Consider the visible surface of Los Angeles. Freeway under-passes, bridges, alleyways, delivery trucks, service entrances, corner convenience stores, mailboxes, water towers, exhaust vents, and streets—except for those in the poshest parts of town, all are covered with graffiti. This was even truer in the 1990s, before the city achieved true expertise in pushing graffiti to the backs of signs and to the margins of freeways, instead of their main walls.
Can you read the graffiti? I couldn’t then and have only now barely begun to learn how to decipher it. But it’s a language and represents a world. It records deaths and transactions, favors done and owed, benefactions and trespasses. Laws and punishments. If you can’t read that graffiti, you have no idea what’s happening around you. How can anyone guide the young who can’t read the navigational charts?
When Karen moved her family back to Los Angeles, they hadn’t lived there in seven years, not since 1986. These were the very years in which the twisting double helix of drugs and gangs converged with an evolution in the criminal justice system. Now, under the mantle of the War on Drugs, came the state’s strongest push for deterrence. With that push, specific human beings, each victim, every wrongdoer, disappeared from the story of crime.
As I mentioned, a 1995 study found that law enforcement systematically overestimated the rate of involvement of gangs in drug transactions. As policy-makers sought to crack down on drugs, it seemed easy to do that just by cracking down on gangs. Because the drug business was erroneously attributed almost entirely to gangs, the War on Drugs morphed into a War on Gangs. The consequences of this transformation have come to define the criminal justice system.
A full decade earlier, in 1984, as Nancy Reagan was teaching people to “Just Say No,” the Drug Enforcement Administration initiated Operation Pipeline to interdict drug trafficking on the nation’s highways through the use of traffic stops. This operation, introduced in the get-tough era of President Reagan, provided national training for police in what we have come to know as racial profiling. Between 1984 and 1988, the State of California also passed eighty separate antigang measures, many of which added “enhancements” to sentences for any case that involved a gang element, a nice euphemism for giving someone extra years in prison. It must be said that getting tough on crime was a fully bipartisan pursuit. Democrats, as well as Republicans, drove through laws like these across all the states and at the federal level. A favorite tool was to pass a law mandating the minimum sentence for a specific crime, and thereby stripping judges of the discretion to peg a penalty to the circumstances of the wrongdoer.
From 1790 to 1950 the number of mandatory minimums in the federal penal code rose from 7 to 38. From 1980 to 2000, their number rose from 77 to 284. These mandatory minimums have been a key driver in increases in penal severity.
In these years, twenty-five years after the Jets and the Sharks stormed Broadway, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department created its first gang database. In 1988, after a high-profile drive-by shooting of a bystander near UCLA, the Los Angeles police used that database to round up no fewer than 1,400 African American youth in the L.A. Coliseum and to jail over 18,000 people in six months. One year later, the Los Angeles police chief, Daryl Gates, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that “the casual drug user should be taken out and shot.” The African American prison population in California alone grew from 12,470 to 42,296 between 1982 and 1995; the Latino prison population soared from 9,006 to 46,080. This was the city ready to explode when the four police officers who had been captured on video beating Rodney King were acquitted. This was the City of Angels.
Karen and her brood came home to a war between two sovereigns: the parastate of a drug world increasingly linked to gangs on one side, and the California and federal governments on the other. When Michael stole that $10 in Georgia, and the judge dropped the charges, you might say Michael met the “forgiving world.” When he shoplifted and stole the radio in Claremont in 1993, and didn’t get any actual charges, you might again say that he met a “forgiving world.” But by 1993, back in Los Angeles, Michael met a politically transformed world that was now unforgiving. By 1995, when he was arrested for the first time for the attempted carjacking and the previous day’s robberies, the angels had already turned their backs.
Yet it is not enough merely to see the parastate or to record the emergence of the unforgiving world. We must notice something else. I ask you this: how could Karen have known the landscape into which she was now moving her family? She was coming, once again, for a job. As had been the case in 1979, the City of Angels, with its rapidly increasing population and growing service industries, drew her siren-like with its opportunity. That opportunity was clear to her. The parastate was not.
The historian’s backward gaze can capture the life-altering convergence of the drug business, gangs, and a newly unforgiving criminal justice system, but while you’re living through it, only the smallest fragments—like news reports about crime—are visible. Fragments like police willing to round up 1,400 black men at one time.
Like the Los Angeles riots or, as some call them, rebellions.
Like miles of graffiti.
But what exactly do these fragments amount to? How can we know when we’re living through it? What is the name of the problem? As Karen navigated these turbulent waters, always seeking to pilot her vulnerable boatload of kids toward refuge, she could see only a bit of the whale’s tail here, a flash of fin there, and now and then the arching crest of the back breaking from the waves. But the whole beast? Never.
What was the beast, exactly, which now and then knocked her small craft? The graffiti is the clue. It records, yes, a world of violence and vendettas, with pregnant histories and decipherable rules. With benefactions and trespasses, crimes and punishments. A world in its own valence with its own laws.
The state sought to break the global drug supply chain by rounding up the lowest-level peddlers and assigning them disproportionate penalties in order to deter them. But too much money was at stake for the producers and wholesalers merely to concede defeat and cede control of their retail and street distributors. By the estimates of federal prosecutors, the famous “Freeway Rick,” an L.A. high school tennis star and community college upholstery student, made about $850 million between 1982 and 1989 selling cocaine to both Bloods and Crips gangs. The producers and wholesalers would fight rather than cave in to the government’s efforts to strip them of their distributors. They needed retailers and street sellers who could guarantee recruits into the business and also enforce discipline. To fight back against the War on Drugs, the drug gangs who took the business seriously established their own system of deterrence.
In short, if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, you’re shot immediately. In the knee first. You try to buck again? Then maybe you’re killed. Or maybe someone you love is killed. Immediately. The drug business depends on well-documented witness suppression programs. It operates a far more powerful system of deterrence than any a lawful state could ever devise. This is, finally, what makes it the parastate.
And then there’s another wrinkle. The War on Drugs has overloaded the justice system with nonviolent drug offenses. In U.S. district courts in 2013, 32 percent of defendant filings were for drug-related cases, making this the biggest category of filings. State judicial systems, too, have been significantly strained for financial resources and personnel by drug-related casework, and this has been true since the early 1990s. An overloaded judicial system then appears to put prosecutors in a position where, with regard to violent crimes, they wish to pursue only open-and-shut cases that will generate plea deals. According to Vernon Geberth, a retired police officer interviewed on public radio, police nowadays have a higher bar to get over in trying to clear homicides, for instance, because prosecutors want only those easier cases.
This higher bar has further effects. When it’s harder for police to hand over cases to prosecutors, we see declines in homicide clearance rates, the percentage of homicide cases that result in closed cases. What’s more, even those clearance rates mask failures because cases are often closed without an arrest or prosecution. In the 1960s, for instance, the average clearance rate for homicide was above 90 percent. In contrast, in Detroit in the years approaching the city’s bankruptcy, the homicide clearance rate verged on single digits. In Chicago in 2009, police cleared only 30 percent of homicide cases, many of them without charges. And in one Los Angeles Police Department bureau, clearance rates at about 60 percent hide the low rate of cases ending in arrest and prosecution. Clearance rates are lowest when victims are black and brown.
The consequences of falling clearance rates, especially against a backdrop of a narcotics business driving increases in violence, are profound. Pay close attention to Michael’s trajectory from 1991 through 1995. He stole $10 in coins from neighbors across the street; then he shoplifted and stole a radio from a next-door neighbor; then he acquired a gun and held up at gunpoint at least three and possibly five people in a one-week stretch. The dates are linear but the increase in the magnitude of his actions is exponential. This acceleration caught the adults in Michael’s life off guard. They were working to push back at the trouble, but they thought the pace of the battle was arithmetic, a matter of mere addition. They expected that the next event might be, at worst, one unit more serious than the previous. Instead, there was a phase shift. How do we explain this acceleration in Michael’s life?
To write this biography of the parastate, we will have to turn, forgive me, to economics. Two economists, Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi, have pinpointed an incredibly subtle connection between the War on Drugs and violence. They argue that above-average homicide rates—that is, above-average rates of armed violence and especially gun violence—will result from low rates of successful investigation and prosecution of homicide cases. If you live in an environment where you know that someone can shoot you with impunity, you are much more likely to be ready to shoot to kill at the first sign of danger. When murder goes unpunished, it begets more murder, partly for purposes of retaliation, partly because people are emboldened by lawlessness, but also as a matter of preemption. Unpunished murder makes everyone (including police) trigger-happy. Places where murder goes unpunished operate according to the dictum that the best defense is a strong offense. In other words, in places with low homicide clearance rates, there is a phase shift in the level of violence in the environment, and not simply a linear progression. Guns spread. The world tips from one social equilibrium to another. This phase shift, the rapid descent through a tipping point, is what we experience as acceleration. This is why the experience feels like that pneumatic tube whisking us instantly up a chute. This phase shift explains the acceleration in Michael’s life.
I’ve asked people who grew up in South Central how Michael might have gotten his gun. No one can give me a specific answer. This is not because they don’t know but because, as they incessantly say, “But guns are so easy to get. He could get a gun from just about anybody.” It’s my question—of how could Michael have gotten a gun—that doesn’t make any sense. It’s a stupid question. Guns were, simply stated, a matter of course in Los Angeles in the early 1990s.
My cousin Roslyn tells a surreal story. She was at a party once, somewhere in L.A., when someone came in and dumped a black garbage bag full of hard objects out onto the middle of the floor. Guns spilled out. Another girl grabbed one and held it to Roslyn’s head.
“Are you Blood? Are you Blood?” she demanded.
Roslyn, petrified, said nothing. Then, a man she’d never seen, and has never seen again, a ghost dressed all in white, suddenly appeared. “She’s cool,” the apparition said and disappeared. The girl lowered the gun and Roslyn left.
In urban centers of the global drug trade, such as the City of Angels, a parastate now operates a system of deterrence even more powerful than a legitimate state can operate. In addition, the misguided policies of the War on Drugs have themselves contributed to an acceleration of violence. Tragically, this simply entrenches the power of the parastate, which over and over again gains its first recruits because they need protection.
I am trying to make visible something that remains even to this day invisible.
It is not invisible because I am bad at seeing.
It is not invisible because I am bad at hunting.
It is not invisible because I am bad at researching.
I don’t fail to see its whole shape because I am oblivious or keeping my head in the sand. The beast below the turbulent waters of Los Angeles is invisible because it is illegal. We have made the beast invisible by desiring drugs and making our own desire illegal. We have made the beast invisible by lying to ourselves in this country about who we are.
We can even measure the size of this invisible world. For each of the last ten years, Americans have annually spent an estimated $100 billion on illegal narcotics. We are, remember, the leading consumer in the world. This annual expense is one-sixth of our national budget for defense. Or put it this way: it is roughly double the annual budget of the CIA. Imagine all the covert activity the CIA conducts all over the globe. Double it. And then imagine it all happening here, at home, in the U.S. of A. This is the size of the invisible world, an invisible world far more powerful than the CIA. And we expect a small intervention here, a small charitable act there, to rescue people? The angels have turned their backs. They have turned their backs on people trapped between the warring states. And thus many millions are gone.
As we now know, when Karen moved Michael back to Los Angeles, where she had steady employment, the police had 47 percent of African American men in Los Angeles between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-four in their gang database. Reread that. In 1992, the Los Angeles Police Department had 47 percent of African American men between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-four in their gang database. It doesn’t really matter if that many young men were actually gangbanging or if it was merely that the police believed them to be doing so. Nor does it matter if all of these young men were selling drugs or were only believed by the police to be doing so. In the context of residential segregation, the logic of social networks is such that once half of a particular group of young men in a city either are or are thought by the police to be involved in gangs, either are or are thought by the police to be involved in selling drugs, all of the young men in that group in the city will be affected by the world of gangs and the punishments applied to it. The question was not whether to live in this world, but only whether it could be survived. Survival would have required Michael to stay indoors, alone every day, or to have ventured out every day never any further than to his rooftop.
Some do survive, and you will find, I think, that they have often stayed indoors.
When Karen did move her family back to Los Angeles, blindly, she had to help her kids navigate a world she could not see. She could not see it because it was and is illegal. Prohibition incapacitates parents. It deepens the dark secrecy of adolescence. In the absence of a clear line of sight, meaningful choice-making is impossible, for parents and also for the young. If a person has been blindfolded, do we fault them for falling into the pit?