Hello dear listeners and welcome to this installment of Context Clues where we share excerpts from previous episodes to give you some important background information for our new topic at hand. I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

For anyone un-initiated, we have this thing called the Urban Legends Hotline, where listeners like you submit tales that they heard growing up.

We recently received a message about a gang initiation story. a even heard far more recently because it has, in fact, stuck around as these kind of lurid

crime tales tend to do. This urban legend tells of prospective gang members performing

initiation rights usually to enter the bloods or the crypts.

They drive around at night with their headlights off, waiting for someone to flash their

own as a friendly reminder in the name of public safety. At that point the gang member flips the car around,

follows, and then kills the driver, thus completing the gang's evil mission.

For this series, we're going to look at the wide and strange variety of gang initiation scares that have popped up through the 20th and 21st centuries.

Up until this point, our Urban Legends hotline episodes have been a little more light-hearted.

Ghostly children who push cars uphill,

Cannibal Pig People, Marilyn Manson removing his ribs for personal enjoyment.

But this one will be a little more serious, still outrageous, of course,

but a tale that in conjunction with moral panics around

juvenile deviance and drugs that we will revisit today has led to tangible and devastating effects on our criminal justice

system. This is the first time I felt that it was necessary to make a context clues episode

for an urban legends hotline topic

as this imagery of heartless organized gangs

targeting innocent strangers as part of their sinister game is deep and complicated

and intricately intertwined with the other moral panics that we'll look at today. I think these connections are vital to a more

complete understanding of how the media, the police, and politicians can use urban legends to alter public perception,

but also to drastically change the American criminal justice system.

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