The Crips is primarily, but not exclusively, an African American gang (i.e., a durable, street-oriented youth group whose involvement in illegal activity is part of its group identity) formed in Los Angeles, California. What was once a single gang has evolved into a loosely connected network of individual sets. The gang is known for its members’ affinity for the color blue and notorious for its ongoing feud with the Bloods, who associate with the color red. Crips gang members are implicated in murders, robberies, drug dealing, sex trafficking, and other serious crimes. This article summarizes the history of the gang, its symbology, and its evolution over time, especially in relation to rivalry with the Bloods and reference to popular culture.
Origins and Early History
South-Central Los Angeles in the 1960s was an area that exemplified the bleakness of poor urban places. The Watts Riots of 1965 left an indelible mark on the city, and an entire generation of young Black men were searching for identity and respect, hanging out together in nascent gangs for protection in the violent streets. Undermined by the government and labeled a threat to national security, the Black Power movement and its various forms of self-advocacy were waning. It was out of the crisis of Black leadership that marked the end of the Civil Rights era that the Crips emerged.
In 1969, 15-year-old Raymond Washington, who had absorbed much of the Black Panther rhetoric of community control of neighborhoods, fashioned his own quasi-political organization in the Panther’s militant image. Washington, who had a reputation for street fighting, assembled his friends to start a gang near his 76th Street home, initially called the Baby Avenues to pay homage to the Avenues, an older local gang. The Baby Avenues later renamed themselves the Avenue Cribs, shortened to simply Cribs, a play on the slang term for home, but also the group’s youthful composition (i.e., a baby’s bed).
Just how Cribs became Crips is disputed. Some argue that a drunken gang member repeatedly mispronounced the b as a p and it stuck. Others claim that because the gang’s founding members would carry walking canes as an affectation, their victims would characterize their assailants as crippled. Still others say it was a typo in the Los Angeles Sentinel newspaper. Etymology aside, 2 years after Washington founded the Cribs on the city’s east side, a young bodybuilder with an affinity for street fighting named Stanley Tookie Williams was establishing himself across town on the west side. In 1971, Washington’s East Side Crips and Williams’ West Side Crips banded together to defend against other South Central gangs that were harassing them. In doing so, they created the Crips, a backronym for Community Revolution in Progress.
As the name implied, Washington and Williams intended to create a resistance movement for Black empowerment, but immaturity and inexperience meant that they failed to apply their vision of neighborhood protection into a broader progressive strategy. Instead, the group’s membership became preoccupied with protecting themselves from marauding gangs in the community, and as is common with gangs, they became integrated through conflict.
The gang grew via friendship and kinship ties at Washington, Fremont, and Locke High Schools; Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall; and Fred Shaw or Bob Simmon’s Home for Boys. It then expanded via a series of hostile takeovers of existing Los Angeles gangs. Washington, Williams, Mac Thomas (the leader of the Compton Crips), and Jimel Barnes (the leader of the Avalon Garden Crips) would venture into local neighborhoods and challenge the leaders of other gangs to one-on-one street fights. Although some gang bosses resisted losing their independence, this process resulted in most gangs agreeing to join the Crips, converting from small, independent cliques into subgroups or sets of the umbrella gang. Another round of gang mergers and acquisitions meant Crips sets soon outnumbered non-Crips gangs. By 1972, there were East Side Crips, West Side Crips, Compton Crips, Avalon Garden Crips, 43rd Street Crips, Harlem Crips, Hoover Crips, Inglewood Crips, and more, all emulating the territory-marking practices of the early Los Angeles Latino gangs.
However, rapid growth created problems for the fledgling gang. Long-standing enemies such as the Piru Street Boys and the Compton Crips were assumed to cooperate, for example, but grievances festered and individual personalities clashed. At the same time, non-Crips gangs, including the L. A. Brims, Athens Park Boys, the Bishops, and the Denver Lanes, sought an effective defense against Crips predation. In 1972, the Pirus split from the Crips. As a counterweight to Crips supremacy, they formed a blood alliance with the other gangs, forming a new gang federation called the Bloods. The ensuing war between the Crips and the Bloods claimed more than 15,000 lives between 1972 and 2017.
Washington went to prison in 1974 for robbery, leaving Williams in charge of the gang. However, in 1976, Williams was injured in a drive-by shooting and later developed an addiction to phencyclidine (more commonly known as PCP). The gang was already too big to manage, and with Washington away and Williams preoccupied, the Crips dived deeper into criminal ventures. By the time Washington was released from prison in 1979, gunplay was more common than fist-fighting, and young gang members were committing increasingly spectacular acts of violence in order to build their reputations.
Washington was opposed to gun violence and even attempted to reconcile the Crips and the Bloods, but soon discovered he had lost control of the gang he had cofounded. During a botched robbery in February 1979, Williams shot and killed the clerk at a 7-Eleven convenience store. Two weeks later, he killed a family of three during a robbery at a motel in South Central. Williams was ultimately convicted of four murders and sentenced to death. He rehabilitated inside prison, earning a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for his anti-gang advocacy. Still, in denying clemency for Williams, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger questioned whether Williams’ redemption was complete and sincere, a case study in the stigma attached to gang membership and the suspicion that many gang members face when trying to disengage from gangs. Williams was executed by lethal injection in December 2005. Washington was killed in a drive-by shooting near his home in August 1979. He was 25 years old.
Migration and Mimicry
Ten years into their history, the two founding members of the Crips were gone. By 1983, the Crips seized upon the availability of illicit drugs, particularly crack cocaine, as a means of income. In poor urban areas hollowed out by deindustrialization and cutoff from economic opportunity by racial discrimination, crack provided one of few lucrative incomes for young Black men. Owing in part to alliances made in the California state prisons, some Crips sets even began working directly with Mexican and Colombian drug cartels to traffic narcotics into the United States. Drug markets are self-enforced through violence, and at this time, production and possession of compact, inexpensive firearms were booming, with the so-called Saturday Night Specials (small caliber handguns of low quality) manufactured in California by the Ring of Fire gun companies. Turf wars turned especially violent, and gang-related homicides reached unprecedented highs.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Crips gang members also began migrating from Los Angeles to other U.S. cities to establish new drug markets and other criminal enterprises. This gave rise to Crips gang franchising or importation, whereby LA Crips would either colonize gangs in other locations or recruit local youth to establish a branch of the gang in an area previously untouched by gangs. Police crackdowns and tough new criminal justice sanctions on gangs followed, resulting in many Crips gang members being sent to prison. An alliance was subsequently formed between the Crips and the Folk Nation, a confederation of gangs originating from Chicago and the Midwest, as a means of protecting gang members incarcerated in state and federal correctional facilities. This, in turn, contributed to further gang proliferation. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, and thanks to vivid depictions of the Crips in the gangster rap music of the N.W.A. and in Hollywood movies such as Colors in 1988, Boyz n the Hood in 1991, South Central in 1992, and Menace II Society in 1993, youth gangs across the United States began appropriating Crips style.
By the early 21st century, the Crips had outposts in some 40 states and upwards of 30,000 members, albeit differentially embedded in the gang and its activities. Crips sets also exist in Africa, Europe (e.g., the Netherlands and the United Kingdom), and Central America. In the age of global travel and the Internet, what were once distant, even metaphorical ties between Crips sets have, in some cases, become close, literal connections, with domestic and foreign gangs following and friending each other on social media and foreign gang members making pilgrimages to Los Angeles, which remains the Crips’ stronghold.
Conflict and Consensus
It is a popular misconception that Crips feud only with the Bloods. In reality, many Crips sets remain independent and fiercely territorial, fighting among themselves. For example, the Rollin’ 60s Neighborhood Crips from the Hyde Park area of South Los Angeles and the Eight-Tray Gangster Crips from 83rd Street have been rivals since 1979. This conflict has resulted in a more general dispute between Gangster Crips and Neighborhood Crips gang federations because, as gangs disseminated throughout Los Angeles and beyond, they divided into smaller and smaller sets and began to encroach on each other’s territories.
In April 1992, just days before the Rodney King riots, the Crips and Bloods in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles convened in the Imperial Courts Project gym to negotiate a truce. Gang members were fatigued from decades of retaliatory violence. Assisted by football legend and activist Jim Brown and hip hop artists of the West Coast Rap All-Stars, they drafted a formal peace treaty modeled on the 1949 Armistice Agreements signed by Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. The gang ceasefire held for a number of years, and although shootings continued throughout the truce, violence declined to such an extent that, consistent with a nationwide crime drop, homicides in Los Angeles fell from over 1,000 in 1991 (a rate of 30 murders per 100,000 residents) to 550 in 1999 (15 per 100,000 residents). In 2016, there were 283 murders in Los Angeles (7 per 100,000 residents), but gang violence remains an intractable problem throughout California and the country.
Symbology
Gangs are known for their use of signals, which convey information understood by convention rather than by an intrinsic link with the message and are produced in a way that ensures coordination. Crips are no different. Large numbers of gang members frequent the same places and occupy relatively small geographical spaces. Thus, they rely on signals to identify one another. It is common knowledge that Crips identify with the color blue, which was inspired either by the colors of Washington High School or by the style of Stanley Williams’ friend Curtis Buddha Morrow. The Crips also represent left (vs. the Bloods who represent right), meaning they may roll up their left pant leg, wear their hat turned or tilted to the left, or hang a blue handkerchief out of their left back pocket.
Wearing blue and claiming Crips in the wrong context can be enough to incite violence. There are stories of youth wearing reversible jackets— Blood-red exterior with Crip-blue lining—to negotiate the risks inherent in walking between rival Bloods and Crips neighborhoods. This speaks to the fact that some signals, such as colored clothing, are easy to mimic. Since the 1990s, gangster style has permeated youth culture. Nongang youth wear the same blue baggy pants or Levi’s jeans, baseball caps, basketball jerseys, and bandanas as their gang counterparts, lending some to rightly conclude that a Crips subculture exists beyond the gang. However, other signals are harder to fake. Hailing from Grape Street in the Watts section of Los Angeles, for example, convincingly marks someone as being at least friendly to the Crips, because Grape Street and the gang are synonymous. Interestingly, Grape Street Crips wear purple in addition to blue.
In their formative years, inspired by the style of early member Greg Davis, Crips carried a walking cane and wore khaki pants with the suspenders hanging down from the waistbands, Stacy Adams shoes, and brimmed hats. In the 1980s, Crips wore British Knights sport shoes because the company moniker B.K. was taken to stand for Blood Killer. Since the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, however, the use of colors and flamboyant clothing has waned since it attracts police attention and is one criterion for entry into a gang database.
Beyond clothing, graffiti and tattoos constitute a layered vocabulary for Crips members to communicate with one another. Popular Crips tattoos include a six-point Star of David (which pays homage to David Barksdale, the Chicago gang leader who founded the Black Disciples), six- and three-point crowns, and the Number 6 (meaning Crip up and Blood down), which all acknowledge the Crips’ affiliation with the Folk Nation. Crips members refer each other as cousins (Cuzz) and in graffiti and other written correspondence. They will post their symbols, but invert, break, and/or cross out a rival gang or nation’s symbol. Crips will call Bloods derogatory terms such as slobs and busters and delete or change words containing the Letter B, owing to their association with the word Blood. If no word can reasonably be substituted, the Letter B will be crossed out to show disrespect. Sometimes, excessive use of the Letter C also occurs (e.g., “I’ll C right baCC”) to refrain from using the Letter B or the initials CK, which stand for Crip Killer.
For Crips, the stacking of complex hand symbols, such as sign language, is a gestural code to greet, confirm affiliation, disrespect rivals, and conduct business in secret. Crips are also known for the Crip Walk, or C-Walk, a dance step involving quick, intricate footwork that was first introduced into hip hop culture by Rapper WC (Dub-C). In the music video for the 2004 hit, “Drop it Like It’s Hot,” produced by Pharrell Williams, gangster rapper Snoop Dogg C-Walks and raps about having a blue flag hanging on the left side, another example of how Crips style permeates popular culture.
References:
- Alonso, A. A. (2004). Racialized identities and the formation of black gangs in Los Angeles. Urban Geography, 25, 658–674. doi:10.2747/ 0272-3638.25.7.658
- Bakeer, D. (1987). Crips: The story of the L.A. Street gang from 1971–1985. Inglewood, CA: Precocious.
- Covey, H. (2015). Crips and bloods: A guide to an American subculture. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood.
- Shakur, S. (1993). Monster: The autobiography of an L.A. gang member. New York, NY: Penguin.
- Williams, S. T. (2004). Blue rage, black redemption. Pleasant Hill, CA: Damamli.