Not long ago, American streets were filled with crime. Daylight robbery, nightly murders. Criminal gangs ruled entire swats of neighborhoods. Big cities had large no-go areas where even police had to go with heavy backup. Some places looked like bombed out warzones. The suburbs were growing like crazy and no one ever contemplated raising children in an urban environment. After twenty years of safe cities and decreasing crime, those suburban children with little or no memory of just how bad crime in a city can get, rediscovered urban life. If they think crime is bad now wait until it sinks to its all time low. In 1989, with local police having ceded territory to the local gang, a U.S. Ranger decided to move into a very affordable house in what would have been a great neighborhood had it been on sovereign U.S. territory but instead it actually belonged to the Hilltop Crips.
The Ranger and his neighbors wanted the police to take it back. When they would not, he set up a camera to observe and record the drug market on the street. He publicized this move and drug customers decreased. The gang demanded he remove it. They threatened his life and then promised to come back. The Ranger called his buddies over for a barbeque and told them to bring their weapons. The stage was set. The News Tribune reported that the shooting started at 9:20 pm.
Approximately twenty gang members surrounded the house. The Rangers were set up defensively and were trying not to hit anyone. Although outnumbered their military training kept the entire scene in check. For over thirty minutes, hundreds of rounds of ammunition were exchanged. At one point a police cruiser came down the street but quickly reversed and peeled away. Eventually, the gang melted away unable to carry out their threat to kill Bill Foulk and the police managed to catch two of them.
The most important element of this horoscope is the T-square between the Cancer Jupiter (the Rangers defending the Cancerian house) opposing the Capricorn Neptune (establishment of Capricornian authoritarian ideals) creating the pressure release of the retrograde Aries Pallas (martial wisdom). Opposing this is the Libra Mercury representing the youthful gang members. The nodes tell the story, change is coming, the north node is in Aquarius and it’s ruler the Capricorn Uranus is allied with the government. The past embodied in the south node allies it’s ruler the Libra Sun with the gangmembers’ Mercury.
Aquarius represents change but is agnostic about what change it is. Not only did Foulk take back the street, the Tacoma police changed and took back the city. No longer content to only handle a crime if they witnessed it; they grew much more aggressive. The energy to confront crime aggressively and directly was upon the nation. Today, we are watching the end result with very aggressive and military style policing replacing the “over the hood or over the radio” passive policing of the 1980s. In 1989, the gangs were Libra because they were in an agreement with police that their crimes would be ignored until a certain threshold was reached. This had allowed the gangs to flourish. That threshold was reset by Foulk and others demanding it be changed. The Hilltop Crips and others like them were now to be directly confronted by authority. The cities were retaken and criminals found themselves with less territory and more discipline and penalties as whole sections of the cities were renovated and restored. Embodied in a younger generation is the same Capricorn Neptune. Neptune is in Pisces and so the nation has taken its collective foot off the accelerator but soon Neptune will transit into Aries and it’s military boot will likely bring a renewed aggression to policing.