Straight Outta Boston
Why is the "Boston Miracle" -- the only tactic proven to reduce gang violence -- being dissed by the L.A.P.D., the FBI, and Congress?
AMONG THE COMPETING STORIES about how to stop gangbangers from slaughtering each other, here's the leading contender from the street: Sometime in '77 or '78, at a South Central L.A. junior high, a Grape Street Crip named Loaf, from the Jordan Downs housing project, sticks a knife into a Bounty Hunter Blood named Night Owl, from Nickerson Gardens, killing him on the spot. One bloody reprisal leads to a hundred bloody more, feuds spread through the two other big Watts projects—Imperial Courts, home of the PJ Crips, and Hacienda Village, home of the Circle City Pirus. With all of them warring against each other—Crip against Crip, Crip against Blood—and the crack wars raging, and L.A. gunslingers wasting 800 people in 1992 alone, Watts becomes the national epicenter of the shadow fantasy that lives in the heart of every American, that Boyz N the Hood dystopia in which lunatic teenagers troll the streets with AK-47s, gunning down suckers without remorse. To be hopeful is to be a fool—it's all going to hell, steer clear—but, to hear Aqeela Sherrills tell it, the answer comes from the black community itself. First, Louis Farrakhan introduces a handful of rival gangbangers to Jim Brown, the retired NFL Hall of Fame running back. Brown directs a self-empowerment nonprofit called Amer-I-Can, and he starts inviting the four gangs up to his posh Hollywood home, feeding them pizza around the pool and pushing them to lay down arms. It's not all love and kisses: One of the PJ Crip OGs, a guy named Tony Bogard, had just shot and killed a Grape, and the Grapes riddle Bogard in return, though not fatally. But Daude Sherrills, Aqeela's older brother and a Grape OG, finally writes a cease-fire treaty based on the text of the Israel-Egypt truce of 1949. The only thing left is to make it real, to walk each other's streets without fear, and it's Aqeela who actually talks a handful of his fellow Grapes into the unthinkable: driving down to Imperial Courts and stepping into the broad daylight of the PJs' turf.
As soon as they show up, Aqeela says, people start running into their houses, yelling, "All the cats from Jordan Downs over here!" But then Bogard emerges, demanding they step into the gym for a conference. "He was talking about how, 'This can't happen just like this! It's going to take years! I just got shot up!'" Aqeela recalls. "But our Gs was over there, too. A lot of these cats is dead now, but they had a higher level of consciousness, and they was all just like, 'Fuck that shit, you know, we ain't never going to heal all that! That's in the past. We got to make this shit right for the little homies.' I was 25 at the time, so a lot of us young cats was like, 'Man, let these old niggas stand in the gym and talk. Niggas ain't going to shoot nobody, let's go outside.'" So they do. They walk right into a crowd of PJs. "The young cats from the Imperial Courts," Aqeela says, "they was like, 'Man, you all wit it? You all wit the peace?' And we was like, 'Yeah, we wit it!'"
Right then, in Aqeela's memory, "it was like, 'Fuck it, it's on!' People yelling it, house to house, it was unbelievable, you could see people coming outside, 'It's on! The peace treaty on!' Mobs of people driving up, girls seeing dudes they been wanting to see for years." By the next morning, which was also the day the Rodney King riots erupted, the cease-fire party had rolled back to Jordan Downs, the Circle City Pirus had shown up to make amends, and yes, even the Bounty Hunters, all those years later, came just to let bygones be bygones. "There were so many peace-treaty babies, it was ridiculous!" says Sherrills.
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I found this article to be very helpful. I'm interested in speaking with someone that can give me some insight on how to start some type of Urban peace-citizen action taskforce within my community of Rahway, NJ.
its funny it really happen just like that and most of the young homies don't no there history and couldn't tell you how our beff started with the jordan downs cause the projects aint what thay use to be thay have changed alot since 1974......last of a die'ing breed PJWC 4 LIFE
Great read. However, I must say a few things, being that I was born and raised during the 80's and early 90's in Boston's black/latino and poor neighborhoods:
Though Bratton takes credit for "Operation Ceasefire", it was actually another thing, an idea, from a Grassroots organization within Boston that came up with a "gun buyback" program, which required cooperation from the community and the police. This program wasn't based on "threatening" the youth to stop shooting though; rather, it was telling everyone in Boston that if you have a gun, if you go to a local community and give it to them, they will pay you money for it without getting you arrested for carrying one with or without a license. Within a year or so during this project, they confiscated over a thousand guns each year that it was in effect... this was MAJOR to Boston's violence rate.
However, the police DID crack down on youths and gangs for even the smallest of crimes.. so with the Police's "zero tolerance" "Ceasefire" in effect, many people got arrested in a greater metro area of merely 2 and a half million people... so the results were shocking and HUGE.
... but to us in the inner city, it wasn't shocking to see the crime rate go up 5 years later since we saw everyone in our neighborhoods get locked up.... cuz 5 years later, there was a statistic out that wasn't surprising: for 4 of the poorest areas in the Greater Boston area, close to 500 people were coming out of jail returning home who got arrested during the "zero tolerance" Police era of the early-mid 90's in ONLY 4 areas that equally merely 20 square miles combined. Mind you, this is ONLY small 4 neighborhoods. In result, little by litte we saw news articles talking about how old gang members were claiming back their neighborhoods and crime sky-rocket.
Just a little info that maybe the readers might find interesting from someone who lived in the areas mentioned during the time's mentioned, and for clarification that the "gang problem" didn't dissappear, it just got swept under the rug, which is why it didn't work afterall.
I think the powers that be
I think the powers that be want the fighting and discourse. It is a form of control, if these people came together to do things right, it would more than likely be a group that would start to change the system. Like how the young have started to change with the voting in of Obama. This kind of stuff would never have been done with the old way of thinking. Especially since the jail system is more of a private system now. Now I am not turning a blind eye to the gang-bangers either. It reminds me of the small factions in the middle east fighting for power. Most have no understanding why they fight. This economic time is another factor that will foster the gang mentality. There is no one thing that will fix this, greed and power is an American way of life, from the president, senators, CEOs down to the gang leaders. Until America changes it's way of thinking and what is really valued, the beat goes on.
Excellent report
So why is this paginated across eight pages? It's incredibly distracting.
The trial over the
The trial over the gang-related shooting death of Chiara Levine in early 2007 is currently ongoing, and the background of that case resonates with the thrust of this excellent article: long standing motivations (for violence), kids with no legitimate opportunities and the willingness to shoot first, think later with fatal results.
Boston did indeed rise to the challenge in 2007, the focused attention of the press, the engaged community and law enforcement resolve and creativity plus the willingness of all agencies to work together to get the job done. Not to mention a huge influx of cash for community projects, boy that helps.
Not the least of which was the willingness of the community residents to finally take very real and very effective steps that they were capable of doing. Not everyone has the balls to turn a banger away on their banger turf...but everyone has the right to make a demand that you "get off my stoop". And they will.
By taking responsibility for the smallest piece of land possible that you can take a stand on and saying "not here", the trouble moves away. Once there are enough of those safe havens, there's nowhere for the trouble to take root and the systemic organization (whatever level of organization there is) falls apart.
For example, a church group might declare their campus and whole street block a safe zone...no loitering, no drug dealing, no posturing or intimidating. An apartment landlord might finally take note of the abandoned cars and units that are being squatted in and get them removed. And on the overhead map of the City, those safe areas grow...from a small circle or square, to connected circles and squares, reinforcing each other.
As someone who was personally motivated to get involved I learned a great deal about the good citizens who are caught up in the mess, they are all involved. Business owners who lost relatives to violence, potential business owners who cant get loans due to the neighborhood being written off, and even the bangers themselves who want desperately for someone to give half a care about their future.
These young black boys, proud and capable wanting to be just like everyone else and contribute anything to the greater good have their hopes crushed day in and day out, either directly by being taunted or threatened or ignored, or indirectly by reading about how the intelligentsia and the privileged dismiss them as animals or worse. Incapable of knowing right form wrong and genetically programmed for black on black violence. Picture every person you come in contact with on a day to day basis reinforcing the message: you don't matter, you are a 2nd class citizen and we will enjoy watching you tear yourselves apart.
Commissioner Davis has somehow threaded the needle and made community policing work, once again in Boston. The Same Cop, Same neighborhood program required a whole new logistical approach in scheduling and patrol areas and only someone like Davis, who has pulled it off before, could make it happen.
By putting the same patrol faces on the streets, the citizens, businessmen and thugs alike become more comfortable with their police, and the police get a deeper and clearer picture of what is going on in THEIR neighborhood.
In Codman Square is a memorial of those young people slain by violence...their empty shoes on plaques on a wrought iron fence...you cant escape it, you cant turn your eyes from their too short biographies it's heart wrenching and I never ever want to look at it again.
Thank you Mother Jones.
Great public service
this article. Thanks for making it happen.
While reading through this I kept thinking of "Romeo & Juliet", "Westside Story" & how little some things have changed.
Scary but there are lots of possibilities if "We the people..." choose to allow them to blossom.
"...This is not a game." - Lorie Van Auken (2001.09.11 widow)
Sounds good but two
Sounds good but two things:
1.)What's wrong with Broken Windows? It made drop and there was never a subsequent upswing like in Boston, suggesting strongly that both systems are good, but NY's way is much better.
2.)Do the peace treaties allow gangs to continue as drug-dealing groups or just community groups? Do police officers have to turn a blind-eye to non-violent drug dealing? If so, that's a recipe for disaster because it surrenders certain areas to drugs and thug-life so long as violence is down.
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