In Chicago’s Stateway Gardens housing project during the 1960s, violence was ubiquitous. The public housing project was developed in the mid-1950s, replacing an impoverished “Black slum,” containing 1,648 apartments in just eight high-rise buildings. By the ‘60s, the city had clearly forgotten about the site’s maintenance, with unmistakable physical deterioration and subpar living conditions, alongside the increase in violence and gang activity.
This phenomenon of concentrated disadvantage as a result of segregation, which primarily impacts Black and Brown Americans, isn’t unique to Chicago. It’s prominent across the U.S., including major cities in California. Public housing in Los Angeles shares a similar history. The LA Conservatory stated that for a “brief moment” public housing in the city was a suitable stepping stone toward public housing; it was racially integrated, clean, and comfortable. By the 1940s, due to migration during the Great Depression, Los Angeles’ Black population experienced a significant increase, with 62 percent of Black LA residents dependent on some form of government aid by 1941.
Jordan Downs is the most infamous housing project resulting from this era of development, described as becoming a “microcosm of the ills of South Los Angeles” by the 1960s. Due to restrictive housing covenants, this once-integrated housing project became predominantly Black in the 1960s. Jordan Downs is located in the historically Black neighborhood of Watts, where significant police brutality and unemployment had become the new normal. These conditions yielded the Watts Rebellion in August 1965, sparked by an instance of police brutality. The recurring encounters with violent officers targeting members of the Watts community highlight the local government’s abandonment of the residents living there. Jordan Downs is still known for its high levels of violence, crime rates, and poverty, including significant gang activity in the 1990s that has proliferated into the 2000s.
Watts in the 1960s | Image Source: History.com
The Bay Area is no stranger to this pattern, with inner-city ghettos in Oakland gaining national prominence for the proliferation of violence and poverty. In 2013, the Acorn Projects in West Oakland were raided by local police and the FBI, who justified the raid based on the high levels of gang activity and lack of community safety in the area. Just a year later, violent gang activity was reported in an East Oakland housing complex, located right next to Castlemont High School.
It was in this environment, in Chicago’s Stateway Gardens, that William Peeples was born and raised. William has been incarcerated for 35 years and is currently serving life without parole at Sheridan Correctional Facility in Illinois. His life before incarceration consisted of struggle and injustice, describing his soul as “completely devoid of light” in his early 20s. I spoke with William about his upbringing in one of Chicago’s most dangerous and impoverished areas to understand why violence persists in similarly situated communities across the country, especially in Los Angeles and Oakland.
William Peeples following his graduation from Northwestern University while incarcerated | Image Source: Northwestern
“As it pertains to joining gangs, there are like a myriad of reasons and I’m sure each person has his or her own… [In my family], I’m the only boy. I have one sibling, my younger sister Kimberly, may she rest in peace… Naturally, I could fight, but I couldn’t fight everyone. When you belong to this set, this group, then the other people knew not to mess with you… so it afforded you that type of protection.”
For many Americans, this protection comes from law enforcement. If you’re in danger, you can rely on the police to come to your rescue and protect you from victimization. If you or a family member is harmed or killed, you can expect the perpetrator to face considerable consequences.
This reality becomes a distant fantasy in inner-city, impoverished ghettos, where the Jordan Downs and Acorn Projects are located. For William, relying on the police for protection was unimaginable.
“I never, ever saw the police as my friend. I don’t ever remember a time when, as a Black kid, even when I was like at my most innocent stage, of ever looking at the police as someone I could trust in and rely on. I saw them as somebody to be afraid of.”
For William, this fear developed over time, through experiences of inaction from the police, when he or his friends were victimized, as well as the immense brutality he experienced and witnessed in interactions with the police as a young kid.
He recalled an incident in which he, as a young child, was robbed on his way to the grocery store while staying with his grandmother. When he returned home and told her what had happened, William’s grandmother called the police, and they came to her house. “It almost seemed like they believed that I hadn’t actually been robbed, that maybe I had stolen the money myself and was lying to my grandmother… It seemed like they were more willing to blame me. It didn’t seem so much that they cared or [were] very interested in solving it.”
The police in this instance were simply responding to a call, with little intent to actually protect and serve the people making the call. For William, experiences of being discarded like this set the precedent that the police weren’t there for him, nor anyone who looked like him and lived in his neighborhood.
Clearance rates for homicide victims in Chicago support William’s understanding that the police, prosecutors, and other actors in the criminal justice system weren’t acting within his best interest. The East North Central geographic division of the United States, where Chicago is located, experienced an approximate 50 percent decline in homicide clearance rates from 1962-1994.
Moreover, the divide in clearance rates for Black and white homicide victims persists today. According to a 2023 report by Live Free Chicago that tracked prosecution rates in Chicago from 2001-2021, only 21.7 percent of homicides with a Black victim were prosecuted, whereas 45.6 percent of homicides with white victims were prosecuted.
Similar racial divides are observed in many cities across the country, including Oakland and Los Angeles. According to a 2020 UC Berkeley Law study that measured homicide arrest rates in the preceding decade, 76 percent of Oakland’s homicide victims were Black, yet police made arrests in approximately 40 percent of cases with Black victims. In homicides involving white victims, arrests were made about 80 percent of the time. In Los Angeles, 2020 data suggests that clearance rates for Black victims sat at 25 percent, while those for white victims were around 76 percent.
These trends signify why kids growing up in William’s neighborhood and the disadvantaged inner-city neighborhoods like it across the country felt compelled to join gangs. Without trust that the police would come to their defense, they often took matters into their own hands.
A story William told me about a conflict with another gang while crossing into their territory at age 17 corroborated this distrust in law enforcement’s ability to provide him and his friends with justice. “So, we’re coming down the street, some shots ring out, and one of my friends is shot in the leg… We get to the hospital and naturally, the hospital [staff], they’re legally bound to call the police whenever a gunshot wound comes in.” As the police questioned them about who shot at them, William tells me the code of the street was to never snitch. He describes how they preferred to enact their own form of justice. “You know, we [can] go back and get our revenge… We really don’t know who shot us, like the person, you know, specifically, but we knew the group of guys that may have been involved.”
The general understanding between William and his friends, between every Black person where he grew up, was that the police didn’t care about them. This notion was developed throughout William’s youth, with the inaction on the police’s behalf when he was victimized, and it was reinforced at age 17, at the hospital with his friend who’d just been shot.
“The police come and so they see a group of Black kids, you know, shot by another group of Black kids, and again, like I said, the nonchalant attitude that they had…” After the boys denied knowing who’d been involved in the shooting, “the police officer says ‘Yeah, well fuck it. No humans involved here anyway.’ And they just walked away. I don’t even think they filed the police report.”
No Human Involved, or N.H.I., was reportedly used in 1990s Los Angeles as well, with Stanford Afro-American studies professor Sylvia Wynter writing, “public officials of the judicial system of Los Angeles routinely used the acronym N.H.I. to refer to any case involving a breach of the rights of young Black males who belong to the jobless category of the inner city ghettoes.
Wynter argues that classifying young Black men from inner-city ghettos in such a dehumanizing manner gave LAPD officers the “green light” to treat and deal with individuals matching the description however they deemed fit. The devaluing of Black lives by the Los Angeles, Chicago, and presumably local police departments across the country has enabled officers to offer brutal and harmful conditions to Black Americans living in inner-city ghettos.
While the police’s indifference to his victimization eroded William’s reliance on them for protection, the brutality inflicted on him and his community led him to fear them.
William’s stories are virtually endless. While speaking with me, he detailed watching his favorite uncle Chucky get brutalized by the police over a verbal dispute he’d had with other members of their family. When the police showed up, instead of removing Chucky from the situation they beat him up. He discussed getting profiled and picked up by the police who questioned him about whether he had drugs or weapons on him. When they discovered he didn’t, they took their frustrations out on him by dropping him in rival gang territory, alone, where he would then get attacked and physically assaulted. These experiences devastated any potential for trust between him and the police, leading him to avoid interactions with them at any cost, even if he or a loved one was victimized.
William recalled a time when his “play cousin”, a close friend he grew up with, was sexually assaulted by another man in his neighborhood. “My first thought was not to call the police. It was not to, you know, have him arrested. It was to call my guys… I called my guys, and we went to his apartment, and we beat him up.” However, the police were then called on William, and he was the one arrested for gang intimidation, recruitment, and assault. “I ended up being arrested, being beaten up for really doing the right thing, which was to protect my play cousin.”
These experiences inform how William viewed the criminal justice system and police force, and how many people in his situation do.
“I never saw the criminal justice system in our country as being pro-me, or in favor of me… I always saw it as just like a tool or a mechanism of maybe the elite… a control mechanism used by people in authority, white people, people who are rich, people who have social standing.”
What being in a gang provided William and others in his community was a sense of protection, but also a way to achieve justice for their friends and family who had been wronged and who the police didn’t care about.
William states that Black people, and all people from unsafe and violent areas, want police protection. “Black people want to be protected and feel safe in their homes like any other people. The difference is how Black and Brown communities are policed compared to… affluent or white neighborhoods. [In Black and Brown communities] they come into the neighborhood like an occupying force, and they treat everyone as if every single member of that community is a potential criminal.”
This treatment doesn’t facilitate the development of trust between police officers and members of these inner-city ghetto communities. As former LAPD Chief Michel Moore stated, “the solving of a crime, a homicide particularly, is dependent on community trusting police.” Yet, how can communities trust police when they are so clearly disregarded and even dehumanized by the very people sworn to protect them?
It is a common belief that providing more social welfare in communities like William’s, which are extremely poor and where disadvantage is concentrated, is the solution to this problem. Generally, people seem to believe that as communities are afforded more opportunities, through education for example, and become more affluent, violence will decrease.
To a certain extent, this addresses a portion of the problem. William describes feeling like his fellow gang members were his “brotherhood” or “comrades.” He didn’t have access to after-school programs like sports or tutoring that may have benefited him developmentally, but also would have provided him with this same social camaraderie.
“If society created institutions for us to go to, where we could learn boxing or, you know, organized sports, [things] to teach you discipline… When that’s lacking, gangs are what you get.”
Solving the high violence in inner-city ghettos — like the one in Chicago that William lived in, and like the ones so prevalent in Los Angeles and Oakland — isn’t simple. Social welfare and better educational opportunities are non-negotiable, but so is repairing the relationship between disadvantaged communities of color and the police.
It is essential that the criminal justice system values protecting the lives of Black and Brown people, and works to their benefit just as it does their fellow white citizens.
Featured Image Source: The Hal Baron Project