Negotiating a truce to end gang violence in Los Angeles

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[SUSPENSEFUL INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC]

JENN WILLIAMS, HOST:
Hey everyone. Welcome to The Negotiators, a production of Doha Debates and Foreign Policy. I’m your host, Jenn Williams. Today we are covering a peace agreement between rival gangs in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. The Watts truce in 1992 had a significant impact. Gang-related murders reportedly dropped 44% in Watts in just the first two years after the treaty was signed. The truce even found its way into rap music at the time. Like this Ice-T song, “Gotta Lotta Love.”

ICE-T (RAPPING):

The gang truce is on, so you wear whatever / At Venice by the ocean …

JENN: But sadly, the Watts treaty was largely overshadowed by the L.A. riots that erupted soon after it was signed. 

[SOUNDS OF SIRENS, GLASS BREAKING, CROWD SHOUTING]

JENN: The unrest began in April of 1992 after a court acquitted four police officers who had been accused of using excessive force in the brutal beating of black motorist Rodney King.

NEWSCLIP WITH AMERICAN WOMAN SPEAKING:

The four LAPD officers in the Rodney King beating case found not guilty …

NEWSCLIP WITH ANOTHER AMERICAN WOMAN SPEAKING:

Los Angeles was swept in some of the worst rioting in US history. Sixty people killed; over a billion dollars in damage. 

JENN: Now, to give you an idea of how essential the Watts truce was, gang-related violence in Los Angeles killed more than 4,000 people between 1985 and 1992. That’s more than the death toll in a lot of high-profile conflicts around the world, including the troubles in Northern Ireland. 

Aqeela Sherrills was one of the key negotiators of the treaty. He grew up in Watts and had belonged to a gang. One day, he decided he wanted something different for his community. So in the late 1980s, he and other Watts residents began meeting informally to try to end the violence. 

JENN: It’s 1989. Where are you? What’s going on? How old are you? Just kind of put me there.

AQEELA SHERRILLS:

1989, it’s the height of the war in the city of Los Angeles. Eleven hundred murders in the city, 1,500 in the county. I’m 19. I’m essentially hiding on campus. I’m at Cal State University, Northridge, where I went to college at, to literally escape the war in the neighborhood, you know? Inspired by one of my oldest sisters, Londi, who was the first person in our family to go to a four-year university and graduate. So I’m the youngest of—Ms. Wajeha has 10 kids, raised in the Jordan Downs housing projects. 1989, my brother Duke got shot. I lost about 13 good friends, you know, to the war in the neighborhood. Also, 1989 is when I had my transformative experience.

JENN: OK, tell me about that. What was that?

AQEELA: So, you know, I never questioned the violence that I witnessed growing up, because it meant to question the violence that I experienced in my own house, right? And I didn’t have language and courage to confront the perpetrator. But when I got to college, I had a professor at Northridge that had me reading this book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen by James Baldwin, that gave me, like, courage, like James Baldwin’s a literary genius, and his telling of the story of the Atlanta child murders, and Wayne Williams being convicted of two of 28, was transformative. I read the autobiography of Malcolm X, which was essentially, like, my story. I was born and raised in the nation of Islam, and then got away from it, you know, because of all of the trauma and gang-banging and all that type of stuff. And so it was like, OK. I was reminded that I had a task, that that spirit was calling me to do something that was so much bigger than myself. I became, you know, a Black nationalist. So I connected with the new African People’s Movement. The research and studying kind of led me to question some of the homies in the neighborhood around the killing that was happening. And so I became what we call conscious, or woke. These are the things that actually inspired me to want to bring about an end to the war that was happening in the neighborhood.

JENN: So you and your brother, Daude Sherrills, and some of your friends decided that, that you would start speaking to some rivals from the other housing projects. Tell me about one of those first interactions that you had there.

AQEELA: Absolutely. So Watts has the largest concentration of public housing west of the Mississippi. These four major housing developments sit on a perfect 90-degree angle. And the epiphany, or, or, or theory that we had, was that if we connect the hypotenuse, the Nickerson Gardens, to the Jordan Downs, we would create a domino effect for peace across the city. And so that was the inspiration. And so we started marching in all of the housing projects in Watts and across the city. And, you know, because we were Black nationalists, we knew that brothers in the street respected strength, you know—because, again, this was at the height of the war, too, of the gang war, as well.

So we would come in the neighborhoods, in rival territories, you know, dressed in all black, red, black and green flag, 25 deep in the street. And we’d come marching down the street, and we started, of course, in our neighborhood, right? And we had these chants, right, the new African People’s chants: “I don’t know what I’ve been told, African people are mighty bold. Done destroyed the old plantation, now we’re going to build a new foundation. Oh, now we’re going to build a new Black nation. Black power!” And it’s a call and response, so, “Black power! Getting stronger by the hour!” “Getting stronger by the hour!” 

And folks would be like, “Whoa, who’s these cats?” So they’d come to meet us to hear what the message is. And so, we’d set up a crate, I’d stand on a soapbox, literally, and start talking about how spirit is calling us to take on a new charge. That, as Minister Farrakhan said, we’re the strongest generation that our race has produced. And so we were like, “You know, we call each other dog, right?” That was the term: “What’s up, dog?” We were like, “What’s dog spelled backwards?” And cats was like, “God.” I was like, “That’s who you really are.” And so we talked about the colors red and blue, when you combine the colors red and blue, you get purple. So purple was the color for Grape Street in our neighborhood.

JENN: Right, and just, just, for listeners, you know, red was the colors that represented the Bloods. Blue represented the Crips. You got rival gangs, you got people showing their colors, wearing their colors. You didn’t want to be seen wearing the wrong colors in the wrong—on the wrong corner. 

AQUEELA: That’s right. 

JENN: So that symbolic, kind of, bringing together of red and blue, making purple—and you know, purple being the color of royalty, too, right? 

AQUEELA: That’s right.

JENN: I’m sure some folks looked at you sideways, like, “What are these guys doing?” But you, you started having some informal meetings, these—with, you know, competing groups. Tell me about one of those meetings that—where you actually, kind of, sat down. Like, where did y’all meet? Was there, you know, neutral territory? What did that look like?

AQEELA: So when we first started having the conversations, you know, they were, they were outside in parks, right? Because we were marching in neighborhoods. And then Minister Farrakhan came with the Stop the Killing Tour in ’89 and drew about 1,500 Crips and Bloods. We took about 25 of our homies from the neighborhood to hear the message. And then there was, you know, these meetings that started happening at Jim Brown’s house in the Hollywood Hills as a neutral ground.

JENN: We’re talking about Hall of Fame football great Jim Brown here. 

AQUEELA: Yes.

JENN: How did you meet him? Was that through Minister Farrakhan and those meetings? How did you get introduced to him?

AQEELA: So interestingly, we met Jim Brown through his mentor, Maggie Hathaway, who was an avid civil rights activist. And we knew her through some mutual friends. 

Jim is a legend, you know, as a civil rights icon and an activist, not just an athlete. And so, we end up going and meeting with Jim, and then Jim told us about Minister Farrakhan coming to town with the Stop The Killing Tour. Because Jim and Minister Farrakhan were tight. So these were huge meetings—two, three hundred people at these conversations.

And so Jim offered his place, you know, as a neutral grounds for us to have dialogue and conversation. These meetings happen for about a year before we start having the real focus meetings around the peace treaty in Watts, right? So one night— you know, we were having meetings every Wednesday night at Jim Brown’s house where we brought people from all across the city, and we realized that trying to—L.A. is huge. I mean, it’s three miles across from one part of the county to the other. We realized that we’re not going to be able to pull everybody together. That if we started with Watts, you know, by organizing the four major housing projects, we can create a domino effect across the city. Like, let’s focus on Watts, you know, as the hub of our strategy.

JENN: So we’re going to get back to Daude and his role in the treaty in just a second. But first, what makes this negotiation so interesting is that Aqeela and Jim Brown and others, they were also helping the community to learn how to mediate conflicts amongst themselves during this whole process, through a company they founded called Amer-I-Can. And that’s what made the eventual treaty really work. So we’re going to spend a few minutes on this piece of the puzzle, which I found really fascinating.

AQEELA: Amer-I-Can is a for-profit company that we launched to finance our work, right? So we got contracts with department of corrections and rehab, we got contracts with the community service center. And so, the curriculum was also a short course in human development. It taught us how to make better decisions in our life. The whole philosophy was: eliminate the negative, establish the facts and choose your best option. These was, you know, ways of helping us to be able to make better decisions in our life. Because here’s the thing: you know, we talk about rehabilitation, but we don’t understand that some of our folks in the neighborhood have never been habilitated, you know? And so, teaching basic decision-making skills; getting full knowledge of a situation before you make a decision; learning how to get angry without having to pick up a pistol or a weapon; learning how to manage your finances. And it was done, kind of, in a, in a group circle. So it was almost therapeutic, you know? The course opened up with each individual talking about—sharing words that describe how they’re feeling that day. And so it gave people an opportunity to unpack some of their emotional and psychological issues.

JENN: So they were doing these meetings in the community, but they were also doing them in prisons and jails.

AQEELA: One of the things that we understood was that there’s a direct correlation in terms of the violence between community and prison, right? Things happen on the street that, that affects the yard, that affects prison, and shots can be called in a prison that actually impacts the street, right? So you need to have that, that relationship. And because Amer-I-Can—we secured a contract, and we went in 17 prisons in the state of California. So it gave us an opportunity to connect with a lot of the G-cats, you know, like, extremely influential dudes in the prison system who had a lot of influence on the street. So, so Amer-I-Can, I would say, was critical in laying the foundation for the peace treaty, because it was why we were able to have some of those dialogues, because we were trained facilitators in life-management skills.

So after the big meetings up at Jim’s house on Wednesday, we started focusing on Watts. And so there’s a Brother, Brother Mujahid Abdul-Karim, who is the imam at Masjid Al-Rasul on 112th Street and Central in Watts. And so, you know, Brother Mujahid was one of the first cats that we went to when we had the inspiration for organizing the peace treaty, and we told him about it. And so he was one of the first cats that believed what we said, and actually gave us money, you know, to open up our propaganda store across the street from the projects. And so Mujahid hosted us at the Masjid, which is essentially up the street from the Nickersons. And when I say that these meetings were intense, you could cut the air with a knife. Like, intense.

JENN: Yeah, put me inside one of those meetings. There was one in particular, y’all discussed a ceasefire, right?

AQEELA: So there were several meetings that had happened, and one of the cats from the Nickersons was like, “Hey, listen, we done met, we done had conversations. We all agree, it seems like we’re on the same page.” They said, “The only thing left to do is y’all got to bring y’all shooters in here.” Because see, and here’s the thing, it’s like 1% of the neighborhood is actually doing most of the shooting and killing, right? And so they’re like, “Hey, we want y’all shooters in the room.” So they brought they shooters, we brought our shooters. Everybody got frisked, too. Now Masjid Al-Rasul is a Shiite mosque, and so, you know, revolutionaries came out of there. You ain’t going to be up in the Masjid causing no ruckus. You know what I’m saying?

JENN: So there was a respect for the place and the situation.

AQEELA: Absolutely, yeah. And so we sat in a very intense meeting where, you know, folks argued a bit about some lives lost and some bodies exchanged. And the agreement was that, hey—with the shooters was that, “Y’all stay over there and we’re going to stay over here.” You know? And so that was the initial get down. You know? So we walked out of the space, you know—not a signed document just yet, but just a verbal agreement that y’all over there, we’re over here.

JENN: So they have a ceasefire. But how did they get to a peace treaty? Find out after the break.

[PERCUSSIVE INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC]

JENN: Welcome back to The Negotiators, a production of Doha Debates and Foreign Policy. I’m Jenn Williams. Before the break, you heard about the work Aqueela Sherrills was doing in the neighborhood and in the criminal justice system. He was helping people process their feelings, move on from decades of violence and buy into the idea of a peace treaty in Watts. Eventually he and others managed to get the rival gangs to agree to a temporary ceasefire, but they still needed to hammer out an actual peace treaty. Aqueela’s brother played a big role in this part. 

JENN: So your brother, Daude, he thought it’d be a good idea to base the treaty off of a real treaty. 

AQEELA: That’s right. 

JENN: Where did he get that idea, and, you know, how did he come to the idea of using the armistice agreement that ended the Arab-Israeli War in 1949? How did he get there?

AQEELA: So, so one of the brothers that was a part of Amer-I-Can and the nation, Tony Perry— you know, Daude asks Tony at one of our Wednesday night meetings if he would do the research and identify, like, a peace treaty document agreement that we could sign, you know, as a part of the peace treaty. And so Tony did some research, and he came back with the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord. And it was just so apropos, right, that the armistice agreement that we signed on April the 28th—but one of the things that we ended up discovering was that the armistice agreement between the Israelis and the Egyptians was also signed on April the 28th. Insane, right? And the other thing that was, like, so serendipitous is that Ralph Bunch, who ended up negotiating the peace treaty, is from South L.A., went to Jefferson High School, UCLA. So I’m like, right from the neighborhood as well. And so I feel like we were absolutely tapped into something divine that actually brought that peace full circle.

JENN: Aqeela wasn’t so involved with the text of the treaty, so we wanted to share a little bit more about that. Daude titled the agreement “The Multi-peace Treaty-General Armistice Agreement.” The main goal was to prevent the, quote, “future war-like destruction of the parties,” end quote. This echoed the Egypt-Israel agreement, and it called for a permanent ceasefire, saying that there would be, quote, “no conflict of the land,” end quote. And it acknowledged the gang war’s impact on civilians, or non-gang members—specifically, that they couldn’t cross the fighting lines. The agreement said that this would no longer be supported; basically, that people could move about freely throughout the neighborhood now. The agreement had some other parts to it. For Aqeela, these were the three main components.

AQEELA: The first thing was that we eliminated colors. So red and blue—like, in L.A., in the 90s, I mean, you would get your head knocked off just for having the color on. No association with gangs or nothing. Right? So that was one of the first things that we eliminated. The second thing was this whole thing about drive-bys, that we were like, hey, we want to end the drive-bys between, you know, warring neighborhoods. If there’s a conflict, you know what I’m saying, let’s identify who’s involved, and let’s come to the table and negotiate the terms before, you know, any shooting happens. I think the third piece was, was to engage in activities that strengthened our relationship amongst rival gangs, so that we know each other when we see each other in the field. And it was not to get rid of gangs, right? Because we’ve never been an anti-gang effort or a strategy, because we believe that gangs are surrogate families that lost their nuclear family to the real killer, which is poverty.

JENN: Mm. So the Arab-Israeli, you know, the armistice agreement between the Israelis and the Egyptians, those three things that you laid out, those three elements in y’all’s peace treaty—how did y’all look at the treaty and translate that into, you know, your neighborhood?

AQEELA: Well, it wasn’t so much about the document as it is about relationships, you know, that individuals have with each other in neighborhoods. Right? As I said, Watts is 2.2 square miles across, largest concentration of public housing west of the Mississippi, about 60,000 residents. We all know each other. We all got kids by the same women. We all grew up together. So it’s not like we don’t know each other.

JENN: Right. So on the text of the agreement, you’ve got those three elements, right, that you were talking about. You used the language of war and peace, right? Like, talking about civilians when you’re talking about drive-by shootings. Did y’all fight over the text of it? Like, were there arguments—

AQEELA: No.

JENN: —over what to include or what not to include, or no?

AQEELA: No. The paper document is one thing. It’s the agreement amongst, you know, those who engage, right? And so every neighborhood has influencers. Like, Black American gangs are decentralized. There’s not one person, like, that calls the shots for the whole neighborhood. You know, the neighborhood is made up of a bunch of cliques. So for instance, Grape Street, right? You got the parolees, you got the triple OGs, you got Dust Town, you got the boss players, you got the POWs, you got all of these individuals who make up Grape Street. And every, every group has a sphere of influence. There’s a charismatic leader, you know, that probably leads that crew. And so … it’s not necessary to get every single individual to buy in. What you do is you get the leadership, you know, to buy in on the strategy. And so as you can imagine, everybody didn’t buy in. You know what I’m saying? And so it was important that you had—you got to have, you know, the strong cats in the neighborhood, you know what I’m saying? And that’s been willing to push, as we call, push a line around peace.

JENN: Aqeela remembered the day the peace treaty went into effect really well.

AQEELA: We were all sitting in the parking lot in the projects, and I was like, “So where we at?” And cats was like, “Yo, they with it, we with it, it’s on.” And I was like, “Well, let’s go over there. Let’s go over to the PJs.” [LAUGHS] And cats was like, “Let’s go.”

And my boy Playmate, I remember him running to the house to get the video camera, and it was one of the, you know, big ones. He was like, “Man, this is going to be historic, man!” So we drove, and we pull up into PJs, man, and I could see all these cats looking. [LAUGH] Cats started scattering a little bit. So we pulled up in front of the gym, and we get out of the car and stuff, you know. And so we’re going in there, we call one of our big homies, you know, Big Blue and Spike. They came through. I think I was about—maybe 22, 23 or something like that. The big homies is arguing in the gym. And so all of the young cats, we go outside. We was like, “Y’all with the peace treaty?” Because, you know, we was the cats that was doing all the craziness. They was like, “Y’all with it?” They was like, “We with it. Y’all with it?” “We with it.” We was like, “The peace treaty on.” 

So we started celebrating outside, and, and you know, man, the project word-of-mouth, man, is better than the phone, man. [CHUCKLES] People started calling, like, folks around. Like, you’re talking about a 20-year war. And I say war, I mean war. Like you know, in which, I mean, there’s been dozens of bodies traded between these neighborhoods.

Man, that night, all of the folks from, from Jordan Downs came over to the PJs, man, and we had a good time. The next day, Jordan Downs hosted the picnic, and we had cats from the Nickersons and PJs. We had 3,000 people in the projects that night, you know, from all of the different neighborhoods, coming to celebrate, like, this release.

JENN: So pretty soon after that, y’all had a big test, right? Rodney King. The Rodney King verdict came out. King was a black motorist who got pulled over and brutally beaten by four police officers. And in 1992, a jury acquitted all four of the officers and L.A. just erupted. So tell us about that.

AQEELA: Actually, it actually solidified the work, because we had been organized and working for almost four years before the verdict came out on the cops, right? [CHUCKLES] I remember, like, the day before the Rodney King verdict, we took 75 individuals on a bus downtown to City Hall. And this is on record, I remember Tom Hayden, who no longer is here with us, Tom Hayden was at the council that day. And so we went there 75 deep, basically telling them that hey, we just organized a peace treaty, we’re going to reduce violence and crime in the city—this was with Jim Brown and Amer-I-Can—that we want to work with you all. And the city council was like, “Yeah, mm, thank you. Go talk to CDD, maybe they can give you guys a couple of dollars for your youth work, thank you.”

JENN: Meanwhile, they’re deploying, like, riot police across the city.

AQEELA: Well, the rebellion breaks out, you know, they called Jim Brown, and asked Jim if he would come on TV, on channel two, and ask folks to calm down. We were all up at Jim Brown’s house, actually, you know, right after the verdict, and things started happening. So at first, we took Jim, Batman, we all got in Batman’s van—our brother Batman from East Coast—and we all, we drove down to the neighborhood. And so we were going to different places telling folks, like, not to, you know, break in the Black stores. But as soon as, you know, the sun went down, it went crazy. And so we rushed Jim back up to the house and got him out of the neighborhood. But yeah, no, it was … insane. We, we—I would say at the beginning of it, we were actually trying to stop people from breaking in stores, but then once we saw that it was, like, anarchy, and the police stopped responding to certain parts of the neighborhood, we was like, “All right, we done.” [LAUGHS]

JENN: So I want to get into the local government and police response a little bit more here. 

AQEELA: Yes. 

JENN: What was that like? Would you just go to them and say, “Hey, we did this thing,” and they would just straight-up say, “OK. We don’t care”?

AQEELA: Well, first of all, it’s hard for government to let somebody else take credit and responsibility for, for working their neighborhood. He or she who controls the narrative, controls the game. OK? Public safety is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Last year, the federal government invested over 300 billion dollars in public safety infrastructure, you know, in cities all across the country. And so these folks are protecting their interest, right, in terms of controlling the narrative around public safety. So they couldn’t give these so-called ex-gang members the credit, you know, for organizing and reducing violence and crime in their respective neighborhoods. So essentially, you know, somebody basically adopted our overall strategy and then sought to implement it in other cities across the country without our input. And safety is not only the absence of violence and crime in community. It’s also the presence of wellbeing and the infrastructure to support the victims and survivors in their respective healing journey. So we’ve had this one-sided criminal legal system, you know, trying to address community violence without healers and therapists and counselors.

JENN: So they don’t get much support from the local government to implement the peace treaty, but they do a ton of grassroots efforts. They organize sports games, they organize parties. They even had a peace treaty radio show. They did a lot of stuff in the neighborhood to promote the peace treaty. Anyway, this story that Aqeela told me about his friend Cartoon really got to me.

AQEELA: One of our brothers, you know, who was instrumental in organizing the peace treaty—we did a documentary about it called WATTS. It’s an acronym, means We Are Taught to Survive. Right? And our brother Cartoon, who just passed this year, who was really instrumental in helping to organize the peace treaty, tells a story about, at one of the football games—so we launched this whole thing, to sustain the peace treaty after we organized it, called the Grassroots Sports Federation. And so we would do football, basketball, baseball against rival neighborhoods to strengthen the relationship, so that when they saw each other out in the streets or at the mall, it’s like, “Yo, I know this brother. I know this sis.” Right? And so Cartoon details a story of when we were on the football field, and he saw one of the brothers that he had allegedly shot walking towards him. 

And so Cartoon says, “I start making a beeline towards my homeboys,” he said, “because I was embracing myself for an intense moment, because I didn’t know what this dude was going to say.” He said the brother got up close to him and he said, “Cartoon,” he said, “I know that you got—probably got some bad feelings about me.” He said, “I probably got some bad feelings about you.” He said, “But man, you know, for the love of our families and of the community—” he said, “I’m with this peace treaty, man.” And he stuck his hand out. And Cartoon said that he grabbed his hand, and he said the brother pulled him into him. And he said he squeezed the brother tight, because he was waiting for the tip of a knife to be stabbed into his stomach, for the, you know, the bullet to be shot into his back. And he said, after a few moments of holding the embrace, he said he felt a genuine love … [BEGINS TO CRY] that this brother was giving. And he said all he could do was just stand there and embrace the brother and just cry. You know? And he said, man, he said it was an intense moment for him. It was transformative. He said, because he never thought in his life that this cat would forgive him or he would be willing to forgive. And the moments … you know, like that, you know, that happened.

I’m not sure, Jenn, if you know that, you know, 18 years ago, my oldest son was murdered in the streets. Home from winter break in college, went to friend’s house in an affluent Black neighborhood on the west side of L.A. and was shot to death at the party. Now, I’m no novice to violence, as I stated, I done witnessed it all my life.

JENN: Yeah.

AQEELA: But nothing ever prepares you for the loss of your child, you know? And it was a transformative moment for me. This was in 2003, 2004. And so if you can imagine, right, I’m pretty well-respected in the neighborhood. And so there’s a conditioned response in the culture I grew up in, to that. And it’s an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. And so one of the things that I had to go tell the homies was that seeking revenge for Terrell wasn’t his legacy. And that this eye for an, eye tooth, for a tooth game that we’ve played has left us all blind and toothless. And I was like, “Hey, we’re going to do something different. We’re going to harness the etheric energy of Terrell,” I said, “and we’re going to do something much more profound.” My son’s case has been a cold case for 18 years now, but, you know, the streets talk. Two weeks later, I got the name, address, telephone number of the kid, and the green light from his homies in the neighborhood to go and knock the kid’s head off. And I said no. I stopped my brothers and family members from harming this kid. I was like, “We’re going to forgive this kid.” And I’m like, “And we’re going to hold space for his healing.” Not condoning what he did. I want him to be held accountable. But if we sought justice in that way, it undoes 16 years of work that we’ve been doing. And I’m like, hey, this kid, something happened to him to have that callous heart that he would take another human being’s life. I want to make sure that he gets the proper counseling, therapy, or whatever healing modality is necessary so that he can live somewhat of a balanced life in his world, because young Black boys in this country are not even seen as human. And again, I don’t condone what he did, but I believe in the divinity of human beings, right? And this was the peace treaty. You know, the gift is in the wound. Let’s hold space for what’s possible and what’s probable, you know, from our collective work.

JENN: You just heard my conversation with Aqeela Sherrills, co-founder and leader of the community-based Public Safety Collective. The group works with local governments and nonprofits around the United States to promote public safety and reduce violence. Aqeela has also worked with the White House on preventing gun violence. 

Now, if you’re a longtime listener to this podcast, you may remember an episode from our first season about a group called Ceasefire in Chicago. Their work as violence interrupters was partly inspired by the Watts truce. While the Watts treaty reduced gang related homicide for much of the 1990s, by 2005, the truce had largely ended. Sherrills says the local government just didn’t do enough to help fortify the deal. That should have included things like helping businesses in the area, a key part of keeping people out of crime.

The Negotiators is a partnership between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy. Our production team includes Rob Sachs, Ashley Westerman, Rosie Julin, Claudia Teti, Japhet Weeks, Jigar Mehta, Amjad Atallah and Dan Ephron. Laura Rosbrow-Telem is the show’s senior producer. Thanks to Nelufar Hedayat, Govinda Clayton and James Wolley for helping create the show. 

Foreign Policy is a magazine of news and ideas from around the world, and we encourage you to subscribe. Just go to foreignpolicy.com/subscribe. Doha Debates is a production of Qatar Foundation, where the most urgent issues of our time are discussed and debated. Tune in at dohadebates.com.

Next week on The Negotiators, we hear from a former aide to Kofi Annan about his efforts to negotiate the end to a political crisis in Kenya.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN:

We were whisked off to an Air Force aircraft and flown to an undisclosed location.

JENN: That’s next time, on The Negotiators. I’m Jenn Williams.