We’ve repeatedly heard the trope about “rising black crime” over the past two years, particularly in response to cries that Black Lives (also) Matter. At the same time, there is a growing awareness that police are about three times more likely to kill a black person. If you narrow the focus to black male teenagers—who fit the profile of being a prototypical “gang banger”—some analyses have shown that disparity rising to as much as 21 times greater.
“The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police,” a new ProPublica report explains, noting that if whites were killed at the same ratio there would have been another 185 white deaths, just during that three-year period, just of those in that narrow age range
The blame for much of this and the more recent rise in the homicide rates in some cities such as Chicago and Baltimore have been attributed (when people aren't blaming Black Lives Matter) to violent black gangs.
But just what are these gangs, and why are they supposedly killing so many of their own people?
The simple answer to that question is because that's the way gangs have always operated. For centuries, ethnic gangs of marginalized persons have killed to establish and protect a sense of dominance and power that they wouldn’t otherwise have in mainstream, above-board society.
As was dramatized more than a dozen years ago in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, violence was the communication method used by impoverished Irish and Italian gangs in the fledgling city.
That’s also as it was nearly 80 years later with the rise of the original Scarface, as portrayed by Paul Muni in 1932. He created a financial empire in the wake of prohibition using whatever means he felt were necessary.
These films essentially traced the actions of Al Capone, including events such as the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.
The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre is the name given to the 1929 murder of seven men of the North Side Irish gang during the Prohibition Era.[1] It resulted from the struggle – between the Irish American gang and the South Side Italian gang led by Al Capone – to take control of organized crime in Chicago.[2] Former members of the Egan's Rats gang were suspected of a significant role in the incident, assisting Capone.
Like other vicious murderers of his day including Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, and Bonnie and Clyde, Capone was considered a folk hero who fought against the corruption that had led to the Great Depression, and the puritanical government overreach of prohibition.
Eventually Capone would be caught and tried, but not for any of the murderers attributed to his efforts to forge his empire: He was brought down for tax evasion. He was eventually sent to Alcatraz and later died of complications from untreated syphilis.
As Capone faded the Sicilian Mafia, also known as La Cosa Nostra, gradually flourished while working largely in the shadows. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover denied their existence for decades. Some have argued this was because Hoover was secretly gay and was being blackmailed into silence (or more likely they found out he was a cross dresser—not the same as gay but it’s not like people back then appreciated the difference). At any rate, this pass was generally revoked when John F. Kennedy became president and his attorney general and brother Bobby charged headlong into a war with the Mob.
Everyone had doubts about Bobby back in 1961, but he got the job, and according to Ronald Goldfarb's "Perfect Villains, Imperfect Heroes," he did the job well.
The book is subtitled "Robert Kennedy's War Against Organized Crime" and treats, almost exclusively, that side of the Kennedy Justice Department. The Kennedy brothers dealt with the stirrings of the civil rights movement in the South, and with Southern resistance. But Goldfarb was one of the bright young lawyers recruited by Kennedy for his organized crime section, and he sticks to the area he knows best.
It is strange to be reminded now that "organized crime" was a new term, a new concept in 1961. Most Americans had yet to hear of Cosa Nostra or Joseph Valachi. For various reasons, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover doubted there was such an animal.
Robert Kennedy had no such doubts, and he dispatched federal prosecutors around the country to ferret it out and send the lords and sublords of crime to prison.
As the 1960s came to a close and the pacifist efforts of Dr. King to achieve civil rights were gradually being implemented, there was also a high cost for those efforts and a growing cynicism about their effectiveness. Just as Dr. King had pursued one path, Malcolm X had pursed another. Later the Black Panther Party for Self-Protection choose yet another path, one that was equally political but far more confrontational. There were others still who, plagued with the same doubts and issues of partial enfranchisement following the Civil Rights era,decided to organize and arm themselves. They consolidated power, money, and eventually control over underground and prohibited goods in a manner similar to Al Capone.
Thus black and brown gangs began to grow out of the car clubs of the ‘50s. In the late ‘60s, after the Watts Riots and deaths of Martin, Malcolm, and even Bobby Kennedy, things began to change.
By 1965 these [car clubs] forged an alliance and participated in the Watts Rebellion. After the August rebellion of 1965 many of these gang members turned their efforts in other directions. Many political organization and radical movements developed during the years from 1965-1969. Bunchy Carter, who was once a Renegade Slauson (A Los Angeles Street Gang from the late 50’s to 1965), became the leader of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Black Panther Party. Other key figures that were influential into the Black consciousness of the 1960s, was Ron Wilkins, William Sampson, Gerald Aubry, Robaire Nyjuky, and Hakim Jamal. They were all former club members prior to 1965.
Late 1960’s, early 1970’s
As Black groups became more socially conscience to racism and police brutality, the FBI and LAPD considered these groups as radical and a threat to the national security of the United States.
In January 1969 Bunchy Carter and John Huggins were murdered at Campbell Hall at UCLA, in a dispute with US members. Geogre and Ali Stiner of US organization were arrested, convicted, and sent to San Quentin prison for their involvement. Claude Hubert who was also involved was not charged. There are still many unanswered questions about why Carter and Higgins were killed, but some insist that Karenga’s US gunmen where police infiltrators working with the FBI, while others say that Carter and Huggins were armed and attacking an US associate when they were shot and killed. Whatever the case, this was a turning point in Black Los Angeles identity as youths who were too young to participate in the movement with organizations like the Black Panther Party and US, began to form their own groups as COINTELPRO tactics and actions of the LAPD Criminal Conspiracy Section left ineffective any Black political organizations.
The Black Panthers were hounded and plagued by the police (as exemplified by the
murder of Fred Hampton as he lay sleeping). Chicago police, the Los Angeles Police Department, and Hoover’s FBI used illegal wiretaps and relied on informants who would lie to foment dissent or lead Black Panther Party members into various forms of entrapment in order to bring the organization down.
Enter a man whose political aspirations were minimal, but whose greed and capacity for violence were nearly unlimited: Stanley “Tookie” Williams, who was eventually portrayed on film by Jamie Foxx.
Williams was executed by the state of California in 2005. He had helped co-found the Crips in the early ‘70s, who along with the Bloods are two of the most notorious known street gangs. According to Williams the Crips were formed as a method of self-protection, which makes some sense in a city and an era where minorities could not expect protection from the police. I’ve long argued that they become what the NRA often claims they advocate: Their own little mini militias as authorized by the Second Amendment. But they didn’t start out using guns—it started out with fists and knives, just like in West Side Story with the battle between the Jets and the Sharks gangs depicted in that musical.
It’s impossible to say that Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, which dramatized the Sicilian gangs of the ‘50s and ‘60s, had an influence on eventual gun use by black gangs. But it’s also impossible to say that it didn’t.
It’s likely that violence shifted into a higher gear because of increased street competition over the drug trade, as opposed to the influence of screenwriter Oliver Stone’s reimagining of Scarface as an ‘80s cocaine cartel kingpin from Cuba.
Still, Pacino’s portrayal of Tony Montana had resonance, particularly in the black community and among gang culture.
Although by the early ‘80s gang warfare killings were fairly common, the reality of how dangerous and deadly the violence had become really didn’t dawn on the general public and the media until the death of one innocent girl in Westwood, California.
On Jan. 30, Karen Toshima was one of thousands of people who went to Westwood Village to have an enjoyable evening. Instead, she found death from a bullet fired by a member of a street gang. In her death, she joined the 60% of victims of gang murders who, like her, were innocent bystanders. Every person who was in Westwood Village on Jan. 30 can truthfully say, "But for the grace of God, it could have been me," because Karen was not killed by a personal enemy. She was killed by our common enemy, a wantonly violent member of a street gang.
Officers of West Los Angeles area reacted quickly and expertly to her murder. Evidence that would have been destroyed within a few hours was quickly obtained.
On the second day following Karen's murder a press conference was held at the scene of her death for the primary purpose of appealing to witnesses to come forward. Several percipient witnesses responded to that appeal. The commanding officer of West Los Angeles area announced at the press conference that he intended to deploy more resources in Westwood Village to prevent escalation of gang violence that might be prompted by the shooting. On Feb. 6, Karen's accused murderer, Durrel Dewitt Collins, was arrested in South-Central Los Angeles. In connection with Collins' arrest, 23 firearms were seized. Those weapons were removed from the South-Central L.A. community.
How often would police have called a press conference over the death of yet another “suspected gang member” in South Central? How hard would they have worked to close that case? Not very, as has been well-documented 25 years later. Most murders of black people—whether gang related or not—go unsolved, particularly in high gang areas in cities such as L.A.
The number of murders in Los Angeles County are down – way down. In 1993, the year after the Rodney King riots, there were 1,944 homicides. In 2014, there were 551. That's nearly a 75 percent drop in less than 20 years, an astonishing reversal of fortune that occurred all over the country, though it was especially prominent in L.A., known as the gang capital of the world.
But there's a dark cloud to that silver lining, as it turns out. The Los Angeles News Group published a disturbing package on Sunday, "Getting Away With Murder," the product of an 18-month study in which its Los Angeles Daily News and other papers found that between 2000 and 2010, 46 percent of all homicides went unsolved.
That's a lot of murderers who got away clean. Over the same period, the national average was 37 percent.
Perhaps even more depressing, 51 percent of murders where the victim was black went unsolved. When the victim was white, only 30 percent went unsolved. Over half of all unsolved homicide victims were Latino.
The same arguments that drove the Panthers to form to protect themselves, that pushed Tookie to found the Crips, are largely still in effect.
The thing is that when most people talk about "gangs” they don’t see Al Pacino, they don’t see James Cagney, they don’t see Leonardo DiCaprio, or even the late James Gandolfini from The Sopranos.
They see this.
Today about 2,300 murders a year are attributed to gangs. If they were isolated from the overall black murder rate, it would cut it by about one-third—and would be nearly zero compared to the most commonly used chart of single offenders/single victims by race from the FBI Uniform Crime Report. (Although not all gang murders involve black offenders and victims—more on that later.)
If you go by this chart, it does appear that the total number of black victims (2,648) are mostly killed by black offenders (2,412). But in reality there were actually 6,812 white murder victims and 7,502 black murder victims in 2012 according to the Supplemental Homicide Report, which includes both single and multiple offenders and victim data. More work would have to be done to specifically break out the gang data.
Here’s a news flash: Not every young black man is in. a. gang. Not all of them are affiliated with a gang or have a gangbangers in their family. Not every black neighborhood is gang-infested—most of the people there are gang victims, not members. Yet some refuse to see it that way simply because those that do belong to gangs have been doing a lot of damage lately.
As we have seen in the Chicago of old, the recent Chicago homicide rate increase (despite the general trend over decades, which has fallen dramatically) has been directly linked to gang activity by police. These gangs look different from Capone or Machine Gun Kelly. But they largely act the same as previous Chicago gangs, for similar reasons.
There were 292 shooting victims in January 2016, compared to the first month of 2015, when there were 136. That's more than double. There were 51 murders in the first month of 2016, compared to 29 in January 2015. That's a 75 percent increase.
Interim Supt. John Escalante calls the stats unacceptable and unexplainable. "We can't put a finger on it, I mean, believe me, we talk about it every day," Escalante said. Escalante says the majority of the violence is gang-related, with 50 percent of the murder victims identified as known gang members. He says shootings are often a result of personal petty disputes that are fueled by social media.
But sometimes it’s not just “petty” arguments. Sometimes the killings are acts of retaliation and retribution for a previous crime that went unsolved and unremembered. That was the case when gang members didn’t target the person they suspected of being the criminal. Instead, they went after his son.
For weeks, two rival factions battled it out on Chicago's South Side. One shooting left the mother of a gang member wounded and her 25-year-old son dead. A few days later, a young woman sitting in a car was fatally shot. With tensions high, outreach workers for CeaseFire traded bits of information and huddled with gang members to try to untangle the conflicts.
But the execution of 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee in an alley by 80th Street and Damen Avenue in early November was nothing anyone — not the most seasoned cops, not former longtime gang members — would have ever predicted. In Chicago's long, troubled history of gang violence, children have far too often been the victims of stray bullets meant for others, but authorities allege Tyshawn was lured from a park and fatally shot because of his father's alleged gang ties.
"When I found out he was targeted, I thought this is a new kind of killer, a new kind of shooter," said Joewaine "Joe" Washington, a former gang member and CeaseFire violence interrupter who was monitoring the ongoing violence in the area. "It was a time bomb, but in my wildest dreams, I never knew it was going to escalate to a kid."
If someone had solved those previous cases then Tyshawn’s dad might have been in custody and there would have been no reason to target his son. But again, why trust Chicago cops who are deeply corrupt, secretly ran their own Gitmo, and some feel are just as just as likely to treat Tyshawn in the same way Laquan McDonald or Tamir Rice were treated—then try to cover it all up?
This violence isn’t completely random. It happens for economic reasons, social reasons, emotional reasons, and personal reasons. It’s ongoing warfare. It’s a shooting war between specific sets of gang factions in specific neighborhoods, not a blanket nationwide phenomenon. Each case is unique, and there are far too many moving parts in each community to pinpoint just one thing that may drive gang warfare intensity up or down on a particular day, week, month, or year.
But people who are effectively disenfranchised and marginalized by society after decades of Jim Crow; by red-lining and housing discrimination; and after white flight and business divestment has created these hollow impoverished neighborhoods. These people find there are fewer and fewer viable options left. Some of them, in misguided frustration, act out.
Is it possible to beat the odds, to fight on despite urban desolation and create a life, a career, and a legacy without violence and self-destruction? Yes, of course it is. But for many people, unless they’ve found a calling or an extraordinary ability in academics, sports, entertainment, or being an entrepreneur by the age of 13 or 14, the standard doorways and ladders into the middle class are largely shut and inaccessible—even unimaginable to them.
When you've seen your friends killed, members of your family killed (or also jailed, which is nearly as bad as being killed temporarily), and you grow up without a formal family structure of any kind; when all the role models you can relate to are gangsters or thugs; when you’ve grown up your entire life not expecting to even survive to see your 21st birthday simply because you can see everyone around you dropping like flies and yet the police can't, or won't really do anything to stop it. When that happens, people turn to desperate means. Their response to this may be dysfunctional, even sometimes irrational, but that also applies to their entire life situation. Why should anyone believe in a justice system that doesn’t believe in them?
The idea of being a member of a group that will provide you that missing family, that will protect you, that will support you, seems like a perfectly reasonable choice when you live in that reality.
And it would be reasonable if gangs, by their very nature, were not massively self-serving, xenophobic, misogynistic, incredibly dysfunctional, sometimes psychotic, greedy and violent. This includes the Mafia, the Crips, the Tongs, the Yakuza, the Mexican drug cartels, the KKK, Skinheads, Hezbollah, al-Qaida, or Daesh.
All gangs are death cults.
They always have been, they always will be, and even a vicious murderer like Tookie Williams came to understand the truth of that. They may have different goals and ideologies, but they tend to form and function in similar ways, even those we refer to as “terrorists.” If we as a nation—not just the black community, not just the police, but the entire country—are going to be able to solve this latest set of gang problems we can’t just kill or incarcerate our way out of it. It’s not just a "black" problem because as the National Gang Survey points out, only 35 percent of an estimated 850,000 current gang members in America are black.
And also, the majority of gang killings are not necessarily by black gangs.
While a lot of attention has been given to the gang-related homicides in Chicago’s predominantly-black South side, very little press has been devoted to covering the epidemic of white-on-white gangland murders. As the above chart demonstrates, the majority of gang-related homicides are committed by white people (53.3 percent white, 42.2 percent black), and the majority of white gang murder victims are also white (56.5 percent white, 40 percent black). Have this fact handy the next time someone bemoans “black-on-black” gang violence.
[Note: The source above is quoted exactly but it says it’s the “majority of white gang murder victims” when it may be all gang murder victims, which would technically include Latinos. They really aren’t broken out, but are most likely to be part of the “white” portion.]
This chart shows black people are in a clear majority (65 percent of offenders, 62 percent of victims) in drug-related homicides (which may perhaps be where far more energy should be focused) and homicides by gun (56 percent of offenders, 51 percent of victims). Meanwhile, white people are a vast majority (70 percent of offenders, 83 percent of victims) in workplace homicides, as well as homicides by poison (80 percent of victims and offenders). Whites also outpace blacks on felony murder by 53 percent to 38 percent.
Gangs are an American problem, one which requires an American solution.
Olympic Champion Jesse Owens came out of this type of community rife with crime and Jim Crow facing enormous, seemingly intractable obstacles. As did Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Muhammad Ali, James Brown, George Washington Carver, the Tuskegeee Airmen, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Prince, Michael Jackson, the owners of BET and Jet magazine, Oprah, Russell Simmons, Jay-Z, Dr. Dre, Ben Carson, and Barack Hussein Obama Jr. But, it can be argued that not everyone is cut out to be like one of those people. Some will overcome, but probably not everyone. Not unless many things change.
It’s far too easy to look at these mostly young, immigrant, and/or minority gangsters and agree with their own conclusion that their lives are essentially worthless. (It’s not like that wasn’t the prevailing view during the common lynchings of black men for perceived crimes against society. Emmett Till was an “attempted rapist,” remember?) But if these lives are worthless, then it can be argued every black and brown life is worthless, now marked down from three-fifths of a person to merely zero. A fire sale, and lo the killings will continue unabated.
For some, that is exactly according to design. Why have people march with pitchforks and torches in the streets for a lynching when you can have police do it for you on the spot—no muss, no fuss? Or even better yet: Simply let them lynch themselves. And then those people argue to themselves and to others, “Look what they do their own city, how they don’t respect themselves or each other. Look how they call themselves the N-word.” Once you believe this, you’re free of guilt and responsibility.
To those that argue that Black Lives Matter should focus on these lost lives, what exactly makes them think gang bangers are gonna listen to them—or anyone else? You would need a truly compelling argument to overcome that level of deeply calcified cynicism. You would need a well-developed deprogramming strategy to separate them from the groupthink of the cult, but it’s unlikely the kind of confrontational intervention and kidnapping used by some deprogramming schemes are going to work with gang/death cult members. Like people with a compulsion or an addiction, they have to come to the realization that they want to leave the gang on their own, or it simply won’t work.
And even when gangs do choose to follow a higher road, like when they’ve come forward to form a truce as they did two decades ago, or to stand up for their support their communities, the right wing and police have attacked them for it. Plus the fact of the matter is that with a 37 percent clearance rate for these types of murders (compared to a 65 percent average for all murders), it's clear that those Black Lives Matter critics, the media, and the police obviously don’t think these lives—the lives of gang members often killed by other gang members—really do matter in any way whatsoever. They never have, because none of this is truly new. It’s been going on for decades. They’re just using this excuse to dodge the issue of police violence and brutality.
It’s long been rumored that some cops call gang-on-gang violence “pest control.” Passive violence. They only seem to care when someone clearly outside the gang gets killed, like Karen Toshima or Tyshawn Lee, not all the others that have filled the cemeteries long before them. It’s understandable on one hand, but on the other hand: Where’s the judge and the jury to determine the legitimacy of this “street justice?” Where art thou, due process?
Clearly we have a gap in our perception of who is deserving of “innocent until proven guilty” and who does or doesn’t deserve “justice.” Even though the total number of black and white people murdered each year is about the same, as shown above (and including those 2,300 gang killings), the ratio of people who go to death row based on who they allegedly murder is nowhere near 50/50. (For white victims, the rate is 75.6 percent; for black victims it’s 15.4 percent; and for Latino victims, the rate is 6.6 percent.)
Fix that—all that—and we've at least a start. Fix that, and perhaps you’ll have a chance to pull some of the most hard-headed, hard-boiled, and hopeless souls back from the brink before it’s too late. Perhaps that might help convince some of those who are willing to be deprogrammed and reintegrated into our communities to take on a job and a future with projects like Homeboy Industries, or the Comprehensive Anti-Gang Initiative by the Department of Justice.
Or we could just go on confirming their worst cynical expectations and helping the gangs with their recruitment efforts.
Most people probably prefer the former scenario to the latter.