The Crips Alliance

Crips is an alliance of individual street organizations known as sets.

The Crips alliance was well established in Los Angeles, California by late 1971. In this same year the Avalon Garden Crips and the Inglewood Crips had joined forces with other Crip sets and began to engage in violent warfare with non-Crip sets. They began to expand to non-Crip set territories controlled by other independent (gangs not in an alliance) gangs.

Each Crip set their own individual gang and are known to have sub-clicks or line-ups that are like smaller individual sets within the set. Gang members in gangs under the Crip alliance are known as Locs and all Crips call each other ‘cuz’ (short for cousin) to signify that they see each other as family.

The gangs under the Crip Alliance are mainly identified by the color blue which is worn proudly by all Crip members as a primary color. Each Crip set has significant differences such as hand signs, use of secondary colors, and customs. The Crip alliance has significantly branched out of California and has spread throughout the majority of the United States.