Synergy by Georgia Payne Page A

money, but by the time he was 18, he realised to
stand out, he needed to have the best product available. Now, at
the tender age of 26, he had the best of anything anyone could
want. A few months after his 18th birthday, he made a few new
connections and started to sell heavier drugs, mainly crack and
heroin. It was sad to see the crack fiends so helpless and broken
when they were hammering his door down at 3am but he was only doing
what everybody else was doing, making a living, and surviving. He’d
left school with no education and he’d never had a real job.
Growing up, young boys looked up to the hustlers, admiring and
respecting their grind, knowing that it was a serious choice for
them when they left school. Jarell had dreams like everybody else
when he was a kid, but as the years went by, they diminished day by
day. He looked around and saw the type of people in his
neighbourhood and knew there was nothing great to be had there. He
knew nobody ever got out of the hood, and decided he was stupid for
thinking otherwise. His mother had been a drug addict growing up,
and he’d seen what they could do to a person and their family, but
still, he did it because he didn’t have any other choice, other
than to lose his home and be broke.
    As a
young teen, Jarell wanted to make it in the music industry. He and
his friends would rap on the streets, making beats and freestyling
to anybody that would listen. They’d tell each other that it would
only take one of them to make it, and then that person could bring
all the others on board, take them and their families out of the
streets. They really, truly believed it would happen. Jarell was a
twin, and he and his twin brother Mario would be running round the
streets all night writing songs and spitting bars, dreaming about
what they would buy when they got rich. At thirteen, Mario’s life
was cut short, and Jarell’s dream died with his
brother. 
    Though
Jarell now tried his best to keep out of the eyes of the law,
keeping the police off his back wasn’t always easy in his town.
There was often police sniffing around those areas to try and catch
someone doing something wrong. He truly believed there was still a
lot of police racism and he would hear stories of young black men
who had been arrested or beaten or even just stopped on the street
for no reason at all. Detroit had a huge history of racism and
police brutality, homing the race riots in the 1940’s and again in
the 1960’s. Today, Jarell could see the everyday divide still
existing between races in the city, not only with the police but
with everyday members of society.
    In the
early hours of April 21st, Jarell was sitting outside a friend’s
house swigging a beer after partying through the night. He was sat
with around five men, all African American, laughing and joking,
when a passing group of Caucasian men stopped outside the house and
began spouting abuse at Jarell and his friends. Unfazed, they
retaliated with the abuse, assuming the men would keep on walking
and leave them be, however, one man with a skin head and a tattoo
on his neck started hurling racial abuse at the men, stepping onto
their porch. Jarell stood up to confront the man before he was
punched to the nose, charged into the wall and threatened with a
knife. Jarell’s friends managed to grapple the guy to the floor
before the other men charged toward them, and a violent fight
ensued between the two groups. When the police showed up to the
incident, they pulled Jarell off the skin head and proceeded to
handcuff him before anybody had dealt with the skin-head. While he
was being handcuffed, he was punched a number of times by the
skin-head with no fast reaction by the police. All the men at the
incident were subsequently released with most of the Caucasian men
being released without charge. Jarell had numerous previous
convictions, so he was arrested and charged with
assault.
    Dee had
seen her brother arrested before, and she had been to visit