THE CRIPS’ LOST LIBERATION: A NOTORIOUS STREET GANG’S EVOLUTION FROM WOULD-BE LIBERATION INSURGENCY IN THE LATE 1960s, TO LATENT POLITICAL POTENCY AS A NON-STATE ARMED GROUP

Jeffrey D. David

doi:10.7273/000007358

Not since the secession of the Confederate States in the 19th century has the United States been closer to revolution or secession than during the height of the insurgent liberation movements in the 1960s. In 1965, following the assassination of movement leader Malcolm X, the Watts Uprising in Los Angeles and its aftermath proved to be an inflection point for grassroots groups that had otherwise been participating in the greater Civil Rights Movement under the auspices of national coordinating groups. Two of the most efficacious and potent of these grassroots insurgencies, the Black Panther Party and the New Afrika Independence Movement, would go on to capture the nation’s attention, pitch the nation’s security services against them as “the greatest threat to the United States,” and inspire future generations of individuals and groups, both on the ground and in popular culture. This project focuses on one particular insurgent group among those inspired ranks of the then-rising liberation generations: the Crips. This study is designed as a plausibility probe in two parts: first, as an analysis of differentiated insurgency types looking at the phenomenon of the Crips as a would-be liberation group, and secondly, as a modern (post-1979) iteration turned amorphous non-state armed group (NSAG). Drawing upon the theoretical frameworks of liberation (i.e., secession), social movements, and peripheral groups, such as warlords and mafia, this study attempts to locate the elements of the Crips’ emergence likely to have made the difference in the trajectory of their insurgency compared to foundational contemporaries, and the most plausible catalysts for their ballistic trajectory as a violent NSAG. With nuance, the study found that the Crips lost their liberation formation because of prematurely pruned political ideology; the cascade of dissipating leaders of indoctrination; an unaccommodating, hostile relationship with the state; and an existential, inward pivot toward localized security that halted their then-known repertoire of contention in perpetual stasis. The study further found that in its modern iteration, the Crips’ group-centric formation, historical and intermittently recentering ideology, lack of popular political legitimacy, and comparatively diminutive territorial control make comparisons to either mafia or warlords generally inaccurate and at best case-by-case empirical stretches. Arguably, the Crips are a politically latent NSAG with mutable activist elements and capacity for sudden sociopolitical destabilization. Because of their level of organization and propensity for violence, considering institutionalized gangs such the Crips through a conflict lens moves the conversation away from criminological senses of good or bad to instead the group as social actors and a social movement with potential for drastic political change.

THE CRIPS’ LOST LIBERATION: A NOTORIOUS STREET GANG’S EVOLUTION FROM WOULD-BE LIBERATION INSURGENCY IN THE LATE 1960s, TO LATENT POLITICAL POTENCY AS A NON-STATE ARMED GROUP

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