Nipsey Hussle Was Hailed as a Hero. But to California Officials, He Was Still a Gangster. (Published 2019) (2024)

LOS ANGELES — When a gunman rolled up to Nipsey Hussle’s Marathon Clothing store late last month, the first person to be shot was Kerry Lathan, recently released from prison and there to pick up a T-shirt. Mr. Lathan was shot in the back, before Hussle, the renowned rap artist, was killed.

Days later, Mr. Lathan, using a wheelchair while he recovered from his wound, was arrested and held in the Men’s Central Jail — not because he had committed a crime, but because he had violated parole by associating with a known gang member: Nipsey Hussle.

Never mind that Hussle had been lauded as a businessman and a philanthropist, mourned with a 25-mile procession through the streets of South Los Angeles, and celebrated by former President Barack Obama. Or that he had been killed one day before he was set to sit down with the city’s police chief to talk about reducing gang violence.

Mr. Lathan’s reimprisonment stirred outrage in the city’s black community, where memories of aggressive gang policing in the 1980s and 1990s are still raw. It also brought renewed attention to a system of parole and probation that can land people back behind bars for violating lengthy sets of conditions that can include curfews, random searches and control over where people can live and whom they can see.

After Mr. Lathan, 56, spent 10 days in jail, apparently even parole officials could no longer reconcile Nipsey Hussle the local hero with Nipsey Hussle the gang member. On Thursday, after appeals to Gov. Gavin Newsom by family members and calls to the governor’s office by reporters, the head of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Ralph M. Diaz, intervened, and the charges against Mr. Lathan were dropped.

“Although there was a technical violation of the terms and conditions of Mr. Lathan’s parole, after reviewing the circ*mstances in more detail, C.D.C.R. requested the petition to be dismissed,” a department spokesman wrote.

More than 4.5 million people in the United States are on parole or probation — nearly twice as many as are incarcerated — and in some states people whose parole or probation was revoked account for more than half the prison population. According to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, about 20 percent of people released from state prisons are sent back for technical violations, meaning they did not commit a new crime but rather violated conditions, like a ban on entering places that serve alcohol or having any contact with the police — or, in the protracted case of the rapper Meek Mill, an order to take etiquette classes.

Critics say probation and parole often go on far longer than necessary and keep people enmeshed in the criminal justice system, and that those accused of violations have limited due process.

California, once a leader in get-tough-on-crime policies that swelled prison populations, is now seen as at the forefront of national efforts to address mass incarceration and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. In recent years, the state has reduced some drug crimes and thefts to misdemeanors, passed a bill to outlaw cash bail and allowed more inmates to be released for good behavior.

But many parole violations involve alleged links to gang members.

“Gangs are the great exception” to the trend away from incarceration, said Jorja Leap, a gang expert at the University of California at Los Angeles. Even with significant questions about how gangs, gang membership and gang-related crimes are defined, such crimes carry enhanced punishments and a person tagged as having gang affiliations can find the label impossible to shake.

“If someone like Nipsey Hussle is viewed as always a gang member,” Dr. Leap said, “what is happening to the average guy who has a low-level job, who’s trying to make it, and that’s his past? Or the average gal, because it’s men and women alike.”

California has long maintained a database of gang members called CalGang, and apparently Hussle, who had spoken publicly about his past experience as a member of the Crips, was still listed, despite the turn in his life. The arresting document for Mr. Lathan called Hussle a “documented ‘Rolling 60’s Crip’ gang member.”

Though law enforcement has defended the list as necessary to fight gang violence, a state audit in 2016 found that it was misused and rife with errors, including dozens of people listed as being less than 1 year old and hundreds who were not set to be purged from the list for more than a century — far longer than the law allowed.

“It’s really wrong to be permanently putting people on these lists,” said Vincent Schiraldi, an expert on probation at Columbia University. “It’s very racially divisive. It makes people in communities of color feel like they never have a chance to be viewed as equals.”

Mr. Lathan was released last September for serving almost 25 years on a murder conviction, and like countless men coming out of prison whom Hussle was trying to help, he was loosely in the rapper’s orbit. Hussle had known his sister, Ellisa McKnight, and had given her a car full of clothes for her brother when he was released.

But Mr. Lathan barely knew Hussle, even though he had hopes of working with him in his programs to reduce gang violence.

“At the time of his death he was an icon of the community,” Ms. McKnight said of Hussle. “The whole city shut down to mourn this man. Even Congress recognized him. So how is it that Mr. Lathan was going to have a meeting with a person affiliated with a gang?”

Mr. Lathan, in a recent interview from jail that was recorded by a friend and uploaded to VladTV, said he had taken a selfie with Hussle. “He’s a celebrity,” he said. “Everybody’s taking selfies, let me take one. That’s on my phone, in front of the Marathon store.”

Mr. Lathan, who said he was feeling “bad as hell” without his pain medication, related his conversation with his parole officer at the time of his arrest: “The parole officer was like, ‘Well you have gang affiliations.’ I said, ‘Look man, I know Nipsey about as much as I know you. You’re my parole officer. I’ve met you. We’ve talked a few times. That’s as far as I know him.’”

In a statement, the Los Angeles Police Department, trying to blunt criticism and put down rumors in the city’s black community that the police were behind Mr. Lathan’s arrest, said this week that Mr. Lathan was “being treated as a victim and a witness in this investigation.”

The statement noted that it was the Department of Corrections that had arrested Mr. Lathan.

Steve Soboroff, the president of the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, who was planning to meet with Hussle to talk about combating gang violence, said in an interview: “We don’t think he’s a gang member. If someone said, ‘Could Nipsey babysit my grandkids?’ I’d say ‘yes.’”

Mr. Lathan had turned his life around in prison by participating in numerous programs and working closely with older inmates, his lawyer, Lauren Noriega, said.

“This area of the law is so flawed,” said Ms. Noriega, of parole policies and gang databases. “It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t give these guys or these women any chance to prove that they have been rehabilitated and actually get a second chance.”

Even as a gang expert who has testified in court, Dr. Leap said she had no access to the CalGang database: “Law enforcement controls it. And here’s the critical thing: No one ever makes it off that list. No one.”

On April 9, as Mr. Lathan sat in jail for associating with Hussle, the city renamed a street intersection in Hussle’s honor.