Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick Page A

you’d either have to stay inside or your mama would have to move the family out.
    The other law of Jordan Downs was that the Grape was the bottom line. If you lived there you were destined to be a Grape Street Crip, just like if you lived in Watts’s other huge housing project, the1,054-unit Nickerson Gardens, you were destined to be a Bounty Hunter Blood. Even if you didn’t actually join the gang, you’d have to answer the questions “Where you from?” or “Where you stay at?” from gang members across the city. If you answered “Jordan Downs,” you’d have to be prepared to take a beating if they had a beef with the Grape.
    Christian was fourteen years old and still in junior high school when his cousins Anthony and DeShawn vouched for his acceptance into the Grape Street Crips. The criteria was simple. “You could show no inferiority,no fear, no backing down. If you ever did, you failed the test,” says Christian. That same year, 1982, DeShawn was shot in the head and killed after a fight. He was sixteen. In 1983, Christian was shot three times in the back with a .22 over a dispute with a guy who owed his cousin, Gloria, $80. He was fifteen.
    Then, in August of 1986, when he was eighteen, Christian gotcaught in a gang ambush and was shot ten times. He was in Bounty Hunter territory staying over with a lady. When he left that morning one of his car tires was flat. As he was changing it, a short, thin guy suddenly approached him. Calling out his street name, “Low Down,” the stranger then pointed a .45 and started shooting. Someone else opened up with a .38 as the shooter with the .45 kept firing away.
    The ambulance brought him to Martin Luther King Drew Medical Center in South Los Angeles. The complex was known as “Killer King” as much for its abysmal reputation as an emergency care facility as for the high number of gunshot and knife wounds it regularly treated. The doctors there were so astounded when Christian survived that they pronounced him a medical miracle.
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    From the perspective of young men like Andre Christian and Alfred Lomas, trapped and segregated in places like Watts, the fifteen or so years from the mid-eighties to the late nineties seemed like a potential gold mine, thanks to the easy money to be made from crack cocaine. The drug gave gangs an organizing principle, a financial raison d’être. If your résumé read “high school dropout,” the length of your rap sheet far exceeded any work experience you may have accrued, and your only option was a fast-food-wage kind of job in a city teeming with immigrants desperate for work and willing to bust their asses for pocket change, it seemed that opportunity had at last come knocking.
    And Grape Street, like other black gangs in Los Angeles, was quick to answer the door. Soon it seemed like all of Jordan Downs High School was wearing T-shirts with “Grape Street” written on the back as an accessory to their purple rags. Twenty or twenty-five kids would show up flashing wads of cash at movies, concerts, malls or sporting events,dominating the scene and doling out beatings. As gang members became flush with cash from distributing and dealing crack,gang-related killings in L.A. County rose from 205 in 1982 to more than 800 a year into the 1990s.
    Similar turf-war crack killings were driving up homicide rates to unprecedented levels in cities throughout America, and nobody seemed to know how to stop it. Conservatives found it impossible to comprehend that four hundred years of unspeakable brutality, a closed economic system, and insidious psychological degradation would have the kind of long-lasting, pathological consequences that were now playing out on a subset of the African-American population. Or that a lot of people segregated into an impoverished, racial subculture that mirrored and amplified the state-sponsored violence that maintained it had been damaged in a way that was simply not going to disappear