Evaluation, and Tracking System (GREAT)—to collect, store, and analyze personal information about suspected gang members. Its creation, and the spread of STEP-type laws across the country, spurred the Justice Department and the FBI to fund national databases.
But these databases could be indiscriminate, often identifying “suspects” before any crime had been committed. There were no universal standards for entry. Many youths were added by virtue of an arrest, whether or not the arrestee was charged. Others merely fit a “gang profile.” STEP’s attempt to define this profile fostered a multitude of local variations. By 1999, wearing baggy jeans and being related to a gang suspect was enough to meet the definition of being a “gang member” in at least five states. Abuses were rampant.
In 1992, a Denver community organization, Actions for a Better Community (ABC), protested that the city’s gang database had unfairly captured thousands of innocent youths of color. A year later, investigations revealed that eight of every ten young people of color in the entire city were listed in the database. Appearing in the database was no neutral thing. Gloria Yellowhorse, an ABC organizer, says, “Employers could call the gang list to see if a young person was on the list.” Police met with ABC and quietly changed their protocols.
But minutes from downtown Denver in suburban Aurora, any two of the following could still constitute gang membership to the local police: “slang,” “clothing of a particular color,” “pagers,” “hairstyles” or “jewelry.” Nearly 80 percent of Aurora’s list was African-American. One activist said, “They might as well call it a Black list.”
In California’s Orange County, where less than half of young people were of color, 92 percent of those listed in the gang database were of color, primarily Latino and Asian. “The ‘gang label’ has everything to do with race,” says John Crew of the California ACLU. “Frankly, we do not believe that this tactic would have spread so widely, and come to be accepted within law enforcement generally, if it was not being applied almost exclusively to people of color.”
The rapid growth of the databases coincided with the rise of sweep laws—anti-loitering laws, anti-cruising laws, and curfews—that proliferated as local municipalities searched for methods to limit the movement of young people in public spaces.
Cruising bans came after a decade of street scenes—boulevards and neighborhoods where young people’s cruising and partying overtook local traffic on Friday and Saturday nights. In Los Angeles, cruising bans ended the scenes in East Los Angles, Westwood, downtown and Crenshaw Boulevard. In Atlanta, outcry from white homeowners over the city’s annual Freaknik event in 1996 resulted in a cruising ban that ended one of the nation’s biggest Black collegiate gatherings.
Between 1988 and 1997, curfew arrests doubled nationwide. In California, they quadrupled. Washington, D.C.’s law, which punished parents along with their children, went so far in abridging civil liberties that it was declared unconstitutional. Curfew enforcement was not color blind. In Ventura County, California, Latino and Black youths were arrested at more than seven times the rate of whites. In New Orleans, Blacks were arrested at nineteen times the rate of whites. But these laws, such as the stringent weekday curfews in Detroit, did nothing to stop increases in crime. They did fatten gang databases with false data.
During the mid-1980s there had been scattered anti-breakdancing ordinances and outbreaks of boombox citations. But what united the sweep laws of the ‘90s was a new logic of erasing youths—particularly youths of color—from public space. Not only were there to be no more boomboxes, sagging jeans, street dancing, or public displays of affection, there were to be no more young people. Youth itself was being criminalized. The most extreme forms of this logic emerged in Los Angeles and Chicago.
In Los Angeles, City Attorney James K. Hahn pioneered the gang injuction strategy when he won a court order against the Playboy Gangster Crips of West Los Angeles. The injunction named dozens of alleged members of the set, and, within a twenty-six-block area, prevented them from hanging out together, talking on the street, or being seen in public for more than five minutes. In effect, the gang injunctions removed alleged gang member’s freedoms in their own neighborhood without actually sending them to jail. This tactic proved so politically popular that it attracted millions in state and city funds. But in a study of the effects of this strategy, the ACLU concluded that the injunction did not suppress violent crime in the area and may, in fact, have forced gang members simply to shift their activities outside of the area covered by the injunction.18 Still, the strategy spread to other cities with the blessing of tough-on-crime, tough-on-youth politicians.
In Chicago, anti-youth-of-color hysteria had begun to mount in the late ‘80s. An anti-cruising ordinance was passed in the southwest portion of the city, and similar measures soon spread across the city’s suburbs and exurbs. By 1992, the sweep solution came to the city in the form of the nation’s broadest anti-loitering law, which sponsors had drafted with Los Angeles’s gang injunctions in mind.
Although it was pitched as an anti-gang initiative, legal experts likened it to Jim Crow laws that were established to restrict Southern Blacks in their leisure time. The law made it illegal just to stand on the street with any person whom a cop “reasonably believed” to be in a gang. Under the ordinance, 45,000 young Chicagoans—mostly Black and Latino—were arrested in just two years. Only a small fraction of them were actually charged with a crime. The Cook County gang database quickly became more than two-thirds black.
“They were arresting lots of innocent people,” said Jeremy Lahoud, a youth organizer with Chicago’s Southwest Youth Collaborative, who noted that the ordinance distorted police priorities. “It takes police away from the real work, and pushes them to simply sweeping youth off the street.” The law was so broadly dismissive of basic liberties that it was declared unconstitutional by a conservative U.S. Supreme Court in 1999.
The racial effects of all of these sweep laws were lopsided. While white youths made up 79 percent of national juvenile arrests, 62 percent of youths in juvenile detention facilities were of color. Even when charged with the same offense, Latinos and Native Americans were 2.5 times
more likely to end up in custody than whites. Black youths were five times more likely to be detained.19
Fear and the Ballot Box
The politics of containment moved next to the ballot box.
In 1993, the state of Washington passed the first “three strikes” initiative in the country, establishing life without parole for convicts with three violent felony offenses. The following year, although crime rates were lower than in 1980, California voters passed Proposition 184, a much harsher three-strikes law.20
The effect was to imprison thousands in life sentences for nonviolent crimes.21
Right-wing anti-immigration ideologues also pressed Proposition 187, an initiative to ban all government services to undocumented immigrants, like health care, social services and education. Playing up the image of young Latino looters, they claimed the “Save Our State” initiative would end incentives for “illegal aliens” to immigrate. Instead, the initiative would have denied basic human services to thousands and bounced many children from the public schools. Although the measure passed, it was never implemented, and was finally ruled unconstitutional.
In 1994, University of California regent and Black Republican Ward Connerly began pushing to overturn affirmative action in the nine-campus system. The University, a recurring right-wing target, was one of the most diverse elite public systems in the country. On July 20, 1995, Connerly and Governor Pete Wilson combined to force a proposal through the Board of Regents to end affirmative action in hiring and admissions. The following year, Connerly’s Proposition 209, ending affirmative action throughout California state government, was passed by the electorate. Nineteen ninety-six also marked the first year in the state’s history that spending on prisons and corrections exceeded spending on higher education.