There are some stories you do because you have to, not because of an assignment but a burning need to help someone get their story out to the world. This was one of those stories. I'm likely going to be doing more about and with Shaka in the near future. Stay tuned. And see the great movie "Crips & Bloods: Made in America," when it's out on DVD (soon).
In the blood
Staying straight in a crooked world
Shaka walks up to the security guard’s table at Fremont High School in South Los Angeles and signs in as a visitor. He then flows smoothly through the halls of his alma mater and enters a small room that serves as a campus police center, complete with three LAPD officers — one white, one Latino, one African-American — who spend each day trying to ensure that the school’s tinderbox mix of races and ethnicities doesn’t erupt into gang violence.
On the wall behind the Latino officer is a crisply hung poster of the 1993 cult classic Western, “Tombstone,” with several badass actors sporting shotguns and pistols under the tagline “Justice Is Coming.” And with the arrival of Shaka, a tall and trim 29-year-old African American who’s also a reformed member of the Family Swans Bloods, an affiliate group of the notorious Bloods gang, that statement has just been bolstered. He comes in daily to help the cops reach the kids who are seemingly unreachable, and to talk them into one last shot at avoiding the court system and prison by doing the right thing in a world where they’re surrounded by wrong.
Shaka is the man’s street name — he prefers not to divulge his legal name, due partly to the street cred he’s established with his adopted moniker, and partly out of concern that harm could come if people know too much about his “real” self. Elaborately decorated Ed Hardy jeans and a navy-blue camouflage-style dress shirt mask an array of tattoos not quite faded into his complexion, the contrast revealing the dual worlds he’s trapped between — his gangbanging past, which earned him three trips to the pen for slinging dope before he went straight five years ago, and his present as a voluntary gang interventionist seeking to atone for his past evils as a violent drug hustler.
In his old life, the money flowed fast and easy; in his new one, he is unpaid by the LAPD or the schools, despite the fact they can’t operate nearly as well without the dozens like him throughout LA County who have seen the light and are trying to light a path for others to follow.
With the recent release of the incisive new documentary “Crips & Bloods: Made in America,” which recently played for a week at the Laemmele Playhouse 7 and will soon be released on DVD, Shaka has found validation as one of the primary interview subjects in the film, taking pride in showing that there’s a better way to live than thugging while also inspiring his own dreams of publishing a memoir of life on the streets, creating hip-hop CDs and designing his own clothing line.
Some might scoff at those ambitions as shallow and stereotypical of young people whose lives in the ’hoods of LA and other cities expose them to few examples of growing up to be doctors or engineers. But whether displaying his surprisingly striking shirt designs or pouring his soul out while gently reading the opening passage of his eloquently written memoir, Shaka shows he’s a man of surprises who just needs a chance to succeed — and he says there are countless more young African Americans just like him. For now, he’s blessed with the funds to survive and pursue his interests by also working with his childhood friend, Los Angeles Clippers star Baron Davis, who initiated the funding for “Crips & Bloods.”
“It feels like we’re not even American citizens, we’re just ‘blacks’ to most of America,” he says, while pointing out that the very same white cop who just consulted with him inside the school was now detaining a group of black male students after school for the apparent offense of talking in numbers. “People don’t think of us in the same way, that we have the same rights. Yes, having the police around does make us safer sometimes, but how are you supposed to stay positive when you’re afraid to walk anywhere alone because someone may attack you, yet you get questioned or detained when you walk anywhere with a group? That’s the whole cycle of gangs — you join for safety, to make friends and have some male companionship when most fathers are out of the picture. The officers don’t really know us, they don’t rest their heads in our neighborhoods at night or know what our dreams and concerns and families are like.” Side by sideThe words spill out from Shaka in a torrent, his eyes riveted on his listener, but, as he himself notes, he is just one man attempting to fight an epidemic of violence that has plagued Los Angeles for the past 60 years and seems to grow worse each decade. According to Father Greg Boyle, a Catholic priest who founded Homeboy Industries, a series of businesses that train ex-gang members to develop skills that will pay their bills legitimately, there are more than 86,000 ’bangers in more than 1,100 gangs in Los Angeles County alone.
“We’re the largest gang intervention program in the USA, with members of nearly 600 gangs walking through our doors here,” says Boyle, who started his ministry in 1988. “We locate jobs for them, and we have five businesses where enemies work side by side with each other: a bakery, restaurants, a silk-screening plant, maintenance and landscaping. It just sort of evolved over the years, with first a school and then a jobs program, opened a bakery, and now we also offer tattoo removal with two machines and ten rotating doctors.”
Boyle started Homeboy while stationed as a pastor at Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights from 1986 to 1992. His parish, one of the poorest the city, had eight gangs and LA’s highest level of gang activity.
“You could either keep your head in the sand or do something about it. There were mostly Latinos and only one African-American gang in the area,” says Boyle. “It’s still primarily Latinos that come here, merely because I hand out my card at masses and only Catholics come to the masses.”
Boyle recalls that his parishioners were skeptical and unhappy in the beginning of his gang efforts, when ex-members started attending church and receiving other services there. But, he notes, “The gang members were never the problem. They never are. It’s more the people demonizing them from the outside.”
Operating on a $3.5 million annual budget, raised not from church funds but from foundations, fundraising and the profits of the Homeboy businesses themselves, Boyle has been able to help thousands of ex-bangers over the years. Far from depending on charity from the diocese, Boyle and his young staffers are proud that parishes are now frequent customers, comprising a large portion of their 1,900-strong customer base.
“There’s no defined period of time that folks stay here, but it helps them when they get out of prison or when they immediately decide to redirect their lives,” says Boyle. “I don’t know many people that do all the stuff we do. It’s a rehab center for people who wanna redirect themselves.” Don’t disappearShaka decided to redirect himself while undergoing a harrowing crisis of conscience that nearly drove him mad five years ago. While he grew up in a stable home with both parents in which he said he acted perfect inside the house but “turned into an animal on the streets, changing every day like a chameleon,” Shaka went deep into the dealing lifestyle once he finished high school.
“There was so much violence I got caught up in, and it never seemed to go away, whether I was doing it or being around it and seeing it everywhere,” he says, his wide eyes welling with pain from the memories. “I finally started going crazy because I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and for like five days I was having my life flash before me without physically being in danger of dying.”
He finally emerged from the darkness, due to turning to God and his girlfriend Chrystal, a vibrant presence who has been with Shaka for six years and shares with him two young sons — Jaiden, 4, and Jaison, five months — and a small but well-kept pink stucco house.
“Jaiden was a result of that madness, because my girl kept calming me down by telling me she loved me and making love,” he recalls. “We’ve been together a long time. I want to set a good example to younger guys in the neighborhood that you stick with your kids and be there for them. When I came out of that madness, I started going to church, when I’d never been religious before.”
As he works tirelessly to quell tensions and set standards for the younger black men coming up through Fremont and other area schools, Shaka has to be fluid in his interactions. As a Latino student sits forlornly in the school police room after being busted for actually rolling marijuana in class, the LAPD officers are threatening the juvenile joint-maker with a trip through the courts, probation and community service — or, if he’s lucky, settling the incident with just a hefty dose of community service without marks on his criminal record.
The student plays nonchalant, but worry is clearly etched in his eyes. Shaka steps in, describing the terms of the deal with a little more slang and the forceful concern of an older brother.
“I know what I’d do if I was you,” he says, as the kid looks at him inquisitively. “I’d take the community service, no strings attached.”
The kid complies; negotiations have ended, problem solved. Stepping outside afterward, Shaka says he makes that kind of quick impact on youths because they know he’s been down the long road to prison over and over. Before he leaves for the day, the LAPD officers ask him to negotiate a meeting between them and a particularly troubled young man and his mother because the school had just pulled his file for a last-chance expulsion warning.
When he sees Michael, the student in jeopardy, smoking with friends outside after school, Shaka pulls Michael out of the pack and warns him how close he has come to expulsion and the courts, saying “It doesn’t have to be something specific. It’s a ton of little things adding up, and they don’t want you there anymore unless you shape up.”
Michael agrees to a meeting with his mom and the officials, and Shaka’s back rolling in his cousin’s car. It’s a stark drive through the neighborhood. He points out a house where a young man on a college basketball scholarship just got shot in the legs nine times by a gang simply for sitting outside in his car. These are the things that never seem to get better.
And yet the only way they can get better is if the residents of neighborhoods like this can be treated like everyone else, and seen as everyday people. Shaka pulls up on another block to introduce a reporter to “other hard-working honest people, and the moms that look out for the kids of the neighborhood.” One man is hooking up an elaborate stereo system for a client’s car, two moms come by and shake hands with a visitor, surprised and glad to see a white face taking the time to listen and meet folks in the area. “Don’t forget about us” is a refrain heard repeatedly as people say their goodbyes.
That unexpected warmth and friendliness flies in the face of the violent and dangerous image South LA neighborhoods are often saddled with. “Crips & Bloods” director Stacy Peralta, who first achieved notoriety as a pro skateboarder and director of the skateboarding documentary “Dogtown & Z-Boys,” says he was shaken by the same positive feelings.“It’s not what I had expected. I never had anybody give me a bad time and always had people being forthright and say thanks for making the film,” recalls Peralta. “Then they’d say ‘Don’t just disappear, come back to our community, be a part of it.’ They’re hungry for connection, hungry to be a part of the world, because in a sense they’re not.” An everyday thingEven more striking for Peralta was the effect he had on interviewees when he took them from their neighborhoods to a calm studio for in-depth questioning.
“People who struck me strongly, I’d bring them to another location where they could really sit down in a secure location and have a long talk without having to look over their shoulder,” Peralta explains. “They commented on being somewhere safe, saying ‘it’s nice to be somewhere I don’t have to think about something happening or someone giving me a hard time for being in the wrong place.’
“It’s really a tragedy that’s going on in this country and that, in a sense, it’s going on in secret. People always say after seeing the movie ‘I didn’t know this was still going on’ or ‘that it’s going on so close to us,’ and so it just goes on and on every day.”
Surprisingly, even the election of America’s first African-American president, Barack Obama, hasn’t created a groundswell of hope in the very place where it’s needed most.
“Some people were happy and I was excited on election day and then at the inauguration,” says Shaka, his face lighting up. “But I saw lots of other people just say ‘what the fuck’s this going to change for us? The same shit is still everywhere.’”
Pasadena’s got plenty of gang problems of its own, a fact that local gang interventionist Tim Rhambo has seen for more than 20 years — first as a member of the Pasadena Denver Lane Bloods and later as an activist with the local youth organization Day One. Like Shaka, he tries to spend as much time as possible mixing it up with gang members and those likely to join them, all in the hope of convincing them to break or remain free of the groups’ insidious influences.
Rhambo himself turned from gang life when he was 18, realizing that if he kept his wicked ways up he’d be heading to the harsh world of the state penitentiary rather than the simpler lockdowns of juvenile halls. The 40-year-old credits police officers and other community members for keeping on him to stay on a productive path, and is dedicating himself to give others the same influence — although the current economic crisis has forced Day One to cut him loose and he now struggles while working part-time with kids at the Asian Youth Center and as a boxing instructor at the Villa Parke Community Center in Pasadena.
“I do a lot of volunteer work down at Villa Parke, as a boxing instructor. And at my job now at the Asian Youth Center, I go out into the streets even after I’m off the clock,” says Rhambo. “This is real to me, and I think every generation it gets worse. When I was out gangbanging, the generation before me said you guys are doing stupid stuff, and said ‘we only was fighting, sometimes stabbings, but not with gunplay.’ Now there’s no respect for the old guys who been through it, and they don’t want to talk to [the young ones] because they’re afraid they’ll get shot.
“You gotta be out there on them every day for bangers to get it. I can’t see them two days, or one day and expect them to do what I expect. It’s hard. It’s a constant battle.”
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