By one account, some 15,000 people have been murdered over the past 30 years in fighting between a pair of South Central LA gangs, the Crips and the Bloods. If this astonishing number is true, than the number of deaths from gang violence in LA is higher than the fatalities in Northern Ireland during the “Troubles” between Catholics and Protestants. But even if the death toll has been inflated for shock value, the photos of gang bangers with assault rifles and machine pistols disturbingly suggest the militias of the Gaza Strip or Beirut. And in America’s richest state, a short drive from Beverly Hills and Disneyland, the social vacuum that gave rise to gang violence on an outsize scale has not been filled.
Stacy Peralta’s documentary Crips and Bloods: Made in America (out now on DVD) is a compelling, alarming look at the problem. In photographs from the 1950s, parts of South Central resembled lower middle class neighborhoods anywhere in the U.S. And yet the district was subject to an unwritten apartheid, enforced by the LAPD, which behaved like an army of occupation. The pressure finally exploded in the infamous 1965 Watts uprising; in the aftermath, a profusion of black pride and power groups that tried to rebuild the community fell prey to the FBI and the LAPD.
Bereft of hope or positive role models, and confronted by a complex of problems, including the unraveling of two-parent black families and the rising tide of hard drugs, African-American teenagers in late ‘60s LA began organizing themselves into the rival Crips and Bloods, staking out turf and going into the drug trade.
Since then, problems have worsened as dangerous weapons proliferated on America’s streets and the “War on Drugs” resulted in the imprisonment of vast numbers of African American men, most of them released after serving time to few prospects but a return to the gang life. After watching Crips and Bloods, one can’t help wonder if someone decided to write-off an entire zone of Los Angeles, leaving residents to their doom.
