[Music] now we're down to Broad Street in Germantown now and as we get to the very bottom of the hill we get into distressed neighborhoods crime alienation the civil law in the minds of people becomes weaker and weaker the code of the street becomes more and more prominent eye for an eye tooth for tooth and where the civil law is weak Street Justice often times fills the void tell me your story my story yeah your story the story of the young black man in the urban environment his perspective is often times missing from any discussion I grew up in a family of four like my brothers they in and out of the streets and stuff like that my mom was there as much as she could she worked but she also had her habits like drinking and stuff like that would make it harder for the kids for you to be your age and me to be mine i' done probably seen a little more than you yeah on a on a on a violent perspective we met Mustafa on the street about 3 weeks ago he's a self-described entrepreneur whatever he can sell to make money as far as seeing people get shot watching dead bodies lie on the ground seeing friends of mine die off just even killer be killed now in the community people divide themselves up into Street and recent and probably Mustafa however he was raised he had access to the street and that experience has created in him a deep sense of alienation anything can happen at any given time but his dream is about decency deceny you know you only get cash two ways I always tell folks legal businesses you you own operate your own business or you work with someone or illegal where you do drug trades or stal on whatever those are only two ways you make money in this country when you break it down drugs are everywhere and guns are everywhere it's easy to get drugs like you go to any Corner out and get drugs like almost any Corner things get bad I stand on the corner of a block and sell drugs if I had to it's not something that oh yeah I'm proud of this yeah look at me I do this it's just literally a way of life what kind of money do they make I mean standing on the corner if you're doing it right you can make like $1,500 a day manhood if you're a man and you feel no hope or you sense no future you become destroyed as a person then you don't care what happens to you if you don't care what happens to you you certainly don't care about people around you I respect you you get enough enough you have to be respectful you got to be respectful you have to be no you have to be respectful Street Credibility is essential and Street credits high maintenance in the 50s 60s and 70s in the city of Phil we had gang Killers this violence now is a whole another kind of level bounds I mean most of the homicides in the city f up for the last 10 years or so U Been argument related yeah guys are frustrated what are the fights about most of the fights in Philly is about nothing about nothing about nothing stuff like me and you talking now we disagree and you can look at somebody girl WR it escalates it esates and you're packing and I'm packing right somebody's going to get shot a lot of people say that fighting is going out fist fighting yeah ain't no ain't no fighting no more can't nobody take a ass with them yeah nobody wanton to get beat up in front of people people gain reputations for having the ability and the inclination payback and kind payback Revenge how easy is it to get a gun a phone call and a couple dollars couple dollars all you need is money you got the little green dead people on a piece of paper and you can get whatever you want so I ain't going to fight I'm just going to shoot you the code of the street it's a peculiar form of social exchange that allows for a certain order in the community it's even something of a self- policing mechanism one might say it's not pretty as a picture but this is one of the ways in which the community functions you see if you walking across a cop car you walking across the street get the out the street not a lot of respect for the police in the community no if somebody broke into my house I would go grab a gun and start shooting first before I caught the police the code of the street is that you don't call the police because you sell yourself M they don't trust the police they don't trust the system because perhaps they had an experience in the past where they did do the right thing and the end work out to exactly how they looked at it the police don't respond to gun call take them 5 hours to get there for that but you tell them somebody on the corner selling a bag of weed here they come 50 cars deep but you tell them somebody laying there dying take the cops 4 hours to get there this guy done been shot four times he laying on the ground uh is he breathing why you asking me questions didn't I just say the man been shot four times why not rush and find out if he breathing in that it's the wrong mindset we all know that but how do you get into a mind of a juvenile or a young adult that tell them do the right thing would it be different in a white neighborhood of course it would course you you get you get an automatic response automatic response as we move up the class system and as we you see people who are less alienated the code of the street is not so prevalent the civil law comes into play one of the things the street worked with me in the last four or five years is that a lot of young folks really don't want to be doing this crazy stuff they're doing they just don't have someone showing them how to do something different so you become the creature of your environment cuz you got to survive I can't keep talking about I want to be a doctor or a lawyer or something like that I can't I can't say I'm a own a car dealership if I don't get some money ain't no money going to come in if you got to kill somebody to survive if you got to rob somebody and it's surviving right now and it's hard and I think this really gets right at America's racial [Music] divide