Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums
| Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums | |
|---|---|
| Abbreviation | CRASH |
Patch of the Los Angeles Police Department CRASH division
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| Motto | "To Protect and to Serve" "We Intimidate Those Who Intimidate Others" |
| Agency overview | |
| Formed | 1979 |
| Dissolved | March 2000 |
| Superseding agency | LAPD Gang and Narcotics Division |
| Legal personality | Governmental: Government agency |
| Jurisdictional structure | |
| Operations jurisdiction* | City of Los Angeles in the state of California, United States |
| Size | 498 sq mi (1,290 km²) |
| Population | 3.8 million |
| Legal jurisdiction | City of Los Angeles, California |
| General nature |
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| Operational structure | |
| Police Officers | Approx. 300 |
| Parent agency | Los Angeles Police Department |
| Facilities | |
| Areas |
18
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| Footnotes | |
| * Divisional agency: Division of the country, over which the agency has usual operational jurisdiction. | |
Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) was an elite but controversial special operations unit of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), tasked with combating gang-related crime.
CRASH was established by LAPD chief Daryl Gates to combat the rising problem of gangs in Los Angeles, California. Each of the LAPD's 18 divisions had a CRASH unit assigned to it, whose primary goal was to suppress the influx of gang-related crimes in Los Angeles, which came about primarily from the increase in the drugs trade.
In 1973, in 77th Street Division of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), street gangs were quickly becoming a problem. Deputy Chief Lou Sporrer, commanding officer of South Bureau, responsible for 77th Street Division operations, and ultimately responsible to Chief of Police Edward M. Davis, created a unit of uniformed officers and a plain clothes intelligence section, combined to be identified as 77th Street Division TRASH.
TRASH was an acronym for Total Resources Against Street Hoodlums; with the idea that LAPD didn't want to glamorize gangs. Activists began efforts to abolish the TRASH unit stating the name itself hurt the image of these youth. Sporrer agreed to a name change and the "T" became a "C" and TRASH became CRASH.
In addition to gang-related crime prevention, CRASH officers also had to obtain information about a specific gang that was assigned to them and relay that information between districts. The CRASH officer's "freedom of movement and activity" and "gung-ho" nature has led some of them to incite controversy among themselves and the whole CRASH unit.
In March 2000, CRASH was gradually diminished and replaced with a similar anti-gang unit. This unit's minimum requirements for enlistment are higher than was CRASH's, requiring recruits to have a sufficiently high amount of experience and a low number of personnel complaints. Major categories of crime offenses and attempted crimes in 2000 in Los Angeles increased over those of the previous year, when CRASH was at full staff. In the 1980s, gang violence began to increase dramatically as a result of the drug trade, specifically the introduction of crack cocaine.
Operation Hammer was a CRASH-led initiative that began in 1987 to crack down on gang violence in South Central Los Angeles. As a result of increasing gang violence and a drive-by killing resulting in the deaths of seven people, then-Chief of Police Daryl Gates responded by sending CRASH officers to arrest suspected gang members. At the height of this operation in April 1988, 1,453 people were arrested by one thousand police officers in a single weekend. While considered successful by some, this operation and the LAPD were maligned with accusations of racism; some believed that Operation Hammer heavily employed racial profiling, targeting African-American and Hispanic youths that were labelled as "urban terrorists" and "ruthless killers." However, proponents of the operation counter that it was not discriminatory as each gang member arrested had warrants for their arrests.
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