01x01 - Midnight Basketball

[bunniefuu]

I grew up in Park Heights

in Baltimore city.

It changes you when you live

next to vacant houses

and see people die

from violence.

First time I saw a sh**ting,

I was before my 10th birthday.

Rec centers

were like our Haven,

if you think

about midnight basketball game

and what that culture

meant for the city.

The midnight basketball league is

not really about playing basketball.

It's about the w*r

against drug and alcohol abuse.

I look at midnight basketball

as one of the great sport-based

youth development interventions

of the 20th century, really.

Our program grew and went to the

larger cities, Chicago, for instance.

It isn't about winning or losing, man.

It really isn't.

It's about just having

a positive attitude, man.

President Clinton told me we need

to do this program across the country.

So, they come up with the crime bill.

The crime bill gives funds

to community activities,

like midnight basketball.

I'd a lot rather have somebody

sh**ting hoops than sh**ting b*ll*ts.

Our children don't need

midnight basketball.

We need to put swiftness

and certainty of punishment

back into the system again.

To say to a kid that it's a waste

of time and money to help you,

you've got to strip away

your ability to see humanity.

When you don't have anyone at

home, that program is your lifeline.

That's your one escape

from a life that's hell.

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

MIDNIGHT BASKETBALL

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

My childhood years,

my teenage years,

were in the eighties

and nineties.

And that directly connects

to the crack epidemic,

some of the most violent times

in Chicago.

Around my neighborhood,

we had to kind of create

our own sports arenas,

because we didn't have them there.

You see all the nails?

Those are the rims.

That's where we put the rims up.

So, as we grew up, look, here's even

a piece of crate. Look at that.

I need a nice sprint now.

With the idea of co-founding

Westside Sports,

we want to provide out of school

positive programming for young people,

so that they have a place to go,

to stay safe.

Most important, to have fun. Okay?

The program's been fortunate to have

officer Whitaker and officer Martinez.

Good hustle. We've got another

one next week. I'm getting ready.

They're actual basketball players.

They grew up playing

midnight basketball.

They now have an opportunity

to relive that,

to take those experiences

and help other kids grow from that.

This is important to me, because

it can help to stay off the streets,

because I knew a lot of kids

doing that right now.

Coach Martinez?

He's a good coach,

and coach Whitaker.

And he give me an important details,

like every time I miss a layup,

like go up harder.

And him and my mom went to the same

school, so that's how I know him.

Take that shot.

Think. Think about it.

Either pass it, or then just

sort a normal jump shot. Alright?

When I coach the kids

and mentor the kids,

for most of them, they have

never even seen me in a uniform.

Traditionally, officers,

they have a bad perception.

And this is nothing new.

This has been going on

from generations to generations.

But when I played

midnight basketball as a kid,

the police was here,

so it was a safe space.

By coaching, I can impact

those kids

the same as those officers

did for me.

Three years ago,

with no help, support, or money,

Van Standifer launched

his one man crusade

to use basketball as a means

of reaching young people

before drugs reach them.

The midnight basketball league is

not really about playing basketball.

It's about providing a vehicle

upon which citizens, businesses,

and institutions can get involved

in the w*r

against drug and alcohol abuse.

I'm Nelson Standifer.

I am the son of the founder

of the midnight basketball league.

My father was

the town manager of Glenarden.

Most crimes are committed

between 10:00 PM and 2:00 AM.

So, my dad decided

something needs to be done.

In reality, this gathering

has less to do with basketball

than it does with what some here

might be doing otherwise.

If they weren't here, they'd be

on the streets selling drugs.

Basketball is just the lure we use

to get them in

so that we can talk to them.

It was a way to get kids

off the street

and give them

something else to do.

But then, there were also

these wraparound services.

My primary concern was

to help to make them

productive citizens

in that community.

And we did that by having

mandatory workshops.

We can teach them

how to fill out a resume,

how to prepare for job interviews.

We had businesses that would hire our

midnight basketball league players.

And we had schools

that would offer them scholarships.

We're giving them a step up.

And we're giving them opportunities.

It kept me out of trouble.

That's the great thing.

I used to get in a lot of trouble.

Standifer's midnight

basketball program,

it started to get written up

in a number of newspapers,

including the New York Times

and some national circles.

And so, that's when the Bush

administration kind of got involved.

His secretary of urban policy,

former football player, Jack Kemp,

was fascinated with the idea of using

basketball to do crime prevention.

People loved the idea of it

because it was cost-effective,

and it seemed to really deal with the

problems in a way that was innovative.

Bush made it one of the signature

programs

of the thousand points of light

initiative.

It gives me great pleasure to welcome

the President of the United States.

President Bush came here,

in this very gym.

And let me tell you something,

little Glenarden was abuzz

knowing that the president

was coming here.

This country is finally catching

onto the fact

that, whenever the drugs

are involved, everybody loses.

So, Standifer creates the very first

program, late eighties, so '86/87.

And some of the backdrop here

is the attacks on the welfare state

during the w*r on drugs

of the late eighties.

This is the enemy,

destroying lives and neighborhoods.

Smokeable cocaine,

otherwise known as crack.

These kids are looking at

a $400 billion industry.

I don't envy them,

the choices they have to make.

By next year, our spending

for drug law enforcement

will have more than tripled

from its 1981 levels.

American people are demanding action

to stop violent crime.

A lot of federal crime control

policies actually set in motion

kind of self-fulfilling prophecies

about incarceration and crime.

We see greater investments

going into police departments

and into the prison system,

while federal policymakers divested

from fundamental

social welfare programs.

At the height of the w*r on drugs,

Ronald Reagan kicks millions

of families off of food stamps,

cuts back welfare budgets,

and reduces federal outlays

for public housing.

What was being called

the crack epidemic itself

justified and rationalized

the w*r on drugs,

and led to disproportionate rates

of black arrests and incarceration

during the 1980s.

In 1985,

Glenarden, Maryland had one of the

highest crime rates in the nation.

That's when Van Standifer

decided to fight back.

He started

a midnight basketball league.

It gave kids something better

to do with their time,

and new meaning

to Van Standifer's.

From the get-go, midnight basketball

was a racialized program,

not just in targeting black men

as its main recipients,

but in the images

about why we thought

this idea of basketball

could serve the problems of crime.

Streets once littered with drugs

and plagued by violence

have become peaceful

and passable.

Standifer brought together

the liberal and conservative

approaches to crime prevention.

If you are a real conservative,

who thought the only way to deal with

crime was more police, more control,

you could see that

in midnight basketball.

If you're more liberal

and thought,

"It wasn't we need more police,

but we need more resources.

And we need to socialize

young men in a different way,"

you could see

that part of the program too.

We have to start somewhere.

We realize that playing basketball

in the wee hours in the morning

isn't going

to solve the problem.

We know that.

But it is a place to start.

My dad used to say that,

what makes our program work

it was a collective of the businesses,

and institutions,

and the police departments,

and the communities

that we were able

to work with together.

And it grew to a national level.

It really exploded.

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

I say my first love is basketball

because it saved me

in many aspects of life.

My father was arrested when I was in

kindergarten. He was a g*ng member.

And he was, I guess,

like the strong guy

or something to like control

where the drugs were.

Well, the police went

to where the drugs were.

And he was the man there,

so he went to jail.

Basketball was my escape.

And it got me mentors,

got me involved in organizations

that joined with midnight basketball

to offer a safe space.

It helped me in so many aspects

that it's still helping me to today.

The mentees that I mentor myself,

I use the same programs that I uses.

It all started

with midnight basketball,

because I just wanted to hoop.

And I got in the room with them,

and the lessons stick.

If in fact you were to measure

the Chicago housing as a city,

it would be the second largest city

in the state of Illinois.

I was the director

of sports program.

G. Van Standifer would develop

a program in Glenarden, Maryland

called the midnight

basketball league.

And it was

a successful little program.

I felt like

it could work in Chicago.

Okay. Good evening.

I want to welcome everyone

to the midnight basketball league.

Midnight league basketball

started in Chicago.

And this was one of the hot spots

for midnight league basketball,

some of the biggest players.

Gil Walker was

one of the founding fathers.

I'm so proud of you guys, I don't know

what to do, man. I'm telling you.

I was 18, 19, 23, 24 at one time.

And if someone showed

an interest in me,

I paid them back

by doing the right thing.

The midnight basketball league

started out

underneath the budget

of the Chicago Housing Authority.

We went out

and found sponsors.

For $3000, you could own

your very own team

in the midnight

basketball league.

He put together Chicago Bulls,

Chicago politicians,

Chicago Housing Authority,

and all of his NBA friends.

It wasn't just on the west side.

It wasn't just on the south side.

He spread it out

throughout the city.

Just amazing to see because the crowd

would come and it was a safe spot.

Cross g*ng territories?

That did not matter.

It was we're coming

to play basketball.

The athletes were off limits

to the gangs.

And everyone knew it. You can yell

and scream, and show that energy.

And not feel like someone

is going to attack you for it.

And it wasn't just anybody playing

in these leagues.

It was like the top, top guys.

You had games

where the games were so intense.

But even when you had the real rough

and tumble guy down the streets,

they respected the league.

They respect the people

that ran the leagues.

They're playing

for big old championship rings.

And they get a chance to go

to the Bulls game,

because they had a partnership

with Chicago Bulls also.

High energy players,

high energy coaches.

I can remember my brother and I,

we both had 40 points.

You never forget it. It's been, what?

Like almost 20 years from now?

The hairs on your arm

goes up.

That's the energy that you feel when

you're playing midnight basketball,

like 200 people now screaming

either at you or with you.

This is what you wanted for the kids.

You want to give them something.

You know they didn't have much.

Most of them were located

in these housing project areas.

I can't pay to go see the Bulls play,

but I can go into midnight basketball.

The program went viral.

We were bombarded with interviews.

We were written up in every major

newspaper and that type of thing.

One of the things we always

emphasize with these guys,

and that is, the eyes and ears

of the entire world are on you.

We're setting up a class

so you can't fail.

This going to be an easy class

you guys ever been into.

Then, after that is over with, you

going to be what we call job-ready.

It kind of had

all this real good energy around it.

And that league was framed

as this innovative approach

to crime prevention in the inner city.

And so, by the early 1990s,

there was thousands of these copycat

programs that were in place.

If these young men weren't on the

court, they might be on the street.

That was the theory

nine years ago,

when this midnight

basketball program was started.

Now, there are 44 cities,

including Puerto Rico,

that can claim they too

are involved in a program

that aims at building self-esteem

and increasing personal development.

It was one of the few programs

that people could talk about

with respect to poverty policy,

with respect to crime.

It was one of the few things

people really got excited about.

This is the model for what should

be going on every place in this state.

We're going to try and copy it.

Thank you very much. Congratulations.

One-two-three-Defense!

There was a rash of shootings

in Chicago.

Young men were k*lling each other.

So, we reached out

to now President Clinton,

implored him to come

to Chicago,

to help us in this fight

to reduce crime in our city.

The president saw all the workings

of the midnight basketball league.

And he told me,

"I love this program.

We need to do this program

across the country."

So now, they began talking

about the crime bill.

Good morning.

For a year and a half now,

I and my administration

have worked very hard

to do the right thing

by ordinary Americans.

Now, our administration and the

Congress must do our job on crime,

so that the American people

can do their job

in the communities

where they live.

During the presidency

of Bill Clinton,

we saw one of the largest

and most consequential crime bills

in the history

of the United States.

The crime bill will put 100 000

more police officers on the street.

But providing more police

and tougher punishment isn't enough.

We have to deter crime

where it starts.

It gives funds to community activities

like midnight basketball.

Midnight basketball

can make the difference.

But why should we have it only

in two schools, or two programs?

We should have it

in every community in America.

In that $33 billion crime bill,

$8 billion was set aside

for preventative

and intervention programs.

And the midnight basketball league

could apply for some of those funds.

So, there's a funny thing

that happens

when the 1994 crime bill

is being debated

in the spring and summer of '94.

And that's that Republicans

start turning against this policy

that had once been endorsed

by President Bush.

Most Americans do not believe

the programs like midnight basketball,

of building Olympic sized

swimming pools,

are going to do much to get th*gs

off their street corners.

This bill throws a huge amount

of money around in a way

that is not likely to have

any great effect on crime.

This is not a crime bill.

This is a welfare bill.

Part of, in '94, why Republicans

turned on midnight basketball

and the crime bill was because Clinton

was trying to federalize the program,

because it was exactly

what they didn't want to see happen.

They wanted it to be bottom up,

not top down.

Don't ask the taxpayers in America

who want a tough crime bill

to pay for midnight basketball

in Little Rock or any place else.

The midnight basketball league

became a proverbial football.

Whenever Republicans

talked about the crime bill,

they talked about

the midnight basketball league.

Republicans really fixated

on midnight basketball

as being this example

of Democrats being soft on crime,

and linked it to what

Senator Bob Dole and others called

pork-barrel spending,

that this was a waste of money.

With the pork-barrel spending

included in this bill,

we could put

360 000 more criminals behind bars.

Our children don't need

midnight basketball.

Our children don't need

more arts and crafts.

Our children need law enforcement,

good jurisdiction,

imprisonment, and safety.

In the first couple of weeks,

when Congress was discussing

and debating the 1994 crime bill,

there was over a hundred references

in the congressional record

to midnight basketball.

This is a tiny program.

It was at most $30 million

of a $33 billion bill.

Yet, a hundred different times,

congressmen saw fit

to talk about this program

when debating the merits of a massive

criminal justice policy overhaul.

We shouldn't be increasing programs

for the midnight basketball,

and the teaching the dance lessons

and the artistic classes,

and all of that kind of nonsense

to get at root causes of crime.

We should be putting the money

where it needs to be put.

We need to put swiftness

and certainty of punishment

back into the system again.

All they saw midnight basketball

was as a basketball league.

Midnight basketball

is about a lot of things.

It's not about basketball.

It's about helping youth.

They belittled innovative

midnight basketball program,

but they ignore the facts.

Experience all around

this country shows us

that a little spending

on recreational crime prevention

stops a lot of crime.

Part of why midnight basketball

got so prominent and controversial

is it allowed both Democrats

and Republicans to use codes

that signaled to each other

and to the country

that they thought crime

was a black problem.

It combined the two dominant

stereotypes of black men

and the culture at the time, superstar

athletes and super predator criminals.

I have an open mind

on midnight basketball.

Certainly, while someone is playing

basketball, they're not mugging you.

Most of middle-class America

doesn't say

"What that thief needs is

a good midnight basketball league."

All this on the theory that the person

who stole your car,

robbed your house,

and assaulted your family

was no more than a disgruntled

artist or would be NBA star.

Midnight basketball itself

was a code word

because everyone knew where

the programs were implemented.

And even Bill Clinton,

when he was touting the program,

the summer of 1994,

at a housing project in Chicago,

said that the purpose of the program

was to serve people just like you,

speaking to a black audience.

I got so tired when we were

debating that crime bill,

hearing people badmouth

midnight basketball.

I'd a lot rather have somebody

sh**ting hoops than sh**ting b*ll*ts.

And similarly, when Republicans

were attacking the program,

they were always playing off

of racial tropes,

racial assumptions about who the crime

problem was in the United States.

Congressional black caucus took

the '94 crime bill as an opportunity

to get more prevention funding,

to get more social welfare programs,

programs like midnight basketball,

but also job training programs,

educational programs,

after school programs

for low-income

youth of color.

These programs that had any component

of improving self-esteem

or trying to create opportunities for

black youth were seen as wasteful.

Because if black youth are criminal,

if they're sure to commit crime,

and the only remedy

is to throw them in prison,

so, these programs

were either cut from the legislation

entirely in its final version,

or only appeared as kind of a shell

of what they could have been.

CRIME BILL SIGNING CEREMONY

SEPTEMBER 13, 1994

We were so close to getting money

out of that crime bill,

but we were back to square one.

Politics is an interesting business.

I don't claim to understand it.

I think the final result

of the controversies

over midnight basketball

led to the stripping out

of some of the prevention aspects

of the original bill.

Three or $4 billion

of prevention oriented funding

went away by the time

the bill was passed

from what had been originally

proposed.

And I think that was a pretty direct

relationship to the controversies

that came about around

midnight basketball and race.

It basically made it harder to

preserve all the prevention elements,

and put more emphasis

on the prisons and police.

One of the ironies is that,

by 1991,

we now know

that crime had decreased.

So, the enactment of the '94

crime bill came at a moment

when crime had actually declined

from the 1980s.

And in this moment, the bipartisan

consensus of policy makers

decided to drastically expand

the policing and prison regimes

of the United States.

This legislation,

more than any other,

really precipitated the prison

expl*si*n that we see in the 1990s:

$10.8 billion for minimum

100 000 new police officers,

a $10 billion

prison construction program.

Between 1990 and 2005,

prison construction itself rose 43%.

Today, as a result,

6.7 million Americans are under

some form of correctional supervision,

whether in prison or jail,

or on probation or parole.

So now, we've got to sit and talk

with our young man to let them know

they getting money to build prisons.

They privatizing prisons.

Who's going in them?

Congress could care less

about the young people

that really need their help.

And now, in this day and age,

when you have for-profit prisons,

the only way they're going

to be profitable is to lock people up.

And that makes things even harder.

We ended up

with mass incarceration.

We ended up with so many

of our communities decimated

through this strategy of arresting

our way out of a problem.

And so now,

as we try to get out of that,

what we look back

in hindsight is that,

had we spent more effort

and more energy

on preventing things

from happening in the first place,

how far would we be?

What's sad about the story

of midnight basketball and its demise

is it had nothing to do

with midnight basketball itself.

It had to do with the racial politics

of that time.

We're now in a situation where kids

who from lower income families

play sports at half the rate of kids

from upper income families.

And that's because we have disinvested

in public recreation options.

Let's take a look

at the city of Baltimore.

In 1990, it had 143 rec centers.

By the end of the decade, there were

fewer than 50 of these rec centers.

Kids were on the streets again.

Brandon Scott started

to bring some of that back.

When I think about 1994 crime bill,

I think about how I was turned out

to be a super predator,

just because I was

a young black kid

who grew up

in a disinvested neighborhood

that struggled with violence.

Our rec centers were never opened

in Baltimore on Saturdays

until I was 35 years old.

That looks like investing in

community solutions to violent crime.

I believe that we can do it here,

and do all the other investments

that we need,

and people in communities,

in an ethical way to see our violent

crime disease be cured at the top.

We're still 500, 600,

700 murders a year.

The real true way you prevent violence

is to address the root causes.

We were on the cusp of, on the verge

of, doing those types of things

back then with ideas like midnight

basketball from a government level.

How do we now bring that back

here and into this present day?

A program like midnight basketball,

like Westside sports,

what that does is

it addresses those root causes.

It brings resources

to a young person.

It brings resources

to a family

in a way that goes

beyond just playing the game.

It's the playoffs.

One game, the season over.

It's just different,

something I never seen,

just churches, non-for-profits,

the police officers

are working together

on the same page for the youth.

We all look at officers

in a certain way.

"Like they can't help us.

They just here to lock us up."

A lot of people got that mentality.

But this league, kids being able

to see officers hand in hand

that ain't got nothing to do

with trying to patrol

or trying to look

for something bad.

We got some good officers

right here in Chicago.

One thing about kids,

they know who fake and who not.

Our coaches, they've reached out

to places all over the neighborhood.

They trying to get as many people

on the team as possible,

because they don't want us

out there doing other stuff,

doing stuff

that we should not be doing.

Right. They want us off the streets.

That's why we got the mentor group.

There's so many times

when we've been here,

and things happen outside

that could have hurt/harmed us.

And if we was out there, it could have

been us instead of somebody else.

There's so many times

that happened.

When you get open, when you get it,

make sure you hit it.

I can impact generations to come

just by being nice and having positive

interactions with those kids.

To me, it's really profound

that I can leave that with my legacy.

Not all officers are negative.

People don't like phonies

around here.

But usually, the options that

they give us are real cool people.

They know what they doing.

If I would say, I would switch

them out for my regular coach.

Growing up as a kid

on the west side,

you're going to be faced

with stereotypes and expectations.

And in many times, as a kid,

you have no control or understand

that it's happening to you.

Some of the criticism

that went into midnight basketball

was that it's a waste of money,

it's too soft.

In order to do that,

you've got to strip away

your ability to see humanity.

Taking this energy

and this effort

to be there for a young person,

to think that, that's not worth it,

that's the saddest thing.

One-two-three!

I think that's one of those dark spots

in our history, as a country,

we're going to have to atone for.

We're going to have to do a lot more

to try and fix the damage

that was caused back then.