The Policing of Black Youth and the Rise of Urban Violence during the Reagan Era

In the context of continued plant closures, the advent of crack cocaine, and the rise of mass incarceration in the 1980s, urban gang warfare reached historic proportions. During the Reagan administration, groups like the Crips and the Bloods increased fivefold—from about 30,000 members in 1980 to 150,000 in 1988—and gang warfare in the city eventually resulted in a reported two deaths a day. This paper examines the conditions that fostered the remarkable expansion of so-called urban street gangs and sustained their deadly consequences. It centers on the relationship between the Los Angeles Police Department’s Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) squad, at the forefront of law enforcement technologies and military-grade weaponry, and the paramilitary street gangs like the Crips that the unit was charged with containing.

CRASH established a wide field of surveillance in South Central Los Angeles and other areas of segregated poverty in the city by classifying nearly all young black and Chicano men as potential gang members. In practice, officers encouraged Crip sets to walk on the street openly armed so members could be easily arrested. The squad used incarceration as a threat to reap information in exchange for law enforcement favors. And CRASH often resorted to driving gang members to enemy neighborhoods to create opportunities for street battle. In exploring the ways in which these methods inadvertently encouraged, rather than suppressed, violence and crime, the paper sheds light on the ways in which national policies (stemming from the wars on crime and drugs) unfolded at the local level and paradoxically intensified the problems policymakers and law enforcement officials aimed to prevent. Indeed, these developments help us understand the ways in which the 1980s left behind a legacy of more crime, more prisons, and more inequality for the remainder of the 20th century and into the 21st.