by Miles Harvey
Every Friday, it was mandatory, we have to be at the block. We’ll all pack up in a car; we’ll go to the block; we’ll do, you know, our routine. Just walk around, two, three, four blocks, make sure nobody’s tagging where they’re not supposed to. If we see anybody that doesn’t belong, we’ll deal with him. One thing that I was told was, “Don’t mess with people that live in the ’hood.” If we see a kid walking around and we know he lives around here, we’re not able to touch him. But there’s days where, if we don’t see nothing going on, then we’ll start the trouble.
There was times when we’d go with a bunch of people to a different block and try to take over. A lot of times we’d succeed and sometimes we’d fail. It pretty much came down to whether they could outgun us. It was like 40 to 43 of us around there at one point. We went with that perspective that, “We’re going to make our point be noticed.” You know? At first, it was…I found it fun. I found it, like, “Man, I have all these people with me. There’s no way I’m gonna get hurt.”
But once a person becomes a gang member, he’s easily targeted by everyone. There was a few times where I would come close to being abducted by other gang members. I didn’t know if they had a gun. It was last year, during the middle of my sophomore year, when it first happened. It was on California, about to hit Division. I was coming out of school. Both of my friends that were usually there with me went to a gang meeting that I chose not to attend.
Apparently, these two rival gang members knew that I didn’t go and, as soon as I was going to step into my car, they slammed the door and they hit me in the head. I fell. They picked me up, put me in the backseat of their car. It got me dazed. As I gained my consciousness back and noticed that the car was moving, I panicked and I started hitting them both. They stopped the car and both came out. They started beating me.
Something in me told me, “Don’t give up. You need to survive. Do what you’ve got to do.” I got up and I fought them both. By luck, I got a few good hits in on them and, as soon as they both fell to the floor, I ran. The guy in the passenger side chased me for about a block and a half.
I went back to the school. As soon as I got into my car, I called my mom and told her, “Mom, I’m gonna be late. I’m gonna be doing some after-school activities.” Then, I went back to the block to tell them what had happened. They gave me a gun and three of us went driving around their ’hood. Whoever we found would have been an S.O.S.—shoot on sight. Luckily, we didn’t find anybody out there.
I’d carry a gun most of the time. The first time I got my gun, I—I was terrified. I didn’t know even how to use it, you know? That’s what always kept going through my head, like, “Man, if I get caught with this…what’s gonna happen to me?” But if I said no—well, there’s punishments for us as gangbangers, even with our own brothers. There’s a lot of things that I would like to say, but I can’t. Um, the hardest moment that I’ve gone through was shoot or be shot.
My parents never knew what I was doing. I really wish I could tell them—but at the same time, that would freak them out about being with me. Them trying to go with me to go see a movie or something, they’ll be afraid. I decided never to fight in my own neighborhood ‘cause that could bring trouble to my house, that could bring trouble to my family, to myself. That’s just too much, too much to be going through.
I messed up once by coming to the house stoned. I came home way out of my mind. I’m thinking, “My parents are sleeping. It’s 1 a.m. They’re sleeping.” I just got dropped off at home. I stumbled going to the bathroom and that’s when my parents came out and: “Oh my God, look at your eyes; they’re ruby red!”
I had to sit down with them: “Mom, I smoke. I’m sorry.”
She had, like, a nervous breakdown. My dad wanted to kick me out the house for that. Imagine if I would have told them what I used to do? My mistake was that I didn’t show my parents the same amount of love that they showed me before I joined a gang.
I was involved for about two and a half years, starting freshman year. It got to where I didn’t like being on the block. I preferred to be in school than to be at home. The only place where I’m able to be free is in school. I get along with all my security guards and all the school faculty so, you know, if they see me doing something wrong, they’ll come and talk with me. A security guard at my school was the one who told me I was pretty much throwing my life away.
I told myself, “You know what? I can’t be a part of this. This is pretty much me living life through hell.” Being in the gang was very scary to me: knowing that four out of seven days of the week I have to be in the block. I have to risk my life those four out of seven days, and there’s times where I had to stay weeks at a time. I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t do nothing, ‘cause I had to stay in the block.
I got arrested about six times for having drugs on me or for robberies—just little things. But if you tell cops information about the gang, if you snitch, you’re pretty much signing your death waiver right there. That’s one of the things that a gang member has to live with.
I would never be able to bring my fellow gang members home to my house because they’ll have tattoos of the gang, or tattoos on their face, and my parents don’t like that. Before I left the gang, they wanted me to get my back tattooed with the initials of the gang. I refused. They wanted to threaten me by giving me a beating, and I told them, “If you guys are going to do that for me not wanting to get a tattoo, then go ahead. Beat me then. It’s okay. I’m not getting a tattoo.”
They were telling me, “Why? Are you planning on leaving the gang?” And in my head, I don’t want to let them know that.
It’s hard to be in a gang and to try to leave. It’s really hard. When I started wanting to leave, there wouldn’t be a day where I could go to school and not be afraid. Every day I was afraid for my life; every day that I didn’t hang out with my friends was a day that I would get a beating for not being with them. That drove away a few of my girlfriends. If I told the guys, “Hey, is it okay if I hang out with my girlfriend today?” They’d say, “Nah, nah, we need you here, man.”
There was times where I couldn’t even walk with my mom to get groceries, because I was afraid of them doing something to me or to my mom. She’ll tell me, “Let’s go through here,” and I’ll be like, “Let’s go around.” ‘Cause if I go through there, I’m pretty much risking my life and my mom’s life. My mom asked me plenty of times if I gangbang. There were a few times where my mom would pick me up from school and there would be bottles thrown at the car and my mom would be like, “What’s going on?” I’d tell her that I just have problems at school with people that didn’t like me.
I got cut in a knife fight about two weeks before I left the gang. It was my final march around the enemy ’hood. I used to love to fight. No matter who it was, how big he was, how old he was, I would fight. But after me getting cut, that’s when something in my head said, “I can’t do this.” I have a scar about five inches long, by my stomach. It scared me. It scared me to know that somebody would always be better, somebody would always be stronger, somebody would just not care. That’s what freaks me out.
In the end, my chief told me, “In order for you to leave the gang, you have to get a violation—a beating for a certain amount of time.” But I didn’t choose that way. I told him, “You know what? Fuck it, I’ll stay.”
So I stayed for a while, about another month, and I told him, “Is there any other way, instead of me getting a violation out that I could do?”
And he said, “You could pay a fine, about $600.” Or I could just give them my personal weapon and four to five other weapons that I had to go purchase. That kind of made me feel useless to know my life was only worth a few guns to them. It made me feel like I was just being used. It made me feel bad about myself.
Around that time, one of my old friends came by the school and he told me that he was personally coming after me. And I thought, “Man, my own brother’s trying to kill me now? My own family, the ones
that I would take a bullet for, they are trying to do this?” But in the end, if you try to leave, all that was just for nothing. According to them, I wasn’t a man for not letting them beat me. They were calling me a wuss, because I preferred to choose a different way. It’s all or nothing with them.
Since I left the gang, my life has been so much better. I began to dress nicer—more appropriate. I don’t sag my pants anymore. I don’t have them below my waist anymore. I would like to go to college: DeKalb, Northern Illinois University. Get an apartment over there, something like that. I haven’t took my ACT yet. I’m nervous about it.
I’m more involved with my family now. I love to hang out with my cousins. They look up to me; I’m pretty much like a role model to them now. When I used to be in my gang life, they used to hate hanging out with me. They used to be like, “No, man, I’m afraid. I’m literally afraid.” Ever since I took that step to leave, I told my cousins, “I don’t gangbang anymore. Let’s go hang out.”
My cousins are not the type to be involved in gangs. They’re mostly about living their own lives under their own rules. If somebody tells them to do something other than their parents, they gonna look at you and say, “Who the hell are you?” And I’m the type that, if I go out to parties with my cousins and I know that something’s gonna happen, I tell them, “Let’s leave.” I’m willing to do anything for my family.
I’ve been able to walk with my mom. I don’t have to keep looking behind me every 5, 10 seconds, making sure nobody’s behind me. Nobody’s running up or anything. Now I’m able to walk through any—well, not through any ’hood, but mostly everywhere. There is certain spots where people know that I left the gang life, but they still want to get at me for fighting one of their members, beating them, or stabbing somebody, or just basically shooting at them.
It’s hard to know that you have to do what you have to do in order to stay alive. It’s terrifying. But when you join a gang, it’s necessary for you to fight with other gang members, no matter what the cause is. I’m happy that I’ve been able to change my own life around. But to tell you the truth, I don’t think the violence will ever stop.
—Interviewed by Alexis Wigodsky
Endnotes
4 To throw down a gang sign means to do a hand signal with the opposing gang’s sign upside down in a show of disrespect.
WHY SHOULD I HARASS PEOPLE FOR STANDING ON THE CORNER?
HARLON KEITH MOSS JR.
Critics claim that street violence in Chicago has been made worse in recent years by an inadequate number of police officers on the street. A 2009 analysis by the Chicago Sun-Times, for example, showed that once various factors were taken into account, the Chicago Police Department was nearly 2,000 officers short of its authorized strength of 13,500.5 The city planned to hire 500 new officers in 2013, but Fraternal Order of Police President Mike Shields insisted that number was far short of what was needed to keep the neighborhoods safe. “If Chicago wants to lose the title ‘homicide capital of the nation,’” he said, “it’s time to get serious about increasing the number of patrolmen and detectives on the street. We at least need to hire 1,400 officers. That’s at a minimum.”6
One man who knows the effects of this manpower shortage all too well is Harlon Keith Moss Jr. Born in the city, he was a Chicago police officer for more than 20 years until leaving the force in 2010. He has spent his retirement resting, spending time with family and traveling with the Buffalo Troopers, an African-American motorcycle club.
At the time of the interview, he sits in the comfort of his house, wearing a black jogging suit and still sporting his Chicago Police Department ring. He eagerly waits to start the discussion, ready to offer candid views on the lack of officers on the street and other challenges facing the force—including infiltration of gang members into the ranks.
When I first started on the job, I trained in Englewood, which is one of the most dangerous areas in the city of Chicago and, I believe, the most dangerous area on the South Side of Chicago. But there’s just more gun violence now. These kids, they pick up a gun and they’re more apt to shoot you and try to kill you. And it’s not only other gangbangers they target. They have no regard for regular civilian life—and it’s gotten to the point where they have no regard for the police out there anymore.
Over the years, a lot of people have lost respect for the police because of the way police deal with them. Who wants to be walking down the street, minding their own business, and the police pull up and grab them and throw them up against the car? You have the right to walk down the street and not be bothered just because the police pull up, especially in black and Hispanic neighborhoods, which is where you’re going to see a lot of this happen.
Why should I harass some people for standing on the corner? Now I’m just making you mad at the police. Now I’m making you ready to do something. So, if I see a group standing on the corner, there are different ways to come up to them. For example, I might pull up and say, “Yo, listen, fellas, you know that there’s this lady somewhere on this block and she’s watching this corner. And, you know, as soon as we pull off, she’s going to call the police saying that you guys are standing here. But if you go in your backyard, you can sit there and sit and talk all night. You can drink all night. Unless you all get loud, we won’t know about it.”
Instead, the police pull up and automatically think you’re a gang member, and you may not be a gang member. Once the police actually start treating people with respect, then some of the respect, if not all of the respect, will come back to the police. Because, as things stand, the police disrespect pretty much everybody.
I always wanted to be a cop, from the time I first saw Dick Tracy on TV as a 5- or 6-year-old. When I first started on the force, it was very exciting and I didn’t have any regrets. But, as I progressed in years on the police department, I could see things really starting to make subtle, then more drastic, changes. One of the drawbacks was that the city stopped hiring as many police officers. Now there’s a shortage of police officers. I don’t care what the new superintendent says.7 He’s trying, in my opinion, to do more with less people, and you can ask other police officers that are actually out in the field and they will agree with me. With a shortage of police officers, you’re putting the regular beat officers in more danger. And you’re shortchanging the citizens of Chicago because you don’t have the adequate patrols that are necessary in order to stop crime.
But the police need to actually get out there and do their job a bit different than they do. One thing my partners and I did was, when I worked the 6th District8 and when I worked the 22nd District,9 was that we patrolled our beat—constantly. You never could tell where on our beat we would pop up, but we were always there. If they wanted to give out a job on our beat, we would answer up on the radio and say, “We’re here on the beat; we’ll take that,” because we were there. We got to know the kids on the beat. We got to know the parents on the beat. We went to the beat meetings. By being in and out of the alleys, up and down different streets at any given time, it makes it harder for perpetrators to do something, because you never know when we were going to pop up. But if you have an approach that you take your job assignment and then you go someplace else where you meet up for coffee, or meet up with your buddies or you do whatever else is on your agenda, and you’re not on your beat, then people get used to the fact that, “I never see the police.”
Unfortunately, the only time I see the police in my own South Side neighborhood is if something happens. But by then, it’s too late. Prior police administrations, under Jody Weis10 and some of the other superintendents, what they wanted to do was they wanted to have the gang unit. They wanted to have the mobile strike force. They wanted to have a gun task force and any of these other units swoop into an area, let’s say like Englewood, after a shooting occurs. That’s a reaction. That’s not pro-action.
And, unfortunately, you have a lot of police officers that come on this job just so they can have the opportunity to g
o into minority communities and assert themselves as supposedly superior. I’ve seen Caucasian officers fight black males only when they have handcuffs on them. I had one Caucasian officer that got dispatched to the 7th District11 with me, and the first thing out of his mouth was: “I can’t wait till I get into a shootout.” We hadn’t been in the district for two or three days, and he couldn’t wait to get into a fight. Unfortunately, less than a year later, he got shot.
Most of the gun violence now is done by kids under the age of 25. They get involved at a much younger age. The gangs seek them out—and, in a lot of respects, they seek the gangs out as a means of belonging to something. Sometimes it’s environmental: “I’m hanging out with Jim over here. And if Jim is a member of a gang, and a rival gang member comes by and shoots at Jim, he is going to shoot at me, too. It’s guilt by association. So, I might as well join this gang so I have some type of way of being protected.”
Another reason could be the fact that the work ethic is a whole lot different now than it used to be. If we look back at history, black people came up here from the South, and they were some of the most impoverished immigrants of all. But they still survived. They still made it, and they tried to do everything they could to make sure that their families made it—get an education, work hard. Even when I was little, the thing I wanted most to do was to get a job and be able to make my own money—honest money. Nowadays, these kids see the gangbangers and the dope dealers riding around in these nice cars, and they don’t think about the fact that this guy’s retirement plan doesn’t go past a certain age. They see the glamour in it, and that’s what they want. So what do they do? They go out and they start slinging drugs. They start gangbanging.
