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15 Crime Media Culture 3 (2019)

handle is hein.journals/cmctre15 and id is 1 raw text is: 


Article

                                                                           Crime Media Culture
                                                                           2019, Vol. 15(1) 3-23
In  the    'h200d': Crips and              the                             0TeAtos)21
                                                                          O The Author(s) 2017
intersection          between         space and                               r    -eusuielies
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identity       in  the    Netherlands                            DOl 10.1177/1741659017729002
                                                                   journals.sagepub com/home/cmc
                                                                                OSAGE

Robert   A Roks
Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands



Abstract
Since the early 1 990s, there have been reports in the Netherlands of groups of youngsters calling
themselves Crips and Bloods. In this article, I will focus on the case of the Dutch Rollin 200
Crips from the city of The Hague, drawing on three years of fieldwork (2011-2013) in a small
neighbourhood  that this Dutch 'gang' claims as their 'h200d'. The history of the Rollin 200 Crips
shows their deeply rooted connection to the locality, whilst the influences from global street and
gang  cultures simultaneously resonates in both the name of the gang and their street spatial
practices. By looking at the ways these Dutch Crips engage in acts of territoriality, I want to
build on Ilan's (2013: 5-7; 2015: 75) and Fraser's (2013, 2015) observations that there is a need
to revisit some of the assumptions that underpin the understanding of street spatial practices
and specifically the way young people understand and construct space and identity. This case
study highlights the interconnection between space and identity, both in terms of how the gang
identity of these Dutch Crips influences their usage of space, but also how space is used in the
construction of personal identities.


Keywords
Ethnography, gangs, identity, space, territoriality




Introduction
'I learned about the Crips from right here, from hanging around the neighbourhood. Later on, I
found out that you also have Crips in Los Angeles, in the United States'. Kerim, a 20-odd years old
Turkish youngster, told me this during the final stage of my three years of fieldwork. In line with
Van Gemert's (1998: 48) expectations about the global dissemination of the Crip brand, for some
youngsters from the Netherlands the Rollin 200 Crips are seen as a local phenomenon rather than


Corresponding author:
Robert A Roks, Assistant Professor of Criminology, Department of Criminology, Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus
University Rotterdam, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, Rotterdam, 3000 DR, the Netherlands.
Email: roks@law.eur.nl

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