There are more than , gang members in Chicago, the city's top cop said Wednesday, hours after a shooting at a funeral, believed to be gang retaliation, left 15 people wounded. In total, Supt. David Brown said, there are , gang members, who are part of the city's 55 known gangs.
That, they believe, was the motive behind the shooting at a funeral in the city's Gresham neighborhood Tuesday. Chicago authorities said they "had intelligence" that the man being mourned by family and friends was killed in a drive-by shooting in the nearby Englewood neighborhood earlier this month.
Many suburban areas face gang-related problems similar to those occurring in urban areas. Suburban communities throughout the nation are encountering gang-related problems, once largely confined to large cities. Data from the NDTS indicates that of the 3, law enforcement agencies responding to the survey, were from suburban areas reporting gang activity. You still have this [idea from city officials] that guys within these groups are going to exercise social control over one another and that is antithetical to the culture among these groups as they exist today.
Your book ends with a critique of violence prevention efforts like Cure Violence and Ceasefire Chicago. Well, how possible is that today? A lot of the violence occurs in the spur of the moment — the whims of young teenagers and adults. The broader critique of Cure Violence and focused deterrence is their models are rooted in the reality that they do not address any of the conditions that produced these elevated levels of violence within these communities. There is now a gun violence prevention collaborative , where more than a dozen private organizations are working together to streamline violence prevention efforts in the city.
Do you think this is a good direction? I still question the adequacy of [the idea that] we just need to have interventions with these young people to try to kind of redirect them into mainstream channels and institutions.
I think that has proven to be inadequate and by no fault or shortcoming of the people who are doing that kind of work, really, but that the odds are so long for these young people and there are not opportunities and resources readily available to make those kinds of transformations in their life. I think we should be careful in terms of overgeneralizing how we think about gangs and violence.
One of the things that we want to be careful about is having an appreciation for the particularities of local dynamics and the history that helped create the context in which street gangs and violence exist. I think people need to think about how we can create a society in which everyone can live a dignified life. There is an opportunity now to build a broader movement and a broader constituency to support the kinds of interventions that are going to be necessary to transform life for wide areas of the South and the West Sides of Chicago.
To me, that means that everyone is entitled to acquire high-quality public education, a meaningful living wage, employment opportunities, and affordable and stable housing. Those should not be things in our society — in a democratic society — that are negotiable.
The defund movement has reinvigorated grassroots efforts to drive down violence. Investigating gun violence in America. The Trace. Ricochet American lives, shaped by guns. The Chicago Crime Commission estimated that females accounted for as many as 20, of the , gang members in the city at the turn of the century. In the past, girls and young women often occupied, or appeared to occupy, somewhat subservient roles within gangs.
A study conducted in the late s revealed, however, that increasing numbers of females were becoming full-fledged gang members and increasingly participating in gang-related violence. Horowitz, Ruth. Spergel, Irving A. David Curry. Youth Gangs: Problem and Response.
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