Position: Original Fonder of  South Central Los Angelos street gang that was later known as the Crips

Partner: Stanley Tookie Williams

Born- August 14, 1953

Death- August 9, 1979 (25 years old)

Raymond Washington was a man of values. While living a life of crime, he didn’t believe in firearm combat. Washington Raymond believed in fist fighting to solve problems. His influence on the Crips gang didn’t last long. Once he was murdered, guns became a widely used weapon amongst the Crips.

Washington Raymond, the creator of the Crips gang, is said to have first started his gang, calling it the Baby Avenues. It then later on evolved into the Avenue Cribs. It remained the Avenue Cribs until it later became simply “Crips”.

Growing up, Raymond was a bully. Washington Raymond is said to have not let anyone outside of his community just walk through freely. Raymond Washington would bully those who lived in the neighborhood. The police were always looking for him. He was a well built person, so it was easy for him to intimidate others.

As gangs became more common in the environment, Raymond Washington gathered neighborhood youth and created the Baby Avenues. They wanted to emulate the older street gang, the Avenue Boys. They then began calling themselves the Avenue Cribs, due to their young age. Washington Raymond was the best fighter of his gang and was feared by his fellow gang members. He then influenced other gangs to make more Crip sets, such as the Westside Crips, which was formed by Stanley Tookie Williams.

Raymond Washington was murdered in 1979 as a result of a sawed-off shotgun blast. Some legends state that Washington was murdered by a member of the Hoover Crips, whiles others state Raymond was murdered by Bloods.

Gangs typically start with youth within a community whom intermingle and form bonds. As these youth venture through their neighborhoods, they set up social companionships and defensive boundaries to protect themselves from any person or group who intrudes into their realm of domain. Some gangs will be duped to do anything to defend their territories, thus the level of violence any gang executes depends on the toleration of the gang’s leadership and what the community will bear. New gangs have migrated into the United States from Central America, Caribbean Islands, and from other nations of the world. The conflagrations of their violence are sensationalized almost every day by the media. The damages to individuals, their families and our society are being done every day. Yet, the reason why gang violence has mounted to what it has is because communities and institutions have allowed it so. Let me explain.

As mentioned earlier the existence of gangs goes back to our prehistoric times when we were building societies. The control or lack of control of gangs has always been at the discretion of civilization of which gangs belong. Civil leadership has and always will control the outcome of what is tolerated.

Today’s escalation of gang violence can be traced back to Los Angeles County in the early 1970’s. Prior to 1972 the gangs in Los Angeles County were confined to racial divides long established by government. To identify some of the diversity of gangs during that era, there were White gangs in the Inglewood and Hawthorne cities, Black gangs in Watts, Compton, South and Southwest Los Angeles, Asian gangs in Monterey Park, and Mexican gangs in East Los Angeles. These gangs rampaged throughout their own communities then and certainly had the propensity for violence; there had always been gang shootings, but these incidents were only known to the victims, witnesses, and people within the communities. Little recognition was given to their existence except for the justice system which often had to regulate these activities. Inadvertently it was the justice system and later the media which propelled gangs to the forefront of becoming a social stigma.

Up until now no one has pointed the finger, but during the administrations of the Los Angeles Police, the County of Los Angeles Sheriffs, and the Los Angeles County judges of that and precedent eras, an unethical practice was allowed to mitigate among many of the representatives of the local justice system. The local justice systems turned their backs on the violence and the traffic of drugs which were happening within the racial communities of which the crimes were being enacted. Their attitudes were rooted in bigotry and they facilitated the violence of allowing the races to victimize and even kill their own kind; allowing acts of self-destruction and potential genocide. As apprehensible as it seems, members of the justice systems allowed known killers of their own kind to be re-inserted back into their communities to kill again. This secret pact remained intact and hidden from the social microscope until one brutal murder changed everything.

In the spring of 1972 a high school football player, Robert Ballou, was viciously beaten to death in Hollywood. Ballou’s father was a Los Angeles assistant district attorney and was given immediate media attention. Within a few weeks the assailants were arrested. They admitted to being members of one of the L.A. Black gangs, the Crips. To further sensationalize this terrible incident, most of the killers were star high school athletes, one of which had set world high school track records. Suddenly, the existence of the Crips had been brought to the front page of newspapers and the main story on local television and radio news. All of a sudden one of L.A. County’s street gangs had acted outside of their segregated territory and received too much attention; the pact of the local justice system was forever disrupted and eventually dismantled with more sensational events to follow. Soon other gangs wanted to get attention and establish identities. The struggle for territories became more violent when the sale of drugs, especially when rock cocaine was introduced into the region. Gangs acquired more guns and more shootings became prevalent as the fight for dominance of boundaries escalated. Soon several movies sensationalized gangs even further and later the introduction of “rap music” and “hip hop” set their lifestyles as icons.

How do I know many of these things? I know because I was there to witness much of what occurred. I was there when the Crips were initially being formed; I personally knew many of them including Stanley “Tookie” Williams. I was there at some of their excursions. I was there when one of the founders of the Crips, Raymond Washington and his band of hoodlums on a particular Friday night in the spring of 1972 drove to homes in the Black community where people were actively partying and he shot through their windows with a 22′ rifle. Fortunately no one was killed that evening, but he would not have cared if someone did. He had already murdered 3 human beings before; he had no concern about killing another one. I was there when he was eventually detained by L.A. County Sheriffs that same night; I did say “detained” because he was released by the following Monday.

As I was told by a friend whose father was in law enforcement, he was released so he could kill more Blacks. I was there when many of the killers who killed Ballou talked about going to Hollywood on that fateful night. I did not go with them. I was there when the news broke out about what had happened and when the killers were nowhere to be found. I did not know they were involved, but later found out after they were arrested. I was not a Crip, but had associated with and were friends with many of them (Stanley Williams and Raymond Washington were never friends of mine). Those who I did associate with I shared the common bond of having to be tough in the confines of a racist society we were indoctrinated into. I pursued education and they were overcome by their vices. Though I befriended some of them, there is no justification and excuse for what they have done and what they have as a result caused. But I must demand that they are not alone to blame.

Lastly, I must say I do not believe the productions of gangs are because of the “survival of the fittest”. Rather, the terrorism gangs currently suppress upon our society is an unexpected result of the bigoted fascists of our past. While attempting to control the races, those in dominance created a cast of monsters. As discussed in “Don”t Go Ape, Darwin!’, it is not in the natural behavior of life forms including humans to steer away from social boundaries. Anti-social behavior was nurtured into gangs by unethical leadership, who never realized the possible outcome of what they did and who have never admitted to this day their roles in what was done.

Gangs become what they are because our institutions and communities mold them in such a way. In the early days all the havoc gangs have caused could have prevented if different approaches to the problem they pose had been implemented instead of that of segregation, complacency and internal genocide. Our society will take a long time to recover from what the institutions had passed onto us. A concerted effort must be made by all institutions and the communities from which these gangs thrive, to convert these gangs from destructive tendencies to productive ones. Once under control, we can not afford to let what happened before happen again. This destructive behavior can not be allowed to ever recycle. After all, if some our civilizations were established by groups of people, “a gang”, with a common cause, then many of these gang members may alter their reasoning to become apart of our society and not anti-social to it. In future writings I hope to suggest some potential remedies.