The Crips Book of Knowledge

After moving to Florida in 1996, I attended middle school in the projects for a year until I was jumped by 3 youths and transferred to the white school in the suburbs.

At this school, I met “Crasper” – AKA Adam – Crasper was an average-looking 13 year old white boy with freckles and he was obsessed with the Crips street gang.

He was otherwise a totally normal kid, very friendly, quiet, intelligent, seemed to make good grades – but his dream was to be in this gang. He would tell me about his fantasies of being a part of the legendary gang, listened to rap music, drew gang symbols all over his school work, and most importantly – Crasper spent time in class studying and memorizing the “Crip Book of Knowledge.”

Crasper’s Book of Knowledge was a 25-page document he had printed from the school library and inserted into a binder with plastic page protectors, adorned with gang symbols he had drawn in sharpie on it. It contained purportedly detailed inside knowledge of the mysterious, complex symbols, codes, and oaths of the Crips, that must be memorized in its entirety by hopeful Crip recruits. According to Crasper, crips would be greeted with a cryptic phrase and if he didn’t know the appropriate response he would be identified as a fake, or worse, an infiltrator from a rival gang. So he set about memorizing the hundreds of codes, phrases, and symbols with determination…

Here is a short sample of some of the codes that he was memorizing:

# codes….
c-7 – wats craccin..
c-6 – cops..
c-6-c – fucc cops.
2020 – wacth your bacc
407 – milk
401 – srt8 loc
403 – loc shorty
187 – homoicide
211 – jokes or bk
c-safe = 600 = c-40 = 409 = c-50 = c-out
101 – enemy
c-13 – its drama
300 – their lieing
From http://richard-irby.tripod.com/id14.html

15 years later, I looked up this “knowledge” to see what it really was:

The confusion of Crips representing the Folks Nation alliance started on the internet with unknown persons creating various fictional “Crip Books of Knowledge” which consist of mixing Crip history and Gangster Disciple history, symbols, and literature (lit) together to form fictional “Crip Books of Knowledge”. These fictional “Crip Books of Knowledge” spread rapidly throughout the internet in the 90’s and eventually into the streets. This misrepresentation of the Crips has largely affected Crips throughout the south and parts of the mid-west. This widespread miseducation of the Crips has lead to a recent major outreach by west coast Crips to all Crips across the country to let them know that Crips do not represent the Folks Nation of Chicago and do not represent the Gangster Disciples 6 point star and lit.

The 6-point star they’re referring to was often drawn on Crasper’s…well, everything. Here’s his signature in my yearbook. Note the 6-point star and the large B with a K inside (stands for blood killer) as well as his spelling of the word kick as “kicc” – this of course is to avoid the letters C and K being next to each other as they stand for “Crip Killer.”:

Needless to say, I think my young friend was something of a poser. I wonder how well his fascination with crips would have gone over at the first school I attended in the area. He may not have been as lucky as even I was to have just been beaten by 3 kids…