Born a Crime

well. If someone’s caught stealing, the township deals with them. If someone’s caught breaking into a house, the township deals ...

but also a ceiling. In our crew, our friend G was like the rest of us, unemployed, hanging out. Then he got a job at a nice clot ...

came out in his slippers and his socks. He wasn’t dressed for work. “Yo, G, what’s going on? What’s up with the job?” “Oh, I don ...

it also never lets you leave. Because by making the choice to leave, you’re insulting the place that raised you and made you and ...

starts a fight and one of your friends pulls a gun and somebody’s getting shot and you’re left standing around going, “What just ...

Americans call SWAT is just our regular police. They came looking for the source of the music, and the music was coming from me. ...

cut the power and possibly damage the drive. This cop clearly didn’t give a fuck about any of that. “Shut it down! Shut it down! ...

the power cord out of the tower to shut the thing down. Then the cops started firing tear gas into the crowd. The tear gas had n ...

Even if I’d had the money for a new hard drive, it had taken me years to amass the music collection. There was no way to replace ...

black Mr. Burns, came by. “Hey, look what I found,” he said. “What’ve you got?” “A camera.” I’ll never forget that camera. It wa ...

that’s degrees removed. You don’t think about it. But this camera had a face. I went through those pictures, knowing how much my ...

affects. We don’t see their face. We don’t see them as people. Which was the whole reason the hood was built in the first place, ...

If we could see one another’s pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the ...

One night our crew got invited to dance in Soweto against another crew. Hitler was going to compete with their best dancer, Hect ...

“Hey, we’re not a township anymore. We’re building nice things now.” That was the attitude. That’s who we were up against. Hitle ...

everyone get out and they searched it. We were standing outside, lined up alongside the car, when one of the cops came back. “We ...

slapping each of us across the face, berating us about the gun. We couldn’t do anything but stand there and take it. “You guys a ...

At a certain point we realized what was going on. This cop was shaking us down for a bribe. “Spot fine” is the euphemism everyon ...

because we didn’t have any money. So he took us to jail. It was a public bus. It could have been anyone’s gun, but the guys from ...

rich boy. You think it’s fun running around with these guys? This isn’t play-play anymore. Just tell me the truth about your fri ...