For St. Louis Gangs, Ferguson Has Become a Recruiting Tool

As they ran through a cloud of tear gas during demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, on Monday, Andre Ellis, 17, linked arms with Graig “Shine” Cook, a self-identified Bloods gang member who’d befriended him two nights earlier.

“What we doing now that they gassed us?” asked Ellis, the Bloods’s newest recruit, half his face covered with a red handkerchief traditionally worn by the gang’s members. “Should we go home?”

“Nah, we going to get more batch,” said Cook, using a slang term for the mixture of gasoline and nail polish remover that a handful of protesters had used to make the Molotov cocktails they’d hurled at police. “Then we coming back on them bitches.”

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