How The Crips And The Bloods Actually Work | How Crime Works Marathon | Insider

my name is Tyrone white I'm a former 65 Milo some of my rivalries were the blood gangs and the crib gangs we're evolved in drive by shootings as well as drug dealing and this is how crime works yeah of course I've participated in Drive buys um I've been a victim of Drive buys plenty of times when you going against war with one another there's no winners now you can you can look at it and say okay I shot more of their homies than they shot of mine or I killed more of their homies or they

killed of mine but both sides are taking losses so if you both are taking a loss of life there's no winners when I was coming up the guns that were using gang banging were the 9 mm the 45 murg 12 gaug shotgun pump AK-47s Tech9 [Music] the first gun that I ever got placed in my hand given to me as a gift from one of my homeboys was a 25 a chrome 25 little small 25 with the pearl handle shot like had like seven shots six shots in it or something like that and as you

got older and you learn more about guns and Elevate yourself of course you get bigger guns guns are sold on the street like dope is sold on the street you can even buy guns from enemy gangs cuz right now it's a business it's about making this money they come from everywhere now where they get them from could be from the police force it could be from the military you can never be caught what we call lacking or slipping you got to always be ready you got to have enough Firepower you are ready for war at

all times from the early 80s all the way up through the mid90s um those were the years of of heightened gang activities so drive by shootings were nothing you you can turn your literally turn your news on every day at those during those years and see a driveby shooting I mean every day we had to drive by shooting to where uh that I participated in I walked in the house and I remember seeing it on the news I must have been about 15 at that time I remember my mom was on the phone and she

was like I'm so tired of these kids shooting one another and killing one another and I remember thinking to myself like man she has no idea that I was just in this situation she never found out about it but I just remember the way that I felt listening to her on the phone telling her friend like man this is these kids need to stop this and this is crazy and there's another situation to where we were getting ready to go out on what they call Sunday Funday when all the low riders all the motorcycle clubs

all the car clubs all the gang members that's like the one day to where all the gang members enemies everybody can congregate in one area on CR Shaw Boulevard I remember we were we seen a car pull up to the corner and usually when you see cars pull up in the corner with no lights or anything like that you know you you you know that's a sign of something that's going to happen and all you see was Guns come out the window and everybody just got the shooting shooting at everybody and we all just scattered

like like ants just everybody screaming hollering running scattering because no one had guns actually on their person at the time one of my big homeboy um he was real very known he had got hit in the face because they shot with a 12 gauge and they had buck shots but it didn't kill him because they Wen shot at close range luckily nobody got killed the Crips were founded in the 60s and by Raymond Washington he formed the East Side Crips which is on the east side of La TIY Williams formed the West Side Crips and

through those two different uh foundations different sets start to evolve different areas you know the the Hoovers the East Coast the ring 60s the menow the all these different sets the object and the goal was to keep this side of of La safe but you know as usual things escalated things multiplied and bodies became no happened when Raymond Washington got killed that's what caused the division that's what caused that's what that's when cripping became divided between the East and the west and different things start happening in different subset and it just became like a disease

you know one set betrayed this set then it just caused a NeverEnding Feud Bloods used to be the main Rivals of the Crips but now there just as many Crips are against one another then there are Bloods a lot of Crips and bloods have become allies because they share the same common enemy for example um the a TR gangster cribs they have a uh a peace treaty going on with the Englewood Family Bloods and that's because their their borderline is connected right next to one another so since our neighborhoods are so close to one another

you got to come through my neighborhood to get home I got to come to your neighborhood to get home let's make this a blood free zone no VI let's not saying that we're homeboys or we're just a close Hood but let's keep the peace between this dynamic between this area the beef between the 65 Milow Crips and the Hoover Crips it goes way back we actually all grew up together and went to school together we became one of the biggest enemies to the Hoovers because our sets are so close to one another to get to

the Hoover Hood you got to come through our hood you know what I'm saying and so for us to get to other parts of the city we got to go through the Hoover Hood I was raised born and raised in South Central LA all my life had a stepfather in my life that taught me how to be a man and different things but for the most part I was raised by a strong single mother usually in the black neighborhoods when kids that come from single parent homes like that they usually get caught up in these

streets because your mom is out working trying to make a living for you provide for you while she's at work you're out there running the streets doing that you know you're not supposed to be doing and that's really that's pretty much how I started it I was about 10 when I first start hanging around them I knew them very well it comes down to hey you know you've been hanging around us a lot you been chilling a lot you from the hood know let's make it official you know and making it official means getting jumped

in or doing something to be a member of other the game can be anything from you fighting one person sometime four or five persons it's to see how you handle yourself it's to see what type of skills you have if you get into to one of these type situations you know can you stand your ground and hold your own whether you get beat up or not you have to know how to fight back you got to be a monster to be a member of of any game but particularly in the Crips you better be a

monster the word was really originally meant Community resistance and progress it was a way to to bring the community to uplift the community to protect the community of course we they took on a mon and the appearance of a gang because according to the dictionary a group of five more more people is considered a gang to be a you have to carry yourself a certain way you have to walk a certain way but for me the The Lure was I love the color blue and they wore blue Rags uh they wore blue jeans they wore

blue belts they wore blue Chuck tayor the dress code for me back when I was an active CP in the in the 990s in the early 80s it was definitely 501 Levi jeans creased you I would go byy a can of starch and literally spend about an hour ironing my pants laying the starch to a point to where before I even put my pants on I could stand them up Crips wore K Swiss because it was an acronym it was actually a disrespectful term towards the Bloods it was called K Swiss stood for kill slobs

when I see some slobs is a disrespectful term towards the Bloods if you was a you couldn't walk if you wasn't a you didn't know how to Walk and so to learn how to Walk and to actually perfect something like that was like a badge of honor it's a cool thing it's when you look at it the the feet movement the way they dance the way they do it the way they incorporate certain moves along with the hand signs and hand signals words that you Crips usually use which is part of the lingo was of

course cuz everything we say would start with a c if you had say Burger you say Ker you know if you say uh you say sit it's just different things that you could replace the B with the c you would do it and that was the same thing with the Bloods anything with a seed they wanted to eliminate and it may it may sound strange and people might be oh that's stupid that's y'all sound stupid that was our language that was the way that we talk we understood it and that's all that matters and if

you disrespect us and tell us to sound stupid you can you might get your ass whooped of course they threw up the seeds you know the C is is just you just take your hands you you make a cat with your hand and now you're set your actual neighborhood your neighborhood like the 60s they have their signs uh the Hoovers they have their signs the menow they have their signs you're going to throw up that sign to represent to let people know that you're actually from that set you're from that neighborhood we threw up the

M it was just a m you just take your hands cross your which which suggest how Ice Cube throw up the W when he's when he's in concert and doing taking pictures Snoop Dogg throws up the W just turn it upside down and you throw up the amp gang graffiti is a big part of Crips people that are coming in there they know when they see that on the wall uh the rolling 60 Crips or the mlo Crips or the five5 Crips they know we're entering this game this is their neighborhood the game structure is

not so much organized like uh the mafia with under bosses and bosses and stuff like that we didn't give titles like that but people automatically knew who the ogs were who the double ogs were who the big homies was and who was ranked over who the double OG is usually one of the big homies that has put in more work than you can imagine um he's done it all killed robbed made money uh been to jail every you name it he's done it usually 50s 60s you know higher age that they were around in the

70s in the 80s when gang banger really just exploded they were at the top of their game um an OG really fars not not too much different from a double OG except that he may be a little younger may have done a less little few a little less of the crimes then you have some of the ogs that have turned their lives around and they just want to live life have a family have wife and kids and they getting money they making money the legal way so what makes them an OG is the fact that

they're talking to the little homies to the young homies showing them and explaining to them how they were able to do this street solders is exactly what that sounds like a street Soldier is going to go out there and put in that work for the OG for the double OG for the little homies or just for the set period a street Soldier has no limits he's going to go out there and do what he has to do no matter what um the little homies are usually of course what they sound like the little homies that's

looking up to the big homies they're going to imitate they going to copy everything that the big homies do and if the big homies is constantly going to jail robbing people shooting people killing people the little homies goingon to follow suit at some point my main thing was always to look out for my big homie or whoever called me they Big Homie and make sure that he was taken care of and vice versa because he does the same for me he don't have to but he does I started out selling weed in middle school and

then moved to crack cocaine and robing I did I did robberies that was my way mostly of making money and and keeping money in my pocket the big homies had the big dope and they'll issue it out to the younger homies they'll issue it down to the guys to the next level and it was a way for everybody from the big homie OG homies all the way down to the homies in junior high school to make money the homies in junior high school they may be out there selling crack on the corners $5 rocks $10

rocks $20 rocks the big homies they moveing big weight no ounces uh quarter pounds pounds stuff like that the drugs came from a lot of times from drug cartels and as well as the government believe it or not I mean there's a story about Freeway Rick one of the biggest black dope dealers in the history of Los Angeles and he was set up he was caught up in that Iran Contra stuff with Ronald Reagan and come to find out that the DEA was supplying him with dope the same dope that they gave him 30 years

for in prison so you know it's like that's how that's just how it worked they put they put it in our neighborhoods to bring us down to keep us down always a gold of Crips make a substantial amount of money and to open up your own business whether it be a smoke shop a liquor store or a Fool's place or whatever that was the goal to find a way to take that money and make it somewhat as legal as you can the LA riots happened in '92 I was 18 years old at that time the

LA riots was a result of the Rodney King verdict those four officers that were clearly guilty as hell on video beating Rodney King half to death when they were found innocent that just sparked something in the community I didn't never think I would see nothing like that the ground zero of the riots happened five blocks from my house I was sitting home watching the news I seen the news so we jump in the car we drive up to the riots by this time you got hundreds and hundreds of people starting to migrate to Florence in

Normandy so at this point it just kicked off every like wildfire every car that came through the intersection that had a white person in it was getting attacked I saw news reporters getting beat up I saw cameraman getting beat up getting the cameras taken from them and at that time it really didn't matter what gang you were from because now it's about it's a black against white thing now so it didn't matter if you was a blood or a or whatever you was even though it was such a messed up day it's such a up

day it was also a gay a day to kind of Rejoice because that was the first time in a long time that you saw common enemies Crips and bloods and Mexican games Come Together against this one common enemy the LAPD and so after a days of riding some of the community leaders like Jim Brown the football player uh a couple of popular gang leaders from different gangs from different areas different sets had a meeting and decided that this was the person perfect opportunity to try to bring a peace treaty a truce between the gangs even

though it was something bad that caused us to get to that level it still was an opportunity for us to bring things together peace treaty lasted officially maybe a good couple weeks and it kind of continued to dissolve and weeks and months went on it to the point to where it didn't exist no more but for that little short time it was great to have it when gangsta rap came out it introduced a lot of cripping a lot of Crips and when NWA came out which is the group that started gangster rap uh e in

peace e was known to be a and from him you had other Pioneer rappers that were from neighborhoods you had Snoop Dog you had Dove seed uh all these popular gang rappers that was in the neighborhoods representing their hoods that were blowing up on the Main Street and so now you got people sitting at home watching MTV 106 in park they're watching all these video shows and they got these gameer MERS doing rap videos with the blue rags and the and the the six folds and the the low riders and wearing all the gang attire

and the Gang uniform but they're actually artists making money on TV and now it's being broadcast all over the world aside from the UK and the Netherlands I've heard about Crips in China um I heard there's some Crips in Africa which I've actually seen online social media uh people in Africa ripping and and just loving this West Coast culture and I think all that all these countries adapted on to these United State values and these United States ways just because of how it was glorified not really understanding the meaning of it know that people lost

their lives and people are killing this is not something to play with in 1994 I went to Oklahoma I got a football scholarship to go to Oklahoma to play football that's pretty much really what saved me from being killed or anything else bad happening to me on these La streets played football there for two years at a historically black college in 1996 97 I moved to Oklahoma City and I start working at the Juvenile Detention Center they needed a gang advisor a gang trainer so of course I was qualified for that just volunteering my time

talking to the kids and you know educating them on gangs and telling them no because I had no idea Oklahoma had a gang problem so I went and I sat down with the chief of police to see exactly you know where did he want me to go with this I did two years in the school system they came to me and asked me that I want to uh interested into transferring to the streets basically running traffic pulling people over writing tickets blah blah blah um I'm like yeah F let me let me do that I

I'll do that see see what that's like I because I actually want to see how they how they dealt with drug dealers being on with me being on the other side of the law and all the complains that I had as a criminal all the police brutality all the mistreatment from the police I got the witness that firsthand working with them and a lot of times I would have to intervene on like hold on like you know it was a couple times where they had to have that conversation with me look either you with us

or you with them so even in the training in the police academy I dealt with racism I dealt with discrimination because a lot of those officers felt like this dude is a criminal this dude is from the streets how in the hell is are you guys going to let him work with us blah blah blah that's even that's why even after I became a police officer and I moved back to California I still ended up hooking back up with my old homies and old gang members and I end up going to jail even after being

the police office officer I went to jail my experience with the LAPD they still haven't found a way to deal with communities and cultures that they don't know nothing about it's the same tactics no dirty cobs bogus charges planting drugs um mistreatment because of who you are what you represent it's the same thing it hasn't stopped the one way to police can bri the cap with the community is to continue to work work with those that want to work with them big you as example from ring 60s guys that like that that are gang activists

that are trying to do things to stop the gang violence and help kids in the community and bring some positiv positivity in the community the main thing is to save lives and after you save lives you want to create opportunities I went to jail in Oklahoma for robbery um since at that time when I was out there it was for a robbery that I did when I was living in Oklahoma when I came back to California in 2006 I went to jail again in 2009 for another robbery and they end up finding about another robbery

that I did and they combined the cases I end up taking a three-year deal when I first got arrested um they took me down to the main LAPD headquarters what they call the Parker Center they transfer you to next day to the County facility so I left the Parker Center that morning they put me on the jail bus took me to the county jail which is known as the Twin Towers you usually go into the tank the tank is basically a holding area where a whole bunch of other game members are at and I'm talking

about mixed in Crips Bloods Mexicans everybody and that's just a that's like a box of dynamite waiting to explode and sometime you get put in those situations and the officers just leave you and they don't care they don't whatever happens in there it happens and you're going to always find somebody in there that's going to challenge you especially if you're from a rival game you listen for the legal you listen to what they saying or you might see people that you haven't seen since elementary and you lost contact with you wonder where they were at

well this is where they at and so you find out that they from a set and so you guys you just guys just conect to one now if it becomes a racial thing um Bloods and Crips you know they find a way to unite against whoever whatever race they have to go against you know it can be some violence erupt in in between the transportation into the different dorms or the different units but for the most part in the county jail Crips was with Crips Bloods with Bloods or sometime you get the general population where

it's a mix dorm now don't get me wrong if I went in there as a mlo or as a or 60 going there and they run into some Hoovers it's blad it's bad blood automatically no matter we're Crips and recrys we in the same unit don't matter we need to settle this beef so you I might walk in here and a Hoover CRI might say hey hey hey you from M I need that fade I need that fade so that lets you know that at some point you and this guy have to fight because y'all

both of y'all sets don't get along inside or outside of prison with cripping there's no difference the way you carry yourself on the streets is the same way that you expected to carry yourself in the prison except at a higher level because it's a little more dangerous in prison than it is on these streets the thing that made me change my life was my kids when I took the scholarship to the school I was in the process of changing my life I just didn't know it but that was my start of changing my life and

when I start working with gangs and talking to the kids in the schools and at the juvenile jails and I seen how I was getting through to them and how much they respected me from what I was telling them to try to teach them it just made me want to change just made me want to continue to to do positive things and that that's what I've been doing ever since I met somebody one day and they told me I had this look it's like you should get into acting you should think about acting so I

started doing acting little the gigs doing extra roles and so I've done several projects and been a part of several uh uh TV series and dramas and and different things that have gotten my foot into the door of acting so I this there's definitely some positivity that could happen from my past that was negative yeah my name is Skip Townsen I'm a former member of The Rolling 20 Avenue Bloods out of and I was active for over 27 years and this is how crime works as a blood gang member I have to go out there

willing to die or be killed just to Stand My Ground when the feud goes it's looking to make a statement and the statement is going to be dead bodies I do not believe anybody won because every neighborhood has over a 100 obituaries main Rivals for Bloods has always been the Crips getting on the bus at 13 years old um the average person back then we're going to the back of the bus that's where the where you from or what you looking at or what size of your shoes and if there were a group that was

maybe five or six seven deep and somebody got on and said they were from the wrong neighborhood that's where it started that's where the fight's going to come and that's how I became a blood gang member willing to fight back and that was in 1977 I joined a movement and the movement was to not be a victim of the Crips that was 1980 when I'm walking home from a football game I was on crch on 59th Street and the rolling 60s had a big party that night there was about 15 of them um they had

beat me to the point where I was unconscious for a second and then when I jumped up and took off running one guy followed me and he kept running after me that was a horrible experience but I'm I'm glad I lived through it what Hollywood thinks about gang membership is that there's some people you know handing out guns to each other saying man we about to go shoot this up and that's just not the case most of the shootings are emotions you know somebody's with somebody's girlfriend somebody stole somebody's car um somebody got beat up

at the mall and now they know they going to be at the ska ring tonight you know the gang wars was not just u a table of guy strategizing and like who are we going to shoot next so back in the 80s most of the individuals had um 38 specials they had a a revolver that only shot five maybe six times they would have a 22 and now nobody has the 38 specials and 12 gauge they have SKS and ARs and they have 30 round clips they have banana clips they can shoot 30 times within

a matter of seconds so that changed everything and that's when La became the the killing field and it was hard to it was hard to survive the beefs now are majority on internet most of the beefs are going now because of someone said something and they're um really tough behind the camera and a keyboard whereas we actually had to go to school to fight so the beefs are totally different in today's age than it was back when I was younger driveby were happening every day and I can tell you the time that I'm standing out

waiting on one of my friends and a guy came down the street in a nice looking car and I started walking in the street to go see the car and he was the closer he got he started shooting at me he was coming to do a driveby and I'm looking at the car kind of unaware didn't know who he was it was war zone we you know there's an area in my neighborhood that we call Iraq you know we call it Iraq because right here on 20th Street in Arlington a father and son had got

shot together in front of their house you know I mean stuff like that happened every day I wake up I don't know if this is the day that's why so many people had had to carry guns that's why I carried a gun back in the day because I did not know was I gonna have to use the gun today just to get home not to just intentionally go look to hurt somebody but I just want to go home every night the Crips chose the color blue so red was just the opposite of blue and also

red stands out there's something here that's brighter than you let you know that we're brighter than you and not um not hiding I didn't have to have on any red if I'm wearing all B they'd be like oh okay I see what you're doing you know and they would know okay these are Bloods but uh we didn't you know some people who didn't leave their neighborhood would wear red shoes red Sho strings red belt red shirt red hat for me it was doing a little bit too much the terminology really you know it it progressed

over the years everything would be like uh big back B boo smoke a bigar rette drive my bar to the beach eat a Bandy bar have a bu of bofy everything was terminology used as a be number one blood sign is this right here um but then this is also a blood sign right here so um you know but different neighborhoods have their own sign see if I can still do this uh so this right here is disrespectful and I don't mean to disrespect anybody but this is a SE with a a k in the

background you know so if you didn't know who you were talking to instead of giving them your sign you get throw up the the the CK which is to see if they're offended by it CK stands for killer right yes and you don't want to say that for me at my age I don't want to do that but what I I do want to say that you know if anybody's offended by me doing that it wasn't my intent I just want to show you guys what it was I think the music industry played a vital

part in promoting gang culture made it prevalent made it uh glorified just the rhythm the Rhythm and the the excitement of being out of town and hearing a ice cube or a Snoop Dog or a Tupac um com in hardcore it it just it it filled the spirit with confidence and and invincibility I'm Invincible now young Bloods today a lot of them go to college a lot of them are into videos they're videographers they're rappers they're they're doing movies they're entrepreneurs some of them work for different companies but they still want to affiliate with the

gang with the blood culture so there was never one way that anybody would make money in a gang so there are guys who go out and steal cars they're real good take a screwdriver they go out and steal cars then there are other people in the community who sell drugs but everybody's not a drug dealer so some guys will go out and sell drugs and they'll go to the swap meet and spend all their money on Fresh t-shirts khakis new shoes they they're fresh real clean but they'll never be a drug dealer again whoever gave

them that knows not to give them anything else cuz they don't know how to manage money I would leave town I would go sell drugs but it was not ever to benefit a gang it was the Ben I had a Cadillac I like low riders I wanted to have a better Lifestyle the most profitable thing that that I did was sell crack cocaine I got to a point where I was making about $88,000 a day in Las Vegas but at the same time when other people were making almost a million dollars a day selling crack

in other cities um um but then I know people who had a PCP we call it Sherm and they could make $50,000 in the day so the thing with the the 1980s the crack era and all that it it put a lot of Bloods and Crips together because it was now no longer just about money for the Bloods it was like the Crips might have had a bigger sack um or maybe a blood had a bigger sack and the CPS was buying from them so really it was about relationships I never shared money with a

gang and there was no leader that ever told me I had to bring my money back to them everybody had a family member who was out of town a cousin in Alabama Louisiana um some people had them in Las Vegas Arizona I had a team a Crips and bloods and we just started putting the drugs on the north side of Las Vegas and it was very profitable very fruitful so the blood culture did expand because of all these out of town missions we're Gathering more blood gang members and um we're letting people know our culture

and and they're able to come to LA and talk to us and deal with us so it it expanded um throughout the 80s even now today you know some guys are old and they have their legitimate business so there's several ex- Blood gang members who now are millionaires and it's not from selling drugs it's because they bought trucks I had tow trucks now they have dump trucks or 18 wheelers so there a lot of success uccessful people were once part of the Bloods Suge Knight comes directly out of uh what is considered the pyu territory

in Compton and he got a legitimate business out of Death Row Records you know Death Row Records uh came out and made a lot of music based on their relationship with the Crips now Suge being from the pyu area is able to show that Bloods and Crips or let me say pyus and Crips can be together I would have used the Crips that's working to build relationships maybe hire somebody from Southside or hire somebody from Santana block or whatever the situation is um and we could have started building peace and I I think Suge did

get involved in a couple of peace agreements I think that's a good example of pyus and Crips working together and we don't have to kill each other there are definitely rules for blood members always say where you from if somebody say where you you from don't say well I don't bang homie you a blood you a blood number two is never tell never tell on anybody you can't even tell the Crips if the Crips say my name is John Smith I'm about to shoot you pal you know when the police come who shot you I

ain't even see I don't know it's a rule not to snitch because if you're in this lifestyle and culture you're going to be in jail you're going to be going to court you're going to go to prison and you can't be known as a snitch and be a blood people didn't follow the rules or get what they call Deep plea get the discipline and you could run from it on the streets but as soon as somebody get into jail and they say oh whoopy whoops here you know they're going to be like oh you know

what you got coming and you can't run from the DP in jail the way the territories are separated could be based on one street as a matter of fact there are certain streets I could walk down in La just one neighborhood and by the time I get to the middle of the Block it's turned into something else the rolling 20 Avenues were based at 16th Place in 2 Avenue um even though it was more towards Third Avenue but because we're from 20s we wouldn't say third half but everybody be hanging out um on 16th Place

between second half and third half being a part of rolling 20 Avenues there were well over 300 um in any given time you know some people would be in jail some people were off gone somewhere so when the blood started um there were a group of guys in La that consider themselves the brims they did not consider themselves Bloods there's another group of guys um The Outlaws and that wasn't a gang it was just a group but as they started fighting the Crips they got together with the guys from Athens Park the guys from um

other areas too the the pyus and Compton and and and the villains the Bloodstone villains on the east side to make sure that the Crips weren't dominant um no matter if it was a parade or no matter what the situation was so um even though they came together and considered themselves you know uh as one like a blood connection but everybody has their own area you know there's the rolling 20s which is your area and so that's that's just to be able to identify where you're from so for me there's no difference between the Bloods

and pyrus however there's some people that say there is a difference but if we're standing on the same corner you don't know the difference all Bloods are not all African-American we have um we have bellian homies we have um Jamaican homies we have uh we have a couple of guys who are white so it was never about just African-American in other cities of the states I know they're in Detroit New York there's a lot of them in Georgia they are emulating something that that we've actually gone through there are individuals who live on a street

and one street is one neighborhood and the other end of the street is another neighborhood so those are things that can't be emulated and that's just what's so different about La so um yeah and there's no hierarchy and and most of these cities are here they pay dues and they have a timeline and man there is no person who could ever collect dues not in my neighborhood he'd be in trouble is everybody would try to get the money back and you know it just it doesn't make sense it's no organization where I'm from everything in

La is unorganized until you go to a California prison then that's when the organizational structure comes in my first arrest was in 1977 but I was in and out that was juvenile um I started getting locked up in 1982 um as an adult I spent from 1977 in 2009 um either on probation on parole in custody or on the run I had drug cases I had a firearm cases I had attempted murder case um I had I had a perjury where just getting a license and another name they sent me to jail for nine months

uh you know violation you know so there's a number of different things I was arrested for anything you could think of in prison uh Bloods are associated with it whether it's uh it's not always contract killing but you know I mean uh it's it's drug selling it's um getting cell phones the ubn that started New York was totally different than everything we were doing out here in LA and they had a hierarchy they had a a level of command and you know they really organized going to jail in 1982 I was able to maneuver in

what they call general population um so I'm in general population and later in the 80s um I would go to the blood module because um that whole 9,000 floor was just full of Crips and it was a free-for-all it's like aund and something people in there and whoever's the deepest Crips is going to beat up the other Crypts definitely all the Bloods emotionally in jail is horrible jail is the worst place in the world being away from my family is is the most horrible thing for me I think mass incarceration took out not just the

blood gang or the gang or they took out our families they destroyed our families they destroyed the fathers and mothers happen to leave the house California has the most incarcerated individuals in the country and this country has the most incarcerated people in the world when Arnold was the governor he spent $7.2 billion and building more prisons but he didn't build any junior colleges I think that people need to have a trade because they might not not do well in a four-year college but he didn't invest in that he invested in the prison system LAPD played

a major part in helping to um develop and grow the hatred that we had for each other LAPD would actually drop people off in different neighborhoods would get on their loudspeaker and they would wake up the neighborhood and say there's a blood in your area he's in this car and he's sitting in front of the house right now and people come out to see what they're talking about I think LAPD has taken a thousand baby steps forward I do not think that they see us or view us any different now I think the only thing

that's uh a little different now is that LAPD not the LA County Sheriff but LAPD will listen to the concerns and the complaints of the community whereas back in the days they didn't want to hear it now they're proactive they're looking to bust up group see who has guns who doesn't but prior to that it would take uh a phone call and most community members didn't make the phone calls to the police department because once again we'd be victimized so I don't want to be victimized so I don't want to call the police I'm going

to call my mother so there was never a year that I decided to leave the gang life in 1998 when I was in jail facing two life sentences for the attempted murders uh I knew that this was not where my future was and I I didn't have anybody to talk to um everybody was either on drugs or talking about robberies and I wasn't doing robberies I was owning a tow truck business so when I came home I just stopped going around my community however my kids were still there and my community members were still dying

so I never left the community I just left that part of me that wanted to help be ignorant so then as I started second call I started helping individuals get jobs getting their careers get their high school diploma helped them start getting shoes and clothing for school so now that I'm a positive part of the community a lot of the young people have no idea who I was so um they just know me as this person but they don't know me as um the person with the gun or who went to war or any of

that type of stuff in the city of La we have gang reduction Youth Development so we have Summer Night Lights at parks where during the summer months the city pays for certain activities to go on from 7 to 11: it used to be a little later till midnight but um what they do is they get everybody tired they they do free food they do face painting and their prizes and um that's from the city of La that use intervention workers but also on the outskirts they have the police to kind of monitor to make sure

nobody comes and disrupts uh what's going on I think the old school blood culture values is more so we are one and the new school blood culture values are um they fight each other and like I said they were born into a war when they were born they were born into blood versus blood Wars so they don't know what peace is the ignorance part of not ever letting go of say the gang culture the Gang Lifestyle not developing into something different and into a a more productive neighborhood that blackstones don't have to be gangs you

know the jungles don't have to have a gang but um there needs to be more development and don't get me wrong there are people who went off to play professional sports um there are people who are making a million dollars off of entertainment but I I just think that it's so much more that could be uh there there's healing circles in the jungles they're doing um expungement clinics there's so much that's going on but I think that the um the culture the mindset never changed the violence of the crypts and the Bloods is definitely going

to end um soon within 10 12 years but in the next 30 35 years they'll be something else that everybody gravitate all the kids will gravitate to be this I don't know what this is but it's going to happen hi I'm a producer on how crime works if you enjoyed this please subscribe and comment below with more topics you'd like to see us cover