ELIZABETH HINTON: So
I wanted to give you
a sense of some of my
core research questions
and my primary contributions
to both US history
and African-American studies
past, present, and future.
And in the broadest
sense, I see myself
as a historian of
American inequality,
specializing in the prism
of policing, crime control
policy, and incarceration.
My ultimate research goal is
to provide greater context
to the rise of urban violence
in the late 20th century
or to historicize the fact that
since 1980, well over a quarter
million black men have been
murdered in this country.
That's more than
four times the number
of American soldiers who lost
their lives in the Vietnam War.
So lacking proper
context, dominant views
treat urban violence as a
pathological outcome rather
than a historical manifestation
or as a malignant aspect
of black culture
rather than a result
of socioeconomic
developments which
obscures wider political
contexts and outcomes
and structural programs.
So why is it that in the
very same communities
where police and surveillance
and incarceration
loom large, young
people of color
are actually more likely to die?
And so that is the central
question of my work.
And my book, From the War on
Poverty to the War on Crime--
The Making of Mass
Incarceration in America,
traced the process
of criminalization
in the segregated,
low-income communities
targeted by policymakers at the
highest levels of government.
And it provides the
first historical account
of federal crime
control policies, which
amounted to the
widespread supervision
and systematic
removal of generations
of young men of color
from their communities
to live inside prisons.
So moving forward, I'm trying
to understand the conditions
that gave rise to the distinct
type of urban violence,
or what I prefer to call
"social harm," that emerged
in isolated and
marginalized communities
in 20th-century America.
The policy decisions
that I trace in my book
that over time created
violent social conditions
marked the first essential
step, as I see it,
towards this
history of violence.
What I didn't have space to
do in that political history
is to closely examine the
external collective violence
against police and
state forces that
rose alongside the official
launch of the War on Crime.
Understanding this collective
external violence, I think,
is the second step.
And then the more difficult
and ambitious final step
is to understand what caused
this external violence to turn
internal, taking the
form of gang warfare
and, most tragically,
things like the rise
of drive-by shootings, which
of course are characterized
by the use of relatively
massive firepower aimed
at stationary targets with
little concern for accuracy
and which are the most
extreme form of violence that
emerged at this precise
historical conjuncture.
And if you notice,
the cover of my book
is actually depicting a drive-by
shooting at the hands of police
during the 1967 Newark uprising.
So what if we
sought to understand
drive-bys and other
forms of social harm
as mechanisms through which
organizations enforce contracts
in the underground
economy, for instance?
Or what if we considered
these major informal economies
in an even larger
framework as part
of the history of
racial capitalism?
So I want to ground some
of these tougher questions
in the policies and programs
that I discussed in the book
that I think can
help us understand
urban violence historically.
In presenting the War on Crime
as the federal government's
emergent response to demographic
changes at mid-century,
the gains of the
civil rights movement,
and the persistent threat
of urban rebellion,
my book makes two
significant interventions.
The first and more obvious
one exposes the way
that racism severely compromised
liberal social programs
and, in doing so, emphasizes
the bipartisan nature
of punitive policies.
So rather than
beginning my story
in the Nixon administration or
the draconian legislation that
swept the nation during the War
on Drugs in the '80s and '90s,
I locate the origins of
the modern carceral state
at the height of progressive
social change in the 1960s,
less than a year after the
launch of the war on poverty
and the enactment of
the Civil Rights Act.
In March 1965, Lyndon Johnson
sent the Law Enforcement
Assistance Act to
Congress, seeking
to establish a new role
for the federal government
in local police operations,
courts, and prison systems
for the first time
in American history.
A week later, he
sent to Congress
the Voting Rights
Act, which completed
the federal government's
civil rights package
and is considered the
major legislative victory
of that year.
But Johnson hoped
that 1965 would also
be remembered not only for the
momentous victory of the Voting
Rights Act, but also
as, in his words,
the year when this country began
a thorough, intelligent, and
effective war against crime.
And this really began a new era
in American law enforcement,
one that would soon shift the
country's progressive policy
trajectory.
So following the passage of the
Law Enforcement Assistance Act
and amid escalating urban unrest
in nearly every major city
during the summers of
Johnson's presidency--
Watts, for instance, erupted
just five months after Johnson
had called the War on Crime.
I really consider this the
first battle of the crime war.
As Robert mentioned,
my work traces the ways
in which federal
policymakers began
to retreat from and eventually
undercut many of the Great
Society programs that
are often heralded
as the administration's
greatest achievements.
So from this period
onward, lawmakers
shared a set of assumptions
about black Americans,
poverty, and crime
that in time became
a causal and consensus-building
force in domestic policy.
This consensus distorted the
aims of the war on poverty
and also shaped the rationale,
legislation, and programs
of the War on Crime.
Together, liberals and
conservatives consistently
supported the surveillance
of urban space,
the militarization of police
forces, harsh sentencing
provisions, and the expansion
of the prison system.
In fact, crime control
is the domestic policy
in the late 20th century
where conservative and liberal
interests most
thoroughly intertwine.
And we continue to see that
today with the recent enactment
of the First Step Act.
Though other people
have made this point--
Naomi Murakawa,
Marie Gottschalk,
and Heather Thompson
come to mind.
But I also asked readers
to really come to terms
with how policymakers'
own racism limited
the possibilities of the war
on poverty and, by extension,
postwar liberalism in new
ways to essentially rethink
the war on poverty.
And this line of argument
I'm happy to elaborate on
further in conversation
since I really
want to try to focus my remarks
on the issue of violence.
So the book's
second intervention
is a bit more complicated.
But its implications are
more directly relevant
to the questions that I
presented at the outset.
So I also argue that long
before disparate rates
of violent crime emerged in
low-income black and brown
neighborhoods, and long
before the launch of the War
on Drugs, federal policymakers
and the social scientists
they consulted decided that
a generation of black youth
posed a collective threat
to American society
and labeled them
criminal or precriminal.
So although the rise
of mass incarceration
is often presented as a response
to crime waves and violence,
my history shows that
policymakers developed
and sustained a set of
law enforcement strategies
that preemptively targeted
low-income youth of color
with highly visible
police patrol
and constant criminal
justice supervision.
Following the unanimous
passage of the Law Enforcement
Assistance Act,
federal policymakers
began to treat
anti-poverty policies
less as moral imperatives in
their own right and more as a
means to suppress future
rioting and crime.
So the Johnson administration
quickly combined
the existing education, health,
housing, and welfare programs
aimed at eliminating crime's
root causes with the police
training, research programs,
and criminal justice and penal
reforms intended to
contain criminal activity.
So in effect, the Johnson
administration fashioned a new
liberal synthesis that brought
crime control strategies
into the fold of social
welfare programs,
allowing law enforcement
officials to use methods
of surveillance that overlapped
with social programs--
so for instance,
anti-delinquency measures
framed as equal
opportunity initiatives--
to effectively diffuse
crime control strategies
into the everyday
lives of Americans
in segregated and
impoverished neighborhoods,
such as teen centers.
So this entanglement of
Great Society programs
satisfied federal
policymakers' desire
to expose poor Americans
to dominant values
while also suppressing the
groups of, in their words,
anti-social and
alienated black youth
that officials
blamed for incidents
of collective violence in
the second half of the 1960s.
Though since
federal policymakers
linked common markers of poverty
with perspective criminality,
they considered nearly
all youth living
in low-income neighborhoods
as potentially delinquent.
And this becomes a
legislative category,
a classification that grants
law enforcement officials
and criminal
justice institutions
greater authority in the
lives of young Americans
whose families received
public assistance, who
went to segregated urban
public schools, who
lived in public housing, or who
participated in social service
programs.
The label marked
people as ostensibly
on the brink of criminality.
It had little to do with whether
or not these youth had actually
broken the law.
Essentially, the preemptive
programs the federal government
developed and supported
at all levels indicted
black and brown youth based
on the immediate conditions
of their lives instead
of their actual crimes.
So the results of this
early intervention
was a statistical
portrait of crime
that overrepresented
black youths
since greater numbers
of black residents
came into contact with
police more frequently
and had longer criminal records
than their white counterparts.
The grim crime figures confirmed
federal policymakers' and law
enforcement officials' notions
about urban youth and fueled
the continued escalation
of punitive force based
on potentiality and prediction
to contain the problem.
So in effect, the cycle of
pathological assumptions
about Americans'
poverty and crime,
targeted patrol and
surveillance, and the resulting
skewed statistical
portrait of American crime
repeated itself, fueling the
escalation and the development
of crime war programs and the
racial profiling within them.
So how did black youth
initially respond
to the punitive impulses
and preemptive crime control
policies of Johnson's
urban social program
when children and
teenagers suddenly
found themselves coming
into contact with police
at schools, dances, parks,
and social welfare offices?
So I'm taking up these questions
in one of my current projects,
which shifts in scale from the
national to the local level
to examine the most widely
adopted form of protest
young people engaged in
low-income black communities
during the early crime
war era, where the 2,310
incidents described by
journalists as disturbances,
uprisings, rebellions,
melees, eruptions, or riots
that occurred in 960
segregated black communities
from Alexandria to
Gary to Sacramento
between 1968 and 1972.
Now, following the assassination
of Martin Luther King
in early April
1968, residents had
erupted in 125 cities for
the remainder of the month.
And then that June, Johnson
signed the Omnibus Crime
Control and Safe
Streets Act into law,
which was really the
capstone of the Great Society
and the last major piece
of domestic legislation
that he passed.
So this legislation expanded
upon the Law Enforcement
Assistance Act and
invested $400 million
worth of seed money
in the War on Crime.
And that amounts
to about $3 billion
in today's dollars, so a massive
new investment in police.
As in Watts, Newark, Detroit,
and other major cities
during the earlier wave
of large-scale unrest,
the collective violence that
persisted after the Safe
Streets Act always started
with contact between residents
and the front-line
representatives
of the state, the police,
and then quickly moved
to other institutions.
So it seemed the decision to
divest from social welfare
programs while incentivizing--
and at times
specifically requiring--
state and local authorities
to increase police presence
and surveillance in
targeted urban areas
had a significant
tendency to inflame
the violent civil
disorder that officials
had sought to prevent.
So as state and
local governments
began to receive their first
federal crime-fighting grants,
many black residents in cities
across the United States
responded to the new policing of
ordinary, everyday activities,
the buildup of
unanswered grievances,
and the lack of concrete changes
in their immediate living
conditions by throwing punches
and rocks, as in this image,
at police officers,
detonating firebombs, smashing
the windows of exploitative
and exclusionary institutions,
and plundering local stores.
For example, in Stockton,
a mid-sized city
in California's
Central Valley, a crowd
of black residents living in the
segregated Sierra Vista housing
project seized an opportunity
to kidnap two police officers
and housing authority officials
in the community's gymnasium
in July 1968.
So after they kidnapped these
officers, a crowd promptly
surrounded the building,
taunted the officers,
and demanded additional
resources for the community.
Soon, more than 40 police,
Sheriff's deputies,
and highway patrolman arrived
at the scene for reinforcement.
But far from
suppressing the unrest,
Sierra Vista residents went
on to destroy public property
in the area for two
consecutive nights.
It can be a struggle to imagine
the overpoliced, marginalized,
and isolated
residents in Stockton
and elsewhere as
political actors.
And this bias has influenced
the writing of history.
Even those of us interested
in forms of resistance
to structural racism have been
reluctant to take seriously
the political nature
of black uprisings.
Yet they were neither
spontaneous nor meaningless
eruptions.
Just as much as nonviolent
and direct action,
rebellion presented a way for
oppressed and disenfranchised
to express collective solidarity
in the face of punitive state
forces and calcified
democratic institutions.
So reviving our knowledge about
these forgotten rebellions also
has important
ramifications for how
we tell the history
of mass incarceration,
though some scholars
have recently
argued that black
Americans called
for more police on the
streets, at schools,
and in housing projects.
And these accounts implicitly
or explicitly suggest
that black Americans championed
the politics of law and order
and are therefore partly to
blame for the punitive turn
in domestic policy.
I think the history of these
"forgotten rebellions,"
as I call them, adds
another dynamic layer
and set of actors to the
story of the so-called "black
silent majority."
As much as some segments
of the black middle class,
political leaders,
and clergy joined
the clamor for law
and order, many others
who do not appear in
traditional archives,
and many of whom were too
young to vote, collectively
defined the legitimacy of
new policing and carceral
strategies.
So in addition, the
failure to attend
to the voices of black Americans
across class strata and outside
of traditional archives, as
well as outside of the nation's
largest cities--
a crucial part of
the story of how
these rebellions became obscured
in our memory is bureaucratic.
So by the late '60s,
the Safe Streets Act
and the subsequent
militarization of local police
effectively quashed any
nascent movement of rebellions
by making them matters
of local administration
and pacification instead of
national political crises.
The legislation
supported police forces
in communities that seemed
vulnerable to unrest,
with surplus
weapons from Vietnam
and training them in systematic
riot control methods.
The act essentially
created the infrastructure
and the punitive apparatus
to make smaller police
departments, particularly those
in deindustrializing cities
with a critical mass
of black residents,
capable of handling
uprisings on their own
before they became
spectacular enough
to generate national media
or activist attention.
So importantly, no less
than $3 out of every $4
the DOJ dispersed to
prosecute the War on Crime
during its first 15 years
went to police operations,
for a total outlay equivalent
to some $15 billion today.
The states, of course,
at the same time
dedicated hundreds of
billions of dollars
more to criminal justice
and law enforcement,
stimulated by the programs
federal policymakers
subsidized and designed.
A close examination of a
cross-regional sampling
of these thousands of
incidents of unrest
demonstrates that had
policymakers and officials
took the disorders
as an opportunity
to listen to residents' demands
and reexamine the purpose
and function of police, the
negative consequences of crime
control strategies and
the escalation of violence
might have been
avoided entirely.
Taken together, the history
of the forgotten rebellions
reveals that patrolling
low-income communities
with outside forces and
throwing money at the problem
does not effectively
control crime.
In fact, it
establishes a dynamic
where residents and officers
view each other as the enemy,
rendering both sides less safe.
The important lesson
from the rebellions
that police violence
precipitates community violence
escaped most policymakers,
law enforcement officials,
and scholars, but
importantly, not all of them.
Shortly after the
nation's first SWAT team
premiered at the headquarters
of the Black Panther Party
in Los Angeles in
the winter of 1969,
the city's police
chief, Ed Davis,
issued a warning to
his captain school.
And he said, "in
areas where there
has been a pattern of
using strong physical force
to achieve police objectives,
a concurrent pattern
of resistance develops within
the individual or group.
The result is
resistance and lack
of cooperation on the
part of the law violator
and the subsequent necessity
for resorting to force
on the part of the police.
The use of force is
thus self-perpetuating."
So Davis's point here
offers a telling commentary
or a foreshadowing
of the consequences
of the self-perpetuating
tactics officials
at all levels of government
developed for the War on Crime
and later the wars
on drugs and gangs.
And we can take
this even further.
Did preemptive policies and
self-perpetuating forces
that Davis described
somehow amplify crime?
So in the era of frequent
small-scale urban rebellion,
a growing consensus of
policymakers, law enforcement
officials, and many
of their constituents
came to see crime as
an inevitable condition
in many low-income
black urban communities.
This consensus argued that the
domestic policies of the 1960s
had failed to make the poor
into productive citizens
and that domestic
urban policy should
focus on containing the
problems of crime and violence
rather than seeking to
eliminate them entirely.
During the 1970s, a new
theory of law enforcement
began to emerge
from these ideas.
The problem of law
and order was seen
as resulting from patrol methods
insufficient to a growing
population and, in
particular, a growing
population of black youth living
at or below the poverty level.
The solution lay in
encouraging officers
to walk the streets
of neighborhoods
and to involve themselves
in community life.
During the Nixon
years, riot squads,
tactical units, as well as decoy
and plainclothes operations
in targeted urban areas
complemented the ongoing merger
of social welfare services
and law enforcement programs,
such as the Police Service
Center at a DC housing
project in this image, which
replaced a community health
clinic that had originally
been established with community
action funds in the 1960s.
In the context of
deindustrialization
and joblessness and shortly
after Gerald Ford assumed
the presidency, law enforcement
officials drastically
moved beyond these strategies.
So the DOJ, the
Department of Justice,
under Ford empowered federal
and local police officers
to build long-lasting
relationships with criminals
and make mass arrests
via sting operations,
reaching a new level of
preemption in the process.
This time, federal
policymakers began
to grant urban
police departments
money to purchase stolen goods
and fence the black market
merchandise to bait criminals
or would-be criminals.
Authorities supported
these projects
in the name of attacking
organized crime.
But in the main battlegrounds
in the War on Crime,
these methods quickly
evolved into an attack
on black petty thieves
and came to involve
the creation of
crime itself, which
is a central feature of the
rise of the carceral state.
The Washington, DC, police
department's sting effort
was the most elaborate
and contrived of those
supported by this fundings.
This project, called
Operation Sting,
involved the FBI, the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms,
and the DOJ, who together
acquired an unheated warehouse
near Langdon Park in
the segregated Northeast
side of the district
in the fall of 1975
and purchased $2.4 million in
stolen property with $67,000
in government funds.
After only five
months, the initiative
succeeded in its
intended purpose
to round up hundreds of
crooks, nearly all of them
wageless black men.
Essentially, Operation Sting
created a demand for crime
by providing the unemployed
with a market on which
to sell stolen goods.
Word quickly spread that
the fencing outfit, known
to its customers as PFF
Inc., for Police-FBI Fencing
Incognito, was tied
to the mafia and would
pay the highest prices in town.
The undercover police
officers and agents,
posing as mafia
dons, gave themselves
Italian names straight out of
the then-recent Godfather film.
So from left to right,
we have Mike Franzino.
FBI Agent Bob Lill
is in the car.
And Washington Police
Sergeant Carl Mathis
is standing next to him.
Kneeling in front is
Rico [? Ricatone. ?]
And next to him with
the checkered pants
is Bohanna La Fontaine,
with Angelo [INAUDIBLE]
and Tony Bonano
standing in the back.
None of these officers were of
Italian descent, by the way.
But they interspersed terms
like "ciao" and "arrivederci"
from the made-up
language they spoke
when they played these roles.
So customers furnished
PFF Inc. with typewriters,
adding machines,
radios, and television
sets and then went back out to
steal more items for the dons.
And if no valuable material
goods were to be found,
the crooks went after
their neighbors' mail,
bringing stolen housing and
welfare checks and credit
cards.
As their employer,
PFF Inc. provided
a steady and continuous
source of income
as long as the thieves
could deliver the plunder.
Meanwhile, officers
built criminal profiles
of their customers over
the course of the sting.
By the end of February
1976, the immense amount
of information the
officers collected
and their desire to act on a
number of recorded confessions
brought the fencing
outfit to its conclusion.
The department issued
warrants for suspects
caught on hidden cameras
during transactions,
a total of about 120 offenders.
Most were released or
received light sentences.
But all of the suspects
either took a plea bargain
or received a conviction.
Federal law enforcement
institutions and the DC Police
Department found Operation
Sting to be so successful
that they planned and
funded another fencing event
that summer called
Operation Gotcha Again.
This time, police officers
courted the thieves
and potential thieves to fence
stolen credit cards, welfare
checks, negotiable papers,
and personal household items
by operating under the
name H&H Tracking Company.
This was a more expansive
effort than Operation Sting.
And so Gotcha Again captured 141
suspects in total, many of whom
were out on bail.
And it also worked
on behalf of PFF Inc.
So soon other police
departments in cities
wanted to join in fencing
stolen goods with federal funds.
And then stings
proliferated thereafter,
with the DOJ
allocating $8 million
for federal, state, and local
joint sting operations in 1978.
The Ford administration promoted
these local fencing operations
with a training film made
by the FBI and the DC Police
Department and $2 million
in discretionary grants
so that police departments from
Maine to Virginia to California
could also make
sweeping arrests.
In the four years after
the Operation Sting test
case in the nation's
capital, police
went on to issue arrest
warrants for a total of roughly
4,000 people on 7,000
separate charges
and recovered $114
million in stolen property
throughout the United States.
Officials were
particularly enthusiastic
about the operations because
of the 98% conviction
rate for sting-related charges
and the high percentage
of guilty pleas many
defendants accepted.
If bringing thousands
of black petty thieves
into the criminal justice system
was the end goal of the fencing
operations, then the
federal government's
growing investment in
the stings made sense
even if they failed to have any
measurable impact on the crime
problem itself.
With federal agents
posing as mobsters
and encouraging
low-income residents
to steal from one
another, the War on Crime
had been fully converted into
a self-perpetuating entity
after 10 years.
And jumping ahead
here, the use of decoy,
fencing, and sting operations
to identify, arrest,
and incarcerate
potential criminals
would grow even more
essential to the War on Drugs
during the Reagan
administration.
So here we have
Miami police officers
with tables full of compensated
weapons and contraband in 1988.
The fact that the
stings of the drug war
centered on the cocaine
trade rather than fencing
made possible sweeping
arrests in the thousands.
So lines between police work and
entrapment continued to blur.
For example, instead of
dressing up as mobsters,
the sheriff's office in
Broward and Polk counties
simply manufactured and
distributed their own crack
supply.
In 1988, the Broward
Sheriff's office
seized roughly 2 pounds
of powdered cocaine
and used it to produce
$20,000 worth of street value
crack on the seventh floor
of the county courthouse.
And within two
months, the department
made some 2,300 arrests
by dealing its own drug.
This is one of the big
findings of my research
that I don't think
gets enough play--
that the Broward office is
literally manufacturing crack
to sell and arrest people
for buying at the county
courthouse.
For the officers
who participated
in the sting operations and
the crack deals in the streets,
these missions provided
an appealing alternative
to the mundane and difficult
aspects of police work.
In arresting
offenders, police were
fulfilling their most basic
duty of enforcing the law
and promoting public safety.
But the operations also gave
law enforcement something
far more tangible.
When it appeared that petty
theft and burglary were
on the rise, federal and local
law enforcement officials
believed decoy- and
entrapment-like measures
would help identify a
subset of repeat offenders
in black urban neighborhoods
and arrest them en masse.
Capturing residents under
legally viable circumstances,
however orchestrated, enabled
law enforcement authorities
to build strong criminal cases
against the petty thieves
and drug users that would
assuredly land them in prison.
Since federal policymakers
and law enforcement officials
came to see incarceration
as a powerful crime
deterrent at this
time, the stings
offered police an easy means
to remove a population they
saw as latently criminal
from the streets
and place them behind bars.
From the perspective of
criminal justice authorities
at all levels,
then, establishing
an informal economy of their
own was a necessary precaution
to prevent suspects
and would-be suspects
from engaging in further and
perhaps more violent crime.
Yet these and other
preemptive strategies
that federal government and
local law enforcement officials
developed to fight crime
had devastating consequences
in the cities where they were
most energetically implemented.
As they unfolded on the ground
during the '70s and '80s,
these policies transformed
the War on Crime
from a politically salient,
action-oriented metaphor
into an actual
violent conflict that
involved the criminalization
of urban space
and low-income
residents in general,
as well as the use of
military-grade weapons,
dangerous patrol tactics, real
gun battles, and real victims.
Against the backdrop of law
enforcement authorities'
efforts to fight crime
by manufacturing crime,
the collective
violence that have
been expressed against
state forces in Stockton
and elsewhere during the period
of rebellion turned inward--
so from black Americans'
struggle with the institutions
and policies that
officials developed
to fight the War on Crime to a
collective struggle against one
another.
So how do we get from the
external collective violence
during the 1960s and
first half of the 1970s
to the internal collective
violence from the mid-1970s
onward?
And that is a tough question.
So there are two
approaches that I'm taking
to go about answering it.
The first roots
internal violence
in the war on gangs and
mass incarceration itself.
And the second grounds
internal violence
in the context of an
entire city suffering
from extreme rates
of poverty and crime.
During the 1970s,
everyday survival
in many deindustrializing
urban areas
depended on engaging in
informal and illicit economies.
So the steady
source of employment
that PFF Inc. provided
for hundreds of people
in the devastated
Northeast section of DC
really underscores this.
The same group of youth
between ages 16 and 24
that policymakers and law
enforcement authorities labeled
as chronic offenders were
also chronically jobless,
at rates as high
as 40% in places
like South Central Los Angeles.
In the early 1970s,
lacking viable prospects,
students began to
congregate into gangs,
engaging in petty theft,
reclaiming public space
and territory with
graffiti tags.
Los Angeles authorities moved
to take a proactive stance
against these youth groups
almost immediately after they
organized, first in 1972
with the Street Gang
Detail of the Los Angeles
Sheriff's Department,
or the LASD, came to segregated
black and brown neighborhoods.
Then the LAPD's TRASH unit, for
Total Resources Against Street
Hoodlums, arrived at the
77th Police Station in Watts
the following year.
And these units initially
focused their suppression
strategies on detaining
young residents
for minor infractions.
So curfew laws,
which were rarely
enforced outside of South
Central and East Los Angeles,
served as an easy pretense to
stop, interrogate, and arrest
black and brown youth
in targeted communities.
Under pressure for harassing
young residents, especially
in groups, TRASH changed
its name to CRASH,
substituting Community
Resources for Total Resources.
With few opportunities
for formal employment
even within the
service sector, youth
identified as gang members.
And other residents of
economically isolated
black urban neighborhoods
turned not only
to fencing stolen
goods, but also
gambling, stealing, robbing,
pimping, prostituting, and drug
dealing, employment
options of the last resort
that became known during
this period as "hustling."
Federal officials and law
enforcement authorities
understood the rise
of hustling and gangs
not as the
consequence of failing
urban schools,
unemployment, poverty,
and the frequent
encounters with police
that came with those
conditions, but as the result
of permissive legal sanctions.
[? So ?] listen to
Ford's attorney,
General William Saxbe, on
the CBS Morning News program
Face the Nation
seeking to generate
public support for the
administration's law
enforcement agenda.
He said, we do not
believe that you
are doing criminals
any favors by saying,
well, he's misunderstood.
He's poor.
He's black, and send them back
to the community, where he is
going to get in trouble again.
Saxbe and others'
view of black crime
as the pathological result of
welfare dependency, poverty,
and racism
rationalized the focus
on effects rather
than insoluble causes,
leading policymakers
to consistently embrace
an increasingly
punitive approach
and justifying the investment
in police departments and court
systems to solve
social problems.
In Los Angeles, CRASH and
the Street Gang Detail
thrived alongside
a national push
to fight gangs with tactical
surveillance, patrol,
and research.
And the LASD force
received a number of grants
from the Department of
Justice in the 1970s
to gather data on the problem
of black youth gangs, which
is a topic that virtually
became a cottage
industry during this period.
Policymakers, law
enforcement officials,
and influential
social scientists
like Marvin Wolfgang
and James Q. Wilson
increasingly attributed
the national crime problem
to a small group of
so-called "career criminals."
In line with the general ethos
behind the sting operations,
Ford officials believed
that urging police officers
and juvenile courts to,
quote, "deal more harshly
with repeat offenders
who are gang members
and remove them from the
community" would bring
an end to the pervasive
atmosphere of violence
they believed was
sweeping the nation.
Creating even more opportunities
for law enforcement authorities
to arrest gang members and
sentencing guidelines that
would ensure their long stays
in prison as a deterrent tactic
offered them the most obvious
solution to street crime.
The Ford administration's Career
Criminal Program in effect
established a separate
justice system
in Los Angeles and
other troubled cities
for the new concerning
category of chronic offender,
with a total discretionary
outlay of $330 million,
or about $1.6 billion today.
The typical defendant selected
for career criminal prosecution
tended to be a single,
unemployed black man
under the age of 24.
Once the defendant had been
identified for the program,
they would be assigned to an
experienced local or state
prosecutor, who devoted
all of their energies
to ensuring the
case was properly
prepared and expedited
from arraignment
to the final ruling, working
directly with law enforcement
authorities to investigate the
suspect all through the trial
process.
In Los Angeles, the Street
Gang Detail of the LASD
designed the Operation
Hickory program
that targeted the Hickory
Street gang in Watts
using the National
Career Criminal approach.
The impetus behind Ford's Career
Criminal Program and Operation
Hickory was the intent to take
gang members "off the streets,"
in the words of
staffer Dick Cheney.
But the targeted
enforcement concentrated
prosecution and draconian
sentencing practices did not
successfully curtail the spread
of gangs or reduce social harm.
As knowledge into
gang violence that
reinforced existing ideas about
innate black criminality grew
and concentrated
enforcement grew,
so, too, did gangs themselves.
In 1972, when the Street
Gang Detail formed,
only 18 known and
active black gangs
existed in LA,
Compton, and Inglewood.
And by 1978, their numbers
had more than doubled.
Instead, Operation Hickory and
the Career Criminal Programs
effectively expedited
the trials and sentencing
of young people
prelabeled in this manner,
bringing them into closer
contact with law enforcement
officials and other
accused criminals.
Rather than seriously reevaluate
the Career Criminal Approach
and the structural shortcomings
of Operation Hickory,
the Department of Justice's
Office of Juvenile
Justice and
Delinquency Prevention
went on to replicate
the program in East
LA, Lynwood, and Firestone
stations, all of which
reported alarming
rates of gang violence.
Using the awarded federal grant
funding and Operation Hickory
as the model, the LASD created
Operation Safe Streets, or OSS,
in 1979.
The program started with 14
investigators and four teams
assigned to each station.
To address the
growing gang problem
in a seemingly practical
and cost-effective way
with limited law
enforcement personnel,
OSS teams applied a
targeting concept,
selecting the most
active group in the area
and concentrating all
law enforcement efforts
on a small set of members.
The deputies sought to build
rapport with suspected gang
members by maintaining
constant contact
outside of an "adversarial
context," in their words,
applying firm but
fair law enforcement,
and developing
relationships based
on their personal
knowledge of the field
and a humanitarian concern for
individuals and their family
circumstances.
Unlike the CRASH officers,
who the LAPD sent directly
to the streets without
gang enforcement training,
the LASD required
each OSS officer
to undergo a basic
40-hour gang curriculum
with an additional 40 hours
of advancing gang training
in order to build their
communication skills.
In theory, such
training would lead
to improved relations
with the community
and assist in recruiting
informants who could
provide strong intelligence.
As in Operation Hickory,
OSS cast a continuous field
of supervision over
targeted gang members
by bringing deputies
into collaboration
with prosecutors and
probation officers
under a single purpose.
So known as the Hardcore Unit,
the district attorneys who
worked with OSS
devoted themselves
to gang-related cases in
a vertical prosecution
system, where a single
attorney or a small team
handled a case
from its inception
through the sentencing process.
Within the probation department,
meanwhile, authorities
created a specialized gang
unit to work with OSS deputies.
And then these
gang-focused officers
have reduced caseloads, which
allowed them to supervise
probationers that had been
targeted by OSS deeply
and intensely.
So a combination of these
three vital elements
of OSS enforcement--
the policing
by the sheriff's deputies,
the vertical prosecution
approach by the
district attorneys,
and the intensive
probation supervision--
seemed to disrupt
informal economic activity
enough for law
enforcement authorities.
So within three years of
its inception in 1982,
the OSS program
expanded from four teams
to seven, including the Los
Angeles Men's Central Jail.
Together, CRASH and OSS placed
tens of thousands of young men
under law enforcement
supervision for the remainder
of the decade and beyond.
And when poorly
educated, unemployed,
and racially
marginalized Americans
entered overcrowded
and often inhumane
penal facilities at historic
rates during the 1980s,
the experience of collective
confinement and the methods
established by correctional
authorities to maintain control
turned many nonviolent
and first-time offenders
into hardened criminals,
propelling alarming levels
of recidivism that exacerbated
group warfare and violence.
The circumstances of
collective confinement
enabled groups like the
Mexican Mafia, shown here
at San Quentin, Crips,
Bloods, MS-13, Black Guerrilla
Family, Nazi Low Riders,
and many other groups
to form highly centralized,
violent governing bodies tied
to the streets.
If a suspect
remained unaffiliated
with a gang going
into a penal facility,
his survival within jail--
and certainly in prison--
depended on joining a gang
soon after for personal
protection, if nothing else.
For incarcerated shock collars,
or high-ranking members
of California's gangs,
prison essentially
functioned as a command
post, where many
continued to direct activity on
the outside from behind bars,
extorting money, ordering
hits, and participating
in informal economies.
The criminogenic conditions
spawned by mass incarceration
also extended to the guards,
who facilitated violence
within carceral institutions
and sustained criminal networks
on the streets in the process.
It would be impossible for
contraband, weapons, drugs,
and, today, technologies
such as cellphones
to enter penal institutions
without the full participation
and involvement of
penal authorities.
In Los Angeles,
some OSS deputies
went so far as to replicate
the gang culture--
so gang sets of their
own, so to speak--
which fed on and
exacerbated violence.
So for example, the Vikings,
the most notorious LASD gang,
formed in 1980 at
the Lynwood station
and openly advocated the
politics of white nationalism.
As a rite of passage marking
the honor of street combat
and a symbol of membership,
Vikings typically
sported either a tattoo
of a helmeted Aryan
warrior or the number 998,
which was a dispatch code
for officer-involved shootings.
Much like the gangs they were
meant to fight and contain,
the Vikings adopted
hand signals,
throwing up an L sign
with their thumb and index
finger for Lynwood.
They used slang speech
when interacting
with community members.
And they marked their turf with
graffiti tags, most often LV25
to denote Lynwood
Viking Station 25.
And much like the stop
snitching movement
embraced by many residents
in the communities targeted
by OSS, with the
honor of joining
the Vikings came
the duty to, quote,
"keep your mouth shut and
obey the code of silence,"
in the words of deputy Mike
Osborne, a former member.
Within the six by
seven-block radius
they patrolled in Lynwood,
a community experiencing
high levels of social
harm, the Vikings
terrorized black
and brown residents.
They frequently used racial
slurs and obscene language
during casual interactions
with the community.
They charged their
way into homes,
ransacking them, and
roughing up entire families,
usually leaving behind
a destructive scene
without even making an arrest.
At other times, Vikings
invoked their authority
to arrest residents of
color on arbitrary charges.
And they often resorted
to excessive force,
beating suspects during
routine stop and frisks
with guns, flashlights,
clubs, boots, brick walls,
and electric taser guns.
Much of the Vikings' brutality
occurred behind closed doors--
so in the OSS trailer or
at the Lynwood station--
where at one point a map
of the District of Africa
hung on the wall, surrounded
by racist cartoon depictions
of black men and various
inflammatory slogans.
In the context of the War on
Drugs and after California's
passage of the Street Terrorism
and Enforcement and Prevention,
or STEP, Act of 1988,
which made participation
in a gang a criminal
offense, gangs
within gang-fighting
units continued
to spread in Los Angeles.
So one gang of
brown OSS officers
called themselves
the Jump Out Boys
and essentially promoted
aggressive policing
within the jails
and on the streets.
So note the slogan here--
"no, you can't call yo' momma"--
and the tattoo, which is an
oversized skull with a wide,
toothy grimace and
glowing red eyes
wrapped in an OSS bandanna.
Like the Vikings,
the Jump Out Boys
earned respect
after being involved
in a shooting incident.
The 3,000 Boys, or
the deputies who
worked in the third floor
of the Men's Central Jail,
also developed their
own hand signals
and refused to associate
with rival guard cliques,
like the 2,000 Boys in the
second floor of the men's jail.
And the Bandidos, who chose
to represent themselves
by a skeleton wearing a
sombrero and carrying a pistol,
used violence and
intimidation to demand favors
of women deputy trainees as part
of the gang initiation rituals.
I could go on.
Until very recently, the
LASD raised questions
about the behavior of
deputies, but remained
largely complacent about the
gangs within its own ranks
on the grounds that banning
them would be unconstitutional,
instead paying out
various class action
lawsuits in the early 1990s and
allowing the units to persist.
It was not until the early 2010s
that LASD fired or placed on
leave 12 members of the Jump
Out Boys and the 3,000 Boys
after a supervisor
discovered propaganda that
promoted aggressive
policing and portrayed
an officer-involved shooting
in a positive light.
So this history suggests
a mutually reinforcing
relationship between
paramilitary urban gangs
and paramilitary penal forces.
In contrast to this image--
and these are prison
photos from one
of my sources, Colton Simpson,
who is currently serving a life
term at Lancaster Prison in
California for a misdemeanor.
This is his third strike.
And hopefully given some new
legislation in California,
he will be released soon.
But that has not
been secured yet.
And these pictures are from when
Colton was in his early 20s.
In many senses, the OSS
gangs and the street gangs
are mirrored images
of each other,
except that the fact that Colton
and his cohort on the inside
aren't smiling and
celebrating in quite
the same way as the deputies.
In addition to the hand
signs and the tattoos,
they are around the same
age, mostly men of color,
with the exception of the
white nationalist Vikings.
They perform a similar type
of commentary and masculinity.
And they engage in a
similar type of violence,
except one is sanctioned
by governing forces.
The fact that the 3,000
Boys, the Jump Out Boys,
and the Vikings emerged
not out of the LAPD,
but out of the
Sheriff's department,
underscores the extent to
which modern penal institutions
function as organizing
sites for gangs and crimes,
as each and every
Sheriff's deputy
begins his or her career
at the county jail
and used it as a space to
recruit and discipline members,
much like the gangs.
So it seems to me that
these groups, both Colton
and other Crips in prison
and the 3,000 Boys,
profoundly reflect
the options available
to low-income Americans
in the late 20th century.
For too many people on both
sides of the crime, drug,
and gang wars, these options
are either dying prematurely,
joining the military,
going to prison,
or enlisting as a
cop or prison guard.
After all, our
corrections sector
employs more Americans than the
top three private employers--
GM, Walmart, and
Ford-- combined.
So this raises questions about
power in the criminal justice
system and the contours
of inequality and access
in America that I'm
currently approaching,
as Robert mentioned, within
a much larger framework.
And that is of the
history of the development
and underdevelopment
in an entire city.
So I think this cycle of
state-sanctioned and community
violence that I've attempted
to lay out for you today
can be seen very clearly
in Stockton, California,
where, as you'll remember, black
residents of the Sierra Vista
Housing Project had
revolted back in 1968.
Today, the deaths on
the streets of Stockton
have outnumbered big
cities like Chicago
and the total number
of US casualties
in Iraq and Afghanistan
during the same period.
So over the course of my
last sabbatical in late 2016,
I began to assist
Stockton Police Chief Eric
Jones in his effort to
reform the department.
I gained access to Chief Jones
as part of the National Network
for Safe Communities,
which is a program
that the Department of
Justice established shortly
after the 2014
protests in Ferguson.
Widely regarded in the
law enforcement community
as one of the most progressive
police chiefs in the country,
Jones has really taken
important strides
to improve policing and
public safety in the city
under the National
Network's guidance.
He is the first
police chief in the US
to begin a process of
racial reconciliation,
for lack of a better term,
in his department, whereby
officers hold listening sessions
with black and brown residents
and take action on grievances.
Even though police departments
rarely open up their records
to historians, I'm fortunate
to be currently working
with Chief Jones and other
officials in Stockton
to help them produce a
history of racial tension
and policing in the city and
to help assist in this larger
reconciliation process.
I think understanding
policing in Stockton
provides a really
meaningful view into the way
that crime control
measures operate
in smaller cities, where
disproportionate numbers
of people of color live at
or below the poverty line
and experience high rates of
incarceration and violence.
As I began to spend
time in Stockton
and get to know Chief Jones
and build relationships
with rank-and-file officers and
municipal employees, community
activists, and formerly
incarcerated residents,
I became fascinated by
the dynamics I observed
and compelled to understand
the historical process that
gave rise to them.
So larger questions
emerged about the ways
in which political and economic
development in the last 50
years turned Stockton
into one of the most
dangerous and impoverished
cities in America today.
The crime control programs
the Clinton administration
supported, including the
investment in community
policing, made possible
by the 1994 Crime Bill,
had particularly strong
impacts in Stockton,
enabling local authorities
to create a fighting unit
of their own
following, of course,
from the initiatives in Los
Angeles and other places.
So my next major book
manuscript project
will place this internal
collective community violence
in full context by providing
a history of Stockton
from the Sierra Vista
uprising to the present.
As a real microcosm
of America, Stockton
provides a powerful
lens to examine
political and economic
transformations
in the late 20th
century, as well
as the dimensions of
contemporary racial inequality.
When the Fair
Housing Act in 1968
outlawed racially
restrictive covenants,
ending the type of
housing segregation
that had maintained
property values in Stockton
for most of the 20th
century, white residents
in the affluent north side
began a redistricting process
that accelerated
in the mid-1970s,
when busing programs forced
the integration of Stockton
public schools.
So the majority white
residents in Lincoln Village
promptly created Lincoln
Unified School District
and do not pay taxes to
the majority black, brown,
and yellow city of
Stockton despite the fact
that the city surrounds
the village on all sides.
So Stockton schools
suffered from high dropout
and illiteracy rates as
a result of the zoning,
while Lincoln
students consistently
performed at the highest
levels in San Joaquin Valley.
So instead of improving
living conditions
for thousands of
low-income families
or allocating resources
to effectively deal
with the problem
of violent crime,
municipal authorities, most of
whom live outside of Stockton,
continue to subsidize
the construction
of sports arenas and
downtown development
to attract investment.
Of course, this history
of racist socioeconomic
development mirrors the
path that many other cities
pursued after civil rights.
But Stockton's unique
demographics really
give us a unique
window and to transcend
the black-white
binaries that shape much
of the popular and
scholarly imagination,
even in my own work.
So Stockton has
the largest number
of Filipino residents
outside of the Philippines
for most of the 20th century.
It was the first to
receive bracero workers
from Mexico World War II.
And it contained a
Japanese internment camp.
Indeed, Stockton's long
history of labor exploitation
and racial oppression
has made it
one of the most diverse
cities in America.
The demographics of Stockton,
where white residents make up
only 22% of the
population today--
and most live in
these shaded areas--
represent the future
of the United States
if current trends continue.
In a moment of larger
national transition,
my study will reveal how
economic development,
policing strategies,
and public programs
impact various racial
and ethnic groups
in specific and
disparate ways to help
us reach a more nuanced
understanding of violence
and segregation in America.
And I think it will
also place into greater
context the social divisions
that the election of 2016
exposed.
So although San Joaquin County
went for Democratic candidate
Hillary Clinton in 2016,
40% of its residents
supported Donald Trump.
And their votes exceeded support
for Republican candidate Mitt
Romney in Stockton in 2012.
So finally, this book will
move the field of urban history
outside of the big city, East
Coast framework that has really
come to define most
of the literature.
So we know very
little about dynamics
in places like Stockton,
Ferguson, and Flint,
and other smaller cities with
high rates of extreme poverty.
As the ground zero of the
foreclosure crisis in 2012,
Stockton became the largest
city to declare bankruptcy
before Detroit did
the following year.
Violence and crime rose
sharply in both places,
further eroding tax bases
and intensifying segregation.
Chief Jones might
not be fighting a war
on gangs and guns today
had Stockton authorities
responded to the requests for
jobs, recreational facilities,
and improved schools the Sierra
Vista community asked for--
demanded-- in a
closed-door meeting
with officials shortly
after the 1968 unrest.
Thereafter, the majority of
funding for low-income youth
in Stockton and elsewhere
focused on juvenile detention,
security hardware, and
gang-fighting forces
rather than the vocational
and educational opportunities
that residents wanted,
social programs
that might have brought
a far greater return
on the investment
in the long run.
The resistance to these type
of socioeconomic solutions
for the past 50-some
years informs the question
of the purpose of the
National Crime Control Program
and the mass
supervision it spawned
might have ultimately served.
The crime control strategies
federal policymakers developed
proved to have the opposite
impact in the cities
and neighborhoods that they
had placed under siege.
It's one of the most disturbing
ironies in the history
of American domestic policy.
What is remarkable is
that their lack of success
and the violence and
crime they advanced
seem fundamentally
irrelevant to federal, state,
and local policymakers
determined
to police urban
space and eventually
entire populations of young men
of color inside prison walls.
State-sanctioned violence
is often seen as a response
to crime.
But historical
consideration of violence,
citing from my first book
on crime control policy
and extending to my work
on external and internal
collective violence, as well as
my examination of recent place
in Stockton, shows that by
acting on potential crime
in various programs
that received
widespread implementation
in designated urban areas
by manufacturing crime
in order to fight crime
in decoy in sting operations and
by remaining complicit in gang
and illegal activity within
the ranks of law enforcement
officials themselves the
preemptive strategies,
federal policy makers adopted
for national crime control
programs unleashed
self-perpetuating forces that
converged in collective
internal warfare
and in the mass incarceration
of American citizens.
These forces continue
to compromise
our democratic values
of equality and liberty
and the principle of
liberty and justice for all.
I'll end there.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
