The Crips are a predominantly African American
gang that originated sometime between the mid-1960s and 1971 in South Central Los Angeles,
California. The origin of the Crips is highly mythologized and facts are difficult to separate from myth. One of the most common versions involves Raymond Lee Washington of the East Side Crips and Stanley Tookie Williams of the West Side Crips uniting their two gangs to form a political organization that would combat gang violence. While the early group was inspired by the
Black Panthers mission to give communities control over their neighborhoods, the Crips later evolved into a violent street gang.
In his autobiography, Stanley Williams claimed that he and Washington founded the gang in 1971 with noble intentions — without any influence from the Black Panthers — to provide protection from street violence, but eventually steered the gang toward violence. Alternatively, the United States Department of Justice and some social scholars claim that Raymond Washington solely founded the gang in the mid-1960s to imitate the Black Panther Party and older Los Angeles gangs. It is universally agreed upon, however, that most of the members in the gang’s early years, including its two supposed founders, were less than 18 years of age.
True it seems according to this that it was started as a black panther type ting but it devolved when the cia infiltrated the panthers and provided drugs to the crips and bloods and other gangs.