The Crips and the Bloods, two majority-Black street gangs founded in Los Angeles, have been in a gang war since around 1971. While it has mostly taken place in Los Angeles and other major American cities, it has presence in Australia, Belize, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom as well. The war is made up of small, local conflicts between the two gangs' chapters, or "sets". An estimated 20,000 people have died from the overall war as of 2014.
In the 1970s, a wide variety of socio-economic issues in South Central Los Angeles led to the emergence of gangs like the Crips, who claimed city territory and guarded it from other gangs. The Bloods formed to counter Crip influence. Both groups started extorting money from local businesses and distributing crack cocaine. In the 1980s, the war reached other countries. By then, the gangs' members often identified themselves using clothing colored blue for Crips and red for Bloods. Those wearing a gang's colors in an opposing gang's territory were often targets of violence; this trend had declined by 2014.
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) targeted the gangs' sets in the city. The LAPD's 1987 anti-gang initiative, Operation Hammer, primarily consisted of large, recurring raids in areas known for gang activity and led to mass incarceration. However, the raids did not greatly succeed in reducing gang violence, while aggravating racial tensions due to accusations of racial profiling. In response, the gangs' Los Angeles sets gained a sense of solidarity, and in 1992, signed a truce in the city conflict; violence resumed in 1993 due to continuing tensions and economic instability. New policies enacted by the city starting in 2006 lowered the severity of violence, but it still continued. In 2012, a major conflict in the village of Hempstead, New York, led to at least 56 people being shot.
Background
In the 1960s and '70s, few job opportunities for young Black men in South Central Los Angeles—especially the neighborhood of Watts—led to the formation of gangs who claimed territories in the city, guarding them from other gangs. Street gangs were also a remaining way for them to respond to "White violence and intimidation" in the city after political action groups espousing black power, like the Black Panther Party, were targeted by the government through COINTELPRO and other methods.Covey, Herbert (2015). Crips and Bloods: A Guide to the American Subculture, pp. 20-21. ABC-CLIO.
The Crips' origins are debated, but they might have been formed by Raymond Washington and Stanley "Tookie" Williams in 1971 as a form of protection from other gangs. However it started, Williams did become the Crips' leader. He "ruled by terror", bringing "impressionable youths" into the group and causing shootings across the city; in turn, multiple groups formed in response to the Crips, including the Bloods. The Bloods' original faction, the Piru Street Boys or simply Pirus, was formed by student Sylvester Scott, after he and fellow student Benson Owens were attacked by Washington and other Crips. Owens eventually formed the West Piru faction of Bloods.
History
1970s The Crip and Bloods went to war with each other to defend their territory. They fought each other with cheap "Saturday night special" handguns, switchblades, Molotov cocktails, as well as through hand-to-hand combat. They also participated in theft, facilitated by the establishment of protection rackets to extort money from local businesses. In 1979, Washington died in a gang-related shooting, and Williams committed four murders which would bring him a death sentence in 1981, carried out in 2005.
In the 1970s, law enforcement agencies heavily patrolled the South Central area, after civilians had been participating in "collective violence" against local government in the 1960s and 70s. In 1972, Los Angeles County created a "Street Gang Detail" LAPD unit to combat violent groups. Gang enforcement in turn led to greater membership and numbers of gangs in Watts, Compton, and Inglewood. In 1977, the police unit CRASH started, which targeted gangs mainly in the Watts housing projects of Imperial Courts, Nickerson Gardens, and Jordan Downs.
1980s In the early 1980s, drug trafficker Freeway Rick Ross introduced crack cocaine to South Los Angeles Bloods and Crips gangs, and both gangs became distributors. Watts housing projects became "open-air drug markets". By the mid-1980s, the gangs had more advanced weapons, including submachine guns like MAC-10s and Uzis. The amount of weaponry available increased the number of deaths in drive-by shootings, which resulted in the deaths of many civilians and led to a greater police response. The Reagan administration supported the removal of many Americans from welfare rolls, food stamps, and school lunch programs, which worsened the conflict. California greatly increased its spending on policing and incarceration in the late 1980s. Despite a fourth of Los Angeles gang members being arrested by 1992, gang controls measures were considered to have failed.By this time, the two gangs often identified themselves using clothing colored blue for Crips and red for Bloods; those wearing their gang's colors ('color banging') in the other gang's territory were often targets of violence. Non-gang members who mistakenly wore the colors were thus also targeted. In 2014, Business Insider wrote that gang colors and tattoos had stopped being used, so members could avoid scrutiny from law enforcement, witnesses to their crimes, or potential employers. Instead, the colors started being worn only at gang meetups, and gang identification was done online instead.
Belize theater In the 1980s, many African-descending gang members from Belize living in California (who were immigrants to the U.S. after a 1961 hurricane in Belize) were deported back to their original country. This Crips–Bloods war was brought back to Belize City. The war in the city grew after the release of the 1988 film Colors, whose plot involves the two gangs in Los Angeles. By 2012, there were 20 to 25 different gangs in the city with some affiliation to either the Crips or Bloods. The war has continued due to conflicts in drug distribution; cocaine left in the ocean by drug cartels has washed up on the shores of Belize for years.
Prelude to 1992 Los Angeles truce In the summer of 1987, as a response to the crack epidemic, LAPD officers started Operation Hammer in Los Angeles, which had a goal of "[making] life miserable" for gang members by arresting them for misdemeanors like traffic citations. Large numbers of arrests were made daily. They also performed raids which vandalized local homes; this and similar "gang-like" behavior lead to mass violence and arson. The reaction to the violence among some was a sense of "solidarity" that led to discussions (starting in summer 1988) of a ceasefire in the gang war amongst the members of the Bounty Hunter Bloods, Grape Street Crips, Hacienda Village Pirus, and the PJ Watts Crips.
In the years leading to the 1992 truce, despite talks of peace negotiations, gang-related crime was at a peak in Los Angeles. Skipp Townsend, a Rollin' 20 Blood from the West Adams neighborhood, said of the time: "I mean, I couldn't even pump gas. I couldn't go to the grocery store. I couldn't do anything without interacting with someone who would want to hurt me, or I'd have to hurt them." In 1990, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD) identified 22,594 Crips and 8,251 Bloods in their jurisdiction. By this time, both gangs started fighting for territory from the growing, majority-Hispanic 18th Street gang, which the LASD found to have 6,000 members.
1990s
1992 Los Angeles truce and riots
In the early 1990s, the Amer-I-Can program (led by former NFL player Jim Brown) had been holding discreet meetings on "the principles of responsibility and self-determination". Many of the men in these meetings went on to organize a truce that happened between the Grape Street Crips and their rivals, the PJ Watts Crips, as well as both of their rivals, the Hunter and Hacienda Bloods sets, at the Imperial Courts housing project (home of the PJ Watts Crips) on April 28, 1992. The 1992 Los Angeles riots on April 29 were over the acquittal of the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King. They involved mass looting and arson, and were ended by a massive law enforcement presence on May 4. Meanwhile, starting the night of the truce and continuing through the riots, the Crips and Bloods partied together at the Imperial Courts and Nickerson Gardens projects.
The Crips and Bloods decided the riots were "an opportunity to transform themselves and their community". During the riots, graffiti was made across the city advertising the truce. On May 3, the Pirus joined the truce. On May 16 and 17, as the National Guard was being withdrawn from Los Angeles, the Crips and Bloods sponsored a Saturday "unity picnic" and a Sunday family event which welcomed members of the community. More than 5,000 people (including Congresswoman Maxine Waters) showed up to these events, including members of both gangs. A final treaty between gangs featured a code of ethics that included the phrase: "I accept the duty to honor, uphold and defend the spirit of the red, blue and purple [the colors of the Watts gangs], to teach the black [sic] family its legacy and protracted struggle for freedom and justice." It also prohibited the throwing up of gang signs.
Community organizers created the Community Against Police Abuse and Community Youth Gang Services with the goal of stopping future violence. They also pushed for more employment opportunities, to offset the number of people who got involved in gang conflict because they could make money from the gangs' drug trade. The reforms made by the community after the riot temporarily decreased violence and led to the association of members of both gangs. In 1993, gang-related deaths in Los Angeles decreased by 10 percent, the first decrease since 1984.
Failure of gang reforms After the truce, sneakers made by the company Eurostar were manufactured which featured gang colors or the colors of the Pan-African flag, to promote the truce; "TRUCE" was written on the heels. President George H. W. Bush praised Eurostar, which promised to use the profits to pay employees who would be former gang members. The promise was unfulfilled, as Eurostar faltered by the summer of 1993.
The LAPD claimed that the truce included a pledge among gang members to commit violence against police. This led to a greater police patrol, which went against community organizers' wishes. They also arrested many people who were celebrating the truce in hopes that they would be angered and commit violence.
In mid-May 1992, members of the Crips and Bloods drafted a proposal for the city's new Rebuild LA city program, requesting a $3.728 billion investment in gang-affected communities. Rebuild LA chose not to work with the gangs, and so the proposal failed; however, it nonetheless influenced lawmakers' policies. Rebuild LA invested far less into affected communities than it had pledged, and by 1997, it disbanded. One of the organizers of the truce said that despite a decrease in gang violence, "this community [Watts] is more hopeless now that it was before", and that "they have no hope that anything is gonna change". The truce made in 1992 would last for about a few months. Time magazine wrote: "Given the continued lack of jobs, substandard housing, limited educational opportunities, and police harassment—all of the conditions that precipitated the rebellion in the first place—the old status quo seemed destined to reemerge. Crime, collective mistrust, and exhaustive policing ultimately prevailed."
Murder of Tupac Shakur