Can't Stop Won't Stop (61 page)

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

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

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.

When the ban took effect in 1998, the number of Black and Latino freshmen admitted to the system dropped by 10 percent. At U.C. Berkeley alone, the numbers plunged by over 50 percent. By the end of the decade, the Justice Policy Institute estimated that nearly 50,000 black males were in a California prison, while 60,000 were in a California university. Across the country, 800,000 black males were in prison, while 600,000 were in college.
²²

Sentencing Project assistant director Marc Mauer tells this story: shortly after President Clinton took office, he proposed a $30 billion aid package for job creation and economic development for urban America. Congress reduced the proposal into a $5 billion allocation, primarily for unemployment insurance. The following year, Congress pushed through its own $30 billion proposal—for crime prevention. The bill included sixty new death penalty offenses, $8 billion in prison construction and federal “three strikes” sentencing.
²³
Clinton, of course, signed it.

Harvard criminologist James Q. Wilson, the father of the “Broken Windows” theory, had begun telling another story:

Meanwhile, just beyond the horizon, there lurks a cloud that the winds will soon bring over us. The population will start getting younger again. By the end of this decade there will be a million more people between the ages of fourteen and seventeen than there are now. . . . This extra million will be half male. Six percent of them will become high rate, repeat offenders—30,000 more young muggers, killers and thieves than we have now. Get ready.
²⁴