Original subtitles

Gangs destroy communities

just like their bullets destroyed people.

Child warriors, communities under siege,

and the look at the origins

of one of America's most notorious street gangs.

Well, you had your leader of all leaders,

which was Raymond Washington.

Next on "Lords of the Mafia."

Hey, Ray, Ray, come here, yo.

August, 1979, a 29-year-old man is called to a car

by someone he apparently knows.

Moments later, a shotgun rips a hole in his chest,

and he left to die.

Had this crime occurred even a few years earlier,

it would've merited front page headlines.

But by 1979, gang-related homicides are averaging

almost one murder every 32 hours.

What the press apparently did not realize at the time

was that the victim, Raymond Lee Washington, was a founder

of the Notorious Street gang called the Crips.

Once a handful of teenagers dedicated

to protecting their turf, by the 1990s,

Crips numbered in the tens of thousands

and that expanded their criminal influence

to wreak havoc throughout the United States.

The story of the Crips begins in the early 1940s

when the explosion of wartime industry

triggered a major migration of workers from the south.

By 1944, the Black population

of Los Angeles had more than doubled.

Anti-minority covenants

and whites-only deed provisions in place since the 1920s

kept Blacks from living outside

of carefully prescribed regions.

Overcrowding was severe.

The first public housing projects erected in Watts

were in part an attempt to alleviate the problem.

But as a population continued to expand,

pressure mounted on surrounding white communities

to change their practices.

That pressure often erupted in violence.

Blacks who ventured across the unmarked border

were often attacked by teenage members

of a new gang called the Spook Hunters,

one of a handful of white gangs active at this time.

It was only natural for LA's newest residents

to respond in kind.

It was into this environment

that a young Raymond Lee Washington

and his family arrived from Texas.

Born in 1953, Raymond soon hooked up with the Avenues,

one of many gangs active at the time.

In the '60s, we had like, you know, the Slausons,

the Gladiators, the Businessmans, the Rebel Routes.

And basically, you know, back then it wasn't, you know,

not real violent, you know?

Greg Batman Davis would eventually become

a founding member of the Crips

and is one of the few still alive today.

For the first time on television,

his exclusive interview reveals a genesis

of the gang from its inception

and provides a firsthand portrait of the modern gang world.

Batman has long since retired

from the gang banger lifestyle, but in the early 1960s,

he was a fledgling member of the Businessman,

and engaged in the battles of the day.

You might have a gang fight, you might see bumper jacks,

sometimes you might see chain, you might see a knife,

but it wasn't basically, you know,

you getting a gun and kill somebody, you know?

The fights during that time period usually emerge

over something such as a girlfriend.

Some of the Blacks that lived in the East Side started

to break out of the central Vernon ghetto

and move on the West Side,

which was considered a more affluent area at that time.

You know, there was sort of this economic disparity

between Blacks who were able

to move on the West Side and Blacks that weren't.

So then you start to see this conflict

expanding in numbers and in turfs,

and I believe in 1960 there were about six homicides,

which was considered a lot during that time period.

Back then, they had like zip guns and stuff like that.

But you know, at that time

I was kind of still kind of young.

Didn't nobody wanna show me how to make no zip gun.

So I had to figure it out.

I made a 38 zip gun.

I made a 410 zip gun.

Like I say, you know, back then it wasn't too much,

you know, about no gun, you know,

'cause everybody was believing in fighting.

It soon became clear

the South Central was in a decline.

The post-war economic boom was over.

Factories closed or relocated.

And while a 1954 Supreme Court ruling against segregation

had open schools and other services to Black families,

the ruling had unintended consequences.

After the the 1954 Supreme Court ruling,

the housing opened up, schooling opened up,

so a lot of middle class,

people from in the inner city were able to move out,

and with them, they took their middle class organizations,

their middle class organizing capacities and so on,

leaving in the inner city

those who are less capable of doing those things,

and the gap has been filled in part

by the emergence of street gangs.

Dr. Malcolm Klein has studied gang issues

for close to 40 years.

He recently retired as a director

of the Social Science Research Institute

at the University of Southern California.

His book, "The American Street Gang,"

challenges assumptions made by media and law enforcement

about gangs and how best to control them.

When I started in 1962,

there were about 50 cities across the country,

cities or suburbs of large cities,

that had a gang problem of some sort.

By 1970, that had doubled, by 1980 had a doubled it again.

And then in the mid '80s and the '90s,

it just exploded there.

The most recent national survey

done by the National Youth Gang Center

lists about 4,000 jurisdictions,

cities to small towns and rural areas,

that have a gang problem.

That's just an enormous explosion of this problem.

By 1965,

the seeds of that future had already been planted.

On August 11th, California Highway Patrol

arrested a South Central motorist for drunk driving.

What started as a minor skirmish exploded into six days

of full skill rebellion

that came to be known as the Watts Riots.

There is no evidence to suggest

young Raymond participated in the violence,

but it is almost certain he witnessed the chaos.

We had our hands on some of the major Black gangs

in the area at the time,

and they didn't get involved in the Watts Riots

until the third day or the third night in fact,

and by and large, their involvement was going down

and watching the scene.

In the end, four people were dead.

Another thousand had been injured.

A special governor's commission

later identified major causes for the rebellion

as including an absence of job opportunities for Blacks

and a resentment of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Then in his 15th year of leadership

under Chief William Parker,

the commission echoed both the Governor

and LA's District Attorney at the time

in criticizing Parker's strong arm approach

to law enforcement,

which many South Central residents experienced firsthand.

In the early '60s, LAPD was run by Chief Parker,

who was a tremendous reformed chief.

He took what had been a notoriously nationally,

notoriously corrupt department

and turned it around extremely effectively.

But it distanced itself from the community.

This was especially true in South Central Los Angeles

and in East Los Angeles.

As a community started to rebuild,

street gangs like the Slausons and the Gladiators

all but disappeared.

For the next four years,

gang-related violence was practically non-existent.

Shortly after the Watts Rebellion in 1965,

there was a whole bunch of organizations

and programs started in Los Angeles

by the youth who used to be in these clubs.

And one of them was the Black Panther Party,

which was originally founded in Oakland.

LA started a chapter under a guy named Alprentice Carter,

also known as Bunche,

and he was a Slauson member,

a club that existed in Los Angeles

from the '50s throughout the early '60s.

So as he became the president of this chapter,

it started to get a lot of youths involved

in this new movement.

While most of the US condemned

the Black Panther's revolutionary agenda,

their message of community-based independence struck a chord

with the residence of South Central.

And even though they were too young to join,

it is likely Raymond

and his cohorts absorbed the Panthers rhetoric

through rallies and outreach programs in the community.

The Black Panthers was pushing brothers to go to school.

They was feeding breakfast in the morning.

We was having breakfast and stuff.

Like I told you, I wanted to be a Panther,

but it wasn't going down.

My mother wouldn't let me be one.

In late November of 1968,

FBI director J Edgar Hoover issued a memo

directing his agents to exploit all avenues

of creating dissension within the ranks

of the Black Panther Party.

Hoover's strategy involved counterintelligence measures,

pitting the Panthers against the US organization

and other Black power movement

under the leadership of Ron Karenga,

creator of the Kwanzaa celebration.

It is relatively easy for the FBI

to flame the fires of rhetoric

by fabricating documents and political cartoons

seemingly generated by each side.

These covert efforts helped turn

an ongoing philosophical debate into a deadly battle.

In January of 1969, Bunche Carter

and John Huggins were gunned down on the UCLA campus,

allegedly by members of the US organization.

Many years later,

a retired FBI agent came forward with claims

that the Bureau had helped plan the assassination.

The demise of the Black Panthers

in Los Angeles was said to be yet another blow

to a generation of Black teenagers

who'd witnessed many of their role models assassinated

throughout the 1960s.

What I'm saying in so many words,

they should have let the Panthers went on

because it probably would've never been

no Crips and no Bloods.

According to Batman Davis,

15-year-old Raymond Washington decided it was time

for his generation to take a stand.

It was 10 guys, and you know,

basically everybody lived in the community.

Remember the Panthers, man?

- Yeah - They was strong, man.

Yeah, they was tight, man.

They protected the community, man.

Look around you, man.

Who gonna protect ours?

But you and I, man, we love our people man.

We love this community.

Somebody gotta protect it.

Look around you, man.

We the only ones, man.

We the only ones who care.

We should start our own thing, man.

- Yeah, yeah. - Baby Cribs.

- Yeah, Baby Crib. - Baby Cribs.

Sound good, huh, man? - Yeah, yeah.

Y'all down, man?

We wore a earring in our left ear.

We wore ace deuce hat, beige khakis,

suspenders dropped down,

a glove on the left hand, black, and we had a cane.

That's how peoples knew who we was.

Cribs weren't thinking in terms of robberies

and homicides and fighting.

They were more protected to the neighborhood.

Couldn't nobody come through and snatch no purses,

break in no cars or nothing like that,

'cause it was like a community thing.

You know, the guys

in the neighborhood protected that neighborhood.

According to one source,

the name Crib became Crip because of the gang's unique walk,

the use of canes and the distinctive way of standing

where the left foot turned out,

all of which led one resident to describe them as crip,

short for crippled.

Reportedly, Raymond Washington himself once claimed

that Crip referred to the "Tales from the Crypt,"

a popular movie released in the early '70s.

One fact everyone seems to agree on

is that Raymond Lee Washington was a soft spoken,

charismatic leader, intent on building an empire.

Well, you had your leader over all leaders,

which was Raymond Washington.

A lot of people you can't whoop, okay?

You can't whoop him.

But you hear people saying, "Oh, if he was here,

I'll do this to him and that and that."

Hit him, hit him.

Yeah, let's go, hit him.

Hit him, Ray. Hit him, Ray, yeah.

9 outta 10,

the guys that you hear say that couldn't whip Raymond.

No way, 'cause Raymond likes to fight.

Hit him.

Yeah, hit him, hit him, hit him.

Yeah!

He like to fighting,

and you know if you get into something you can always say,

"Well, I'm going to get Raymond," you know?

And when you say a person's name

that everybody don't heard, that scares them out automatic.

It has been reported

that Washington spread the word about his new gang

on the walls of South Central,

continuing a long tradition of gang graffiti.

Chitty chitty bang bang,

that was something everybody that was a Crip used to say,

you know, 'cause I used to say it.

I used to, you know, you say something

and you make, you make little rhyme.

Chitty chitty bang bang, nothing but Crips and things.

Crips don't die, Crips multiply.

Chitty chitty bang bang, Black or white,

all the Crips gonna ride tonight.

Three up, two downs, all the Crips from underground.

We don't jive, we don't joke,

we don't smoke, we don't take, get land in court.

It was going to happen.

These were gang-spawning areas.

If Raymond Washington

and a few of his buddies hadn't started up a Crip gang,

somebody else would've started up a something gang.

A 59th Street gang, a Watergate gang, a Democrat gang.

God knows what it would've been called,

but there would've been gangs in South Central.

By the time you get to '71, '72,

they started turning their energies more towards robberies

and stealing materials and stealing things,

because they didn't have any money.

The economics during that time was depressing

for the youths.

You know, it's a whole lot of stuff came into play

for us to go negative against other peoples.

And I'm not going to say it was all because of property.

I'm not gonna say that.

First homicides that a crib member participated in

was the stealing of a leather coat, which was initially

for trying to fashion themselves after the Panthers.

March, 1972, Robert Bilau

and his friends were leaving a concert

at the Hollywood Palladium when a group of cribs demanded

that they hand over their leather coats, Bilau refused.

And he fell down on the ground

and hit the back of his head on the curb.

And he eventually died later that day in the hospital.

News of the criminal exploits

gave the Crips an instant notoriety

that other delinquent use found attractive.

There was power to be found in numbers.

It was extremely popular.

In fact, having large numbers.

Raymond was able to recruit a lot of people

to continue cripping in different neighborhoods.

Like I said, from the beginning

when we first started wasn't but 10, okay?

It wasn't nothing but the East Side Baby Cribs.

Then you had your East Side Crips,

then came the West Side and Compton Crips, okay?

At that time, things started really changing, man.

By 1972, eight Crip gangs were thriving

in Los Angeles County,

boasting a total membership of approximately 200 members.

Even though these gangs are only loosely affiliated

with Washington's original Crip set,

their aggregate size and influence was starting

to pose a threat to other gangs

also operating in the region.

A Brim, a guy named Fred, was murdered.

They believed by Crip.

And then around 1972, a group in Compton,

the Piru Boys, they got into a conflict

with the Compton Crips,

and they had a meeting on Piru Street,

and they organized all these other clubs

and groups that weren't Crips to get together

and say, you know,

what are we gonna do about this growing Crip presence

and this domination that they're trying

to do over the community?

And that's when they decided to come up

with this new identity,

which eventually emerged into the Bloods.

I'd say about the late part of '72, early part of '73,

we started flying them rags.

The red was for the Bloods and the blue was for the Crips.

The sergeant used to work this unit was friendly

with one of the founders of one of the Piru sets.

And when he asked him why,

he's looking for some deep, dark, sociological reason,

and why they had Blood, you know,

is it for shedding the blood of your enemy

or bleeding for your gang or,

and he said, he just looked at him,

shook his head, and said,

"Remember, we used to have to buy our rags

at the liquor store,

and they only sold two colors, red and blue,

and they already had blue."

And it could have been just simply that.

Wesley McBride is a sergeant

in the LA Sheriff's Department Safe Streets Bureau.

He is also president

of the National Alliance of Gang Investigators Associations

as well as his California branch.

He has been following gang trends for over 25 years.

People talk about, well,

they didn't get violent until the '80s.

Well, I can tell you, I came into this detail in 1972,

and it was violent then.

The difference is they had junk guns in those days.

They didn't have necessarily good guns,

sawed-off shotguns and 22s,

where now they all have excellent weaponry,

new 9 millimeter or 380 tends to be their favorite weapon.

And you put a lot of bullets in the air with one of those.

Los Angeles boosts

the largest sheriff's department in the nation.

Every day, gang enforcement teams deploy into the field.

Their work and unique combination

of enforcement and prevention.

Probably out of every 100 houses,

99 of them are just families

trying to make a living every single day.

And each house has, you know, a couple little kids,

and it only takes one or two houses on every block,

the kids that turn into gang members

and end up becoming the ones

that end up terrorizing the whole community.

We like, if you get a youngster's gang banger,

it's most likely, you know what I'm saying?

It's a inheritance in here before he came.

There's intervention programs.

We try to refer kids to community-based organizations.

You know, like little league, church organizations.

We try to get in the family,

we get these kids when they're young

and get them referred to maybe some other type of program.

You know, we might keep them out of the gangs,

but it's hard, you know,

they growing up in these neighborhoods and being around it,

it's almost glamorous to them.

What do you think is gonna happen

if Carlo, the Crips came through the neighborhood,

they're looking for someone to shoot.

If you standing out,

you're looking like that, what's gonna happen?

Probably shoot at him.

Probably shoot, that's about it.

By 1973, gangs were proliferating

at an alarming rate fueled in part

by an increasingly deadly rivalry

between the Crips and the Bloods.

Between 1972 and 1979,

the number of gang-related homicides rose from 55 to 276.

Washington himself was in prison

for much of this time period,

incarcerated for second degree robbery.

Without central leadership,

the various Crip sets continued to splinter and fragment.

These new sets often took names

identifying their region of control.

Washington's original East Side Crips

became the East Coast Crips,

with subgroups appending specific street numbers

to their name.

If a set was large enough

to encompass several blocks in a row,

they might take the name Rolling 30s, for example,

to indicate control of every street between 30th and 39th.

The other thing to understand about Crips

for your viewers is that there is no Crip gang.

There are lots of Crip gangs.

Some of them are affiliated with each other

and feel an affinity.

Some of them don't get along well at all.

And there are lots of Crip against Crip violent activities.

When you get to the late 1970s,

you start to see these rivalries emerge within the Crips.

And these rivalries are now, you know,

20 years old, and they're still here today.

One of the biggest Crip rivalries

in South LA is between the Rolling '60s Crips

and the A Tray gangster Crips.

When Raymond Washington

finally emerged from prison,

he found himself in a world at war with itself.

Gone with the traditional fist fights,

the new world valued bullets over punches.

Homicide is much more common

amongst gang members now than it used to be.

And 90 to 95%

of those homicides are firearm-caused homicides.

I can go back and remember

one night me and him got together,

and he didn't know I had a little sawed-off shotgun.

And I say, "Raymond, I got a shotgun like that,"

and I pulled it out my pants,

and I ain't never seen him that angry.

What are you doing with that?

He was in the uproar.

He took the gun, threw the gun to the sewer.

And I looked at him, I said,

"Man, why you throw my gun down there, man?

What's wrong with you?"

We can fight.

I said, "But, you know, things starting to change."

You know, guys are starting using guns,

you know, to handle they business now.

'cause a lot of guys don't want to fight

or a lot of guys can't fight, you know what I'm saying?

So after then, I would never tell Raymond that I had a gun.

And I say, "Man, Raymond, don't know."

In the old days, if two of us beat up one of you,

you and your group could or could not retaliate,

it was pretty much an option for you.

But if two of us shoot and kill one of yours,

the demand character of that situation is such

that you are almost bound and determined

somebody in your group to try and repay that event

to fire back at some point, maybe not successfully,

but the requirement to do so is much greater

than it used to be.

So the homicide cycles on itself, didn't use to be the case.

If it was a way that we can run it back to the beginning,

and if, like I said, if Raymond was still here,

probably a whole lot of this wouldn't be happening

the way it's happened because a lot of guys ain't with that,

just straight killing somebody, you know,

because of what he got or what he said.

If I'm not mistaken,

he was trying to bring everybody together

back up under the one umbrella,

and then we was gonna talk to the Bloods.

Everything was trying to go smooth,

and things went haywire after he got killed.

Hey, Ray, Ray, come here, yo.

I know how Raymond was.

He used to like always tell us if somebody call us,

don't walk up on the car.

You know, make them get out.

Whoever they say they was, Raymond say, "I know him."

And he walked up on the car,

and they say, when he leaned on the car,

he said, "Y'all ain't something."

From the way I feel, I think somebody on the inside

of the organization killed Raymond

because some of the guys was there.

I don't know if it was behind power, leadership.

I don't know what it was behind.

August, 1979, the founder of the Crips laid dying

on the streets of Los Angeles,

a victim of the same violence he had helped to inspire.

In the coming decade,

thousands of young men would follow in his footsteps.

Cripping to me at its best

is when we was all one big happy family.

At the worst is when Crips start killing Crips

and killing innocent peoples.

Okay?

And, huh.

I don't know, man.

It's just, it's real sad.

It's just sad,

because something that we put together,

supposed to be something

for just protect the neighborhood went sour.

Kids growing up

in gang territory understand violence.

They're also familiar with death.

Why then do gangs continue to attract young members?

Oversimplifying it a bit,

family is the number one cause.

They let this child be a gang member.

Now sometimes their ability to stop it is limited

because of their education, their jobs.

Both working or no jobs, and they're poverty stricken.

We found, you know, parents helping the kids sell drugs,

you know, because it's putting food on the table.

Stuff like that.

You know, it starts out with the gang members

asking the little kid to, you know, hold some dope

or maybe carry a gun for them and do these little errands.

And you know, they have to, you know,

I guess they earn their stripes, as the more things they do,

and before you know it, they're caught up in it.

Kids join gangs by and large for identity,

for status, for reputation,

for a sense of protection against other gangs.

And the crime is a byproduct of a lot of that.

It's important, it's a piece of the action.

Much more important is hanging around together,

socializing, being with each other.

You can get love from the homies

because they gonna look out for you.

You know, you ain't, a lot of kids don't get love at home.

In the early 1980s,

a new influence arrived in Los Angeles, crack cocaine.

We became aware of crack cocaine in the early '80s,

just before the Olympics.

We didn't call it crack, we called it rock.

The gang members,

the early stages weren't selling it at all.

Then they got hired kind of as bodyguards and lookouts

and stuff for the big-time drug dealers are running it.

And slowly took over most

of that crack cocaine operations,

at least street level operations in the neighborhoods.

Each gang sort of had a kingpin, to of them.

This person would have the connections

to bringing the drugs into the community.

He sells it to the street level dealer

in ounces or half ounces or kilos.

And what it really does is suck young kids into the gang.

It's a great recruitment tool

because the dope dealers have money, cars, guns, girls,

and the little dysfunctional kid

standing around on the corner has none of that.

The assumption was by many law enforcement officials,

both locally and in the federal agencies,

that gangs were now in charge of drug sales

in inner city America,

that they were turning into drug distribution gangs.

Our research across the nation suggests that maybe 8 to 10%

of all the street gangs are of this specialty type,

drug gangs or burglary gangs, robbery gangs,

auto theft gangs, gangs that concentrate

on a particular form of criminal activity.

Law enforcement in some cases, media in many cases,

pick out the more dramatic examples

of the drug-selling group

and say, aha, this is what gangs have become.

They're wrong.

Some gangs have become that.

The majority have not.

Like Raymond Washington before him,

Batman was in prison while the world changed.

He emerged to find the crack explosion already in progress.

That's when I was introduced to the cocaine.

I didn't really know what it was,

'cause at first, when I first went to see my friend,

he like, "So what you gonna do while you out?"

I said, "I'm just gonna kick it like that."

He like, "You running with the little homies,

get them to rock it up, and they know what to do.

They know what to do.

You wanna make some money?"

And I'm like, "Man, make some money?"

You know?

I'm like, "What is this stuff here?"

I had to be a part of what was going down,

and I seen something really go haywire.

You been knowing a person for about 20 years,

all of a sudden now y'all is into it because of the drugs.

You know, now he want to kill you or you want to kill him.

Either it's behind, he want to jack you

or he want this neighborhood or you want the neighborhood.

So everybody want to be Scarface.

Crips killing Crips.

Crips killing Bloods,

Bloods killing Bloods, Bloods killing Crips.

The thing just went haywire.

The drugs came in and had everybody going crazy.

It's all negative, you know, understand what I'm saying?

But for any man to get in a car

to go and drive by and shoot somebody,

that's a coward's move.

Because the person that you might be shooting at,

the bullet might not hit him.

The bullet might just miss, go through somebody house,

kill a baby in the bed or anything.

Drive-bys are are one of those mythologies of gang life

where everybody seems to think, again,

I'm afraid fed by the media,

that most gang homicides are drive-bys.

They're not.

That drive-bys are always, are almost always fatal.

They are not, most of them do not yield death.

While no drive-by statistics were collected

in the early '80s, by 1991,

they were occurring at an average rate of four per day.

2,000 people were shot in those attacks,

with less than 10% of those shots proving fatal.

Despite the media's focus on drive-by shootings,

the fact remains

that most of the nearly 800 gang-related homicides chartered

that year occurred in some other fashion.

The symbolic nature

of a drive-by is what captures our attention.

Throughout the 1980s,

images and symbols characteristic

of modern gang culture is solidified.

All gangs have hand signs.

By the time you get to know what one of them's hand sign is,

it's changed to something else.

The very first gang sign was done by the Slausons,

and they used to throw up a V for Slauson Village.

And after they threw up the V,

all the other clubs adapted their own hand signs.

Real general, if you throw up a C, that means Crip.

And if you throw up a B, a variety of ways,

you can throw up a B, which means Blood.

Gang members will throw signs,

make a hand sign at another gang,

and then he'll answer back with his or gunfire.

Tattoos generally depict the gang,

the person's nickname maybe, and his philosophical bent,

whether he'd be a Crip or Blood.

A crip would have maybe BK Blood Killer tattooed on him.

A Blood would have CK Crip Killer tattooed on him.

Does that mean you're a Crip killer?

You ever put any work in for the gang

and shoot anybody that you a cop to?

No, I'm not violent.

Before all the kids get to play

at this little park right here on the colorful slide

with all the markings.

There's a variety of different writing conventions

going on in graffiti.

First and foremost, the name of the gang.

It's about advertising your gang.

And then there are symbolic things going on,

such as arrows, which mean

that this neighborhood is being claimed by that turf.

And you'll see arrows pointing down.

There's also representation of the dead,

sort of commemorating gang members who've died in conflict,

tombstone-like symbols

with the names of members written inside them.

And in fact, sometimes

they'll even tattoo those same things on their bodies.

Alonzo found that graffiti was a good indication

of a gang's territory,

as warring gangs tended to deface the graffiti

of their rivals with greatest frequency

at the boundaries of their influence.

This wall marks the line between the turf

of the Rolling 30s Crips and the Rolling 20s Bloods.

Crip gangs will often X-out the letters B and P,

representative of the Piru or Blood sets.

This is true even when they're writing the P

in their own name.

Blood sets respond in kind, avoiding the letter C.

Every name possesses an inflammatory counterpart.

The chicken in this example is a derogatory representation

of the Kitchen Crips,

while the crying toast is an antagonistic pun aimed

at the East Coast Crips.

Well, one of the old sayings of it was that

it was the newspapers of the streets.

We look and see if two gangs haven't been

marking each other out,

and all of a sudden they're marking each other out,

we don't know why, and that there's a problem has developed

'cause that's a capital offense within the gang world.

And I can't tell you how many we found dead

at the scene of something like that.

The fights and the disputes

and the conflicts are never really over the turf,

it's just over the identity of the other organization.

Gang identity is a powerful force.

And loyalty is tested in ways designed

to separate the homies from the wannabes.

This process has given rise to a unique turn of phrase.

If I tell you to put in work,

you should know already what I'm talking about.

That means you putting in work for the hood.

That means get your pistol

and go down there and put in work.

That's how gang members become celebrities

within the community by putting in a certain amount of work.

And if it results in a homicide,

then you really put in work.

The issue of gang cohesiveness is central

to my way of thinking about gangs.

Once gangs have formed,

the question is why do they maintain themselves?

Why do they keep going?

And there are several reasons for that.

One is that their activities hold the together.

That's why they joined in the first place.

And they're held together by their own very nature.

But also people start responding to gangs.

The neighborhood starts turning its back on those youngsters

and the youngsters feel more alienated.

Police crackdowns may take place

giving the gangs something to fight against,

a kind of common enemy, if you will.

So that once the gang is formed,

then social responses to the gang kick in

and reinforce the very alienation

that brought those youngsters into the gang

in the first place, reinforcing their bonds to the group,

reinforcing gang cohesiveness.

That's a very hard thing to avoid.

What I would do if I were a police organization,

I had my druthers, would be to put a great deal more money

into community development,

into prevention efforts early on,

rather than trying to handle the problem

of the 16, 17, 18-year-old gang member

who's already fully committed to that group

and not likely to be affected by your suppressive efforts.

If you put him away for three or four or five years,

he's gonna come back,

and he's gonna come back more hardened, more convinced

that nobody loves him, and he's gonna respond to that.

Both the news and entertainment media function

as agents of gang cohesion.

By focusing on violence, it could be argued

that the media reward gangs for their sensational behavior.

There was an attraction,

particularly in Hollywood and the TV industry

of showing gang members and making them bad guys.

But you know, the old Clint Eastwood type of guy.

What is it? The anti-hero type.

And that's not them at all.

They're thugs.

We spread the word about gangs through TV, through MTV,

through the print media, through movies and so on.

There's not a kid in America,

probably an adolescent at least,

who doesn't know what a gang member presumably looks like,

talks like, acts like, dresses like,

what the tattoos are like.

So lots of kids across the country sort of imitate that,

mimic it to see how it feels.

And for some of them it feels pretty good.

It gives them something they haven't had before.

Los Angeles was exporting much more

than the gangster culture

associated with the Crips and the Bloods.

As early as the mid 1980s, law enforcement officials

in Seattle and Portland were starting to see Crips sets

thriving in their jurisdictions.

Street gangs have infiltrated deep into rural America,

bringing with them a host of associated problems.

The first sign of us seeing any Crips here

in the El Paso area was basically back in '89.

And when they came and relocated to El Paso, you know,

basically had a huge following from many of our kids

because of the fact that they were from California.

Families were getting out of LA,

saying, we're going back home.

We didn't have gangs when I was a kid.

I'll take you back there, and get you out of the gang.

And what they did, in fact was just transport cancer

from here to there because they didn't make that decision

till the house had been shot up a few times,

and we'd arrested the kid a few times for gang stuff.

And so now when she moves,

he's hardcore, he's not getting out.

And that was in just about every case,

the reason for the initial migration.

Then once he gets there, sees that that new area,

this virgin turf, the police, nobody knows about gangs,

then they set up, call some homies back here

who go out and help 'em and maybe set up a dope network

around the surrounding little communities like an octopus.

And pretty soon there is a link between there and here.

For several years, Sergeant McBride has charted

where Crip and Blood gangs have appeared across the US.

His map does not distinguish between transplants,

imitators or drug selling outposts of Los Angeles gangs.

For McBride, it is enough

that Raymond Washington's original group

of 10 has become a national problem.

By 1987, gang violence

in Los Angeles had reached epidemic proportions

with homicides occurring at an average rate

of more than one a day.

In February of 1988, however,

Raymond Washington's legacy would break out

of his South Central birthplace

and onto television screens around the world.

27-year-old Karen Toshima was celebrating a promotion

in Westwood, a popular night spot near the UCLA campus.

As she walked in a crowd down Broxton Avenue,

a member of the Rolling '60s Crips opened fire

on a nearby rival.

Karen was killed in the crossfire.

The local press played that up very big.

One of our local city councilmen offered a reward

of $10,000 for information

leading to the capture of the shooter.

Now, in that same year, there had been hundreds

of other shootings, killings by gangs,

and no reward had been offered at all.

A city councilperson named Robert Farrell, who said,

"Unfortunately, a perception that a life lost

in South Los Angeles, in East LA does not measure up

to a life lost in Westwood."

And that's the way a lot of the residents

of South Los Angeles were feeling

because they saw a heightened police presence.

So as soon as a prominent

or mainstream person is affected by gang activities,

then the rest of us react.

The end result was a renewed effort

by law enforcement to suppress gang activity.

Chief Darryl Gates received additional funding

and manpower for his crash program,

community resources against street hoodlums.

There was a time

when the Los Angeles Police Department was listening

to the outcomes of our research.

And Darrell Gates put out an order

to all stations in the LAPD,

that was Chief Gates at that time,

that in the handling of gangs,

they should be very careful not to do anything

that would bring status or identity to the gangs

because this would increase their strengths.

When the gangs became notably worse during the 1980s

when they became more numerous, more violent,

LAPD, along with a lot of other police departments,

forgot that message and simply turned to crackdowns

doing more of what they already knew how to do.

I ain't gonna just shoot the whole police force down

'cause you got good police, you got bad police.

But if I'm a Crip,

I get dropped off in the Bloods neighborhood.

They get on the mic and holler out, "We got a Crip,"

same thing they do with them.

They drop them off in a Crip neighborhood

and holler out, "We got a Blood!"

It's sad because why would you

bring somebody in somebody else's community

knowing that this was gonna happen?

LAPD operated at one point

something called Operation Hammer,

which they feel badly about now,

but at the time it was a very big thing.

A thousand officers sweep into South Central Los Angeles

to pick up as many gang members on a Friday,

on a Saturday night as they could possibly do.

A war, if we're going to fight a war,

must be sustained until you achieve your objective.

Our objective is to get rid of the little terrorists

that are creating havoc on our streets.

We think because of the show of force

that crime generally will go down.

Those backfired essentially,

they didn't get many legitimate arrests,

they didn't get many felony convictions out of those,

but they sure angered an awful lot of people,

and they alienated gang members even further

than they were alienated against the LAPD to begin with.

At the end of 1988, homicides were at an all time high

and then it went up again in 1989 the following year.

So the efforts to police gangs

and the police crimes were a big failure.

The perceived enmity between the LAPD

and the residents of South Central came to a head

when a Simi Valley jury acquitted the police officers

charged in the battery of Rodney King.

No deal, no justice, no peace!

Unlike 1965, however,

the 1992 uprising occurred in an area now populated

by over 200 well-armed street gangs.

'65 didn't settle anything.

So when the Rodney King event took place,

it triggered off again

this remaining residual anti-police feeling in the community

and anti-authority feeling in the community.

By the mid 1990s, the Department of Justice estimated

that there were over 600,000 gang members nationwide.

A quarter of those were in Los Angeles County alone,

and 33,000 of them were affiliated with the Crips.

The message today to the Bloods, the Crips,

to every criminal gang preying on the innocent is clear.

We mean to put you out of business,

to break the backs of your organization,

to stop you from terrorizing our neighborhoods

and our children, to put you away for a very long time.

We have just begun the job,

and we do not intend to stop until we have finished.

The violence of LA's unrest helped trigger

a new wave of federal resources and support.

Using conspiracy statutes originally designed

to combat the mafia, the FBI formed a special task force

to combat street gangs that had reached the next level

of criminal enterprise.

One of their first targets was a drug trafficking clique

within the Grape Street Crips.

Wayne Day was probably the largest.

Somewhere along the line,

he was dubbed as the godfather of Watts.

It is believed Day expanded his operations

across state lines when the LA market

for crack became saturated and prices fell.

He regularly enlisted younger gang members

to ferry narcotics across the country on his behalf.

At the time, a kilogram of cocaine was selling

for 14,000 in Los Angeles,

but could be sold for 23 to 24,000

in Minneapolis or Chicago or Cleveland.

In the end,

the Grape Street investigation yielded

over 100 indictments nationwide

with 20 convictions in Los Angeles alone.

Search warrant!

And while the seizures of currency

and narcotics were significant,

more revealing was the fact

that when gang members were threatened with prison,

their loyalty to the group disappeared.

According to Benavidez,

every one of them was willing to give up fellow gang members

in exchange for a lighter sentence.

If you think gang banging is the thing,

it's only two things gonna come out of it,

is death and the penitentiary.

So you can have your choice where you want to be.

After his last trip to prison,

Greg Batman Davis had had enough.

Inspired in part by the memory of Raymond

and what the Crips were originally supposed to stand for,

Batman dedicated his life to gang prevention and reform.

He has produced a video recounting his experiences

in hopes that at-risk teenagers

might make better choices for their lives.

His organization, Save The Babies,

has teamed up with Reverend Watkins Family Helpline

in an effort to raise support for community-based bootcamp.

Get them kids from juvenile,

get them kids from them broken homes, parents on dope,

or they just don't wanna pay attention to their parents.

Put 'em in their bootcamp about six months.

If you can't break 'em down in six months,

then you ain't gonna break 'em down.

The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department

already runs bootcamps as part of its intervention efforts.

Officials were so impressed by the pilot program

that they're preparing to try the concept countywide.

Next time their parents see 'em, it's gonna shock 'em,

because they gonna be going back with that,

yes sir, no sir, yes ma'am, no ma'am.

At the end of they six months, them kids will say,

"I found somebody that loved me,"

'cause they gonna be told every day,

only reason why we're doing this 'cause we love you.

Until the basic causes

of gang formation can be dealt with,

gangs like Raymond Lee Washington's Crips will continue

to proliferate and while they may dress differently

or go by different names,

their negative effect on communities will be the same.

I'm Robert Stack, thanks for joining us.