True to the Hood
Posted on June 30, 2020 by Linda Sanderson
“The system is broken. Every rejection, every shooting, every arrest. Your parents are taken away and the people you love are killed. Then they tell you your neighborhood is a gang.”
—- Willie Lee Jasper, Jr.
For the gang cop, it all boils down to association. In the compressed, family-packed neighborhoods of Richmond, California, association is unavoidable. This fact has led to many gang charges in Contra Costa County courtrooms, even when the underlying crime is stealing a television, robbing a grocery store or possessing too much marijuana. When a man associated with certain low-income, black or brown neighborhoods is arrested for carrying a gun, gang cops see the gun as a weapon that exists “for the benefit of the gang.”
“What gang am I a member of?” might ask the man whose home has been burglarized four times and who can’t walk down the street without hearing shots being fired. This gun is clearly for protection.
Richmond police and Contra Costa County sheriff’s deputies, posing as experts on gangs, began testifying in the 1990s that the young black men they saw on neglected streets in Richmond and North Richmond were “gang members loitering with other gang members in gang territory.” The double designation (others, gang territory) was made regardless of whether the Black person was standing with a brother in a neighborhood driveway or with cousins on his granny’s front porch. If one of these youngsters was also spotted on a friend’s YouTube rap recording, that made the three points a cop needed to confirm gang member status. There are nineteen identifiers on the “gang member” list.
At first, young men on the street scoffed at what they saw as the police getting it wrong. They were basically all related one way or another and had hung together since childhood. How were they suddenly a gang? They argued that gangs were hierarchically structured criminal enterprises with well-developed lines of authority and identifiable clothing and tattoos. Like Nortenos or Surenos. Like the Crips or the Bloods. That was not what they were, they countered.
But soon it became apparent that California’s STEP Act of 1988 and its successive amendments could be used against the nontraditional gangs that Richmond’s small neighborhood cliques personified. These groups may have grown organically to protect disadvantaged and marginalized neighborhoods, but they were also involved in criminal drug operations and shootings. The very markers these young men had adopted to distinguish themselves — the hats they wore, their street names and rap music — were now being used against them. Project Trojans was not just a baseball team, the police said. Fourth Street was no longer just a family, they insisted.
Not only were black defendants now subjected to longer prison sentences based on the same behavior committed by a white defendant, but so began the criminalization of certain Richmond neighborhoods. Once your neighborhood was on the list, you hardly stood a chance of being young, black and male and not qualifying as one of the city’s small units called “gangs.”
For Willie Jasper and young men like him, the gang law messed with basic needs: protection and community. Protection relied on the integrity of the hood; community required a loyalty to the group that eclipsed all other sense of order. They believed that self-sufficiency was the only way their undisciplined and neglected community could carry on safely.
–excerpt from True to the Hood: Surviving the Streets of Richmond, California
Linda Sanderson 