From the NY Times-- Authorities in Chicago Struggle to Deal with Gangs

[Steve Nawojczyk]

November 22, 2009
Chicago News Cooperative

Police Struggle to Navigate New Gang Landscape By RYAN BLITSTEIN

Almost a year from the day the Chicago Police Department unleashed a
sweeping crackdown on gangs, its efforts crashed into stark reality
Wednesday in a gritty area of the South Side that many in the
neighborhood call “Kill Town.”

Luis Garcia, 17, was standing at a memorial of stuffed animals, beer
bottles and a wooden cross erected for a slain friend when a bullet
tore into his chest and killed him in the 2900 block of East 87th near
Commercial Avenue, an area of the city that got its nickname from a
recent rash of homicides that are almost as common as broken glass and
potholes.

Mr. Garcia was trying to extricate himself from the Latin Kings street
gang he had joined years before because he felt gang membership made
him safer in his neighborhood. But his lengthy rap sheet and poor
grades made getting into another school impossible. So, as he stood
before the memorial for Mickey Vilella, a friend and fellow Latin
Kings gang member killed five days earlier, a gunman some 400 feet
away on the same side of the street shot him dead. Now “Kill Town” has
two memorials, one for Mr. Garcia and one for his friend.

Mr. Garcia’s death was just the kind of violence that Police
Superintendent Jodi P. Weis was hoping to prevent when he introduced a
new strategy against gangs soon after taking office in 2008 in the
midst of a summer gang-shooting spree that terrorized many city
neighborhoods.

In short, Mr. Weis’s strategy boiled down to this: launch a
concentrated attack on street gangs by assembling a special force of
400 officers to work with residents in poor neighborhoods to pre-empt
and reduce violence.

The superintendent and his team faced an intriguing new challenge.
Past crackdowns by the police had created a shifting landscape in the
world of street gangs; as an older generation of gang leaders was put
behind bars, the sociology of gangs changed, spawning fragmentation
and turf wars.

With no leadership to enforce discipline, once-petty arguments over
dice games or girlfriends quickly escalated into violent and even
fatal attacks, making enforcement particularly tough.

Even Mr. Weis admits that the department has arrested and jailed so
many gang leaders that it has become, in a sense, a victim of its own
success.

The fallout from chaos in gang structure is magnified by social
developments like school closings. And the gangs’ migration into more
sophisticated, often white-collar criminal schemes can bedevil even
the most cagey street-level strategies.

At first glance, Mr. Weis’s gang strategy appears to be working. Last
year’s increase in murders has leveled off, and the city’s homicide
rate for 2009 is projected to drop to the mid-400 range, down from
last year’s 511.

Gang violence as a percentage of total homicides has barely budged,
however. Of the 384 killings in Chicago from January to October,
nearly 36 percent were found to have a gang-related motive, according
to police statistics.

During the same period last year, 37 percent of the city’s 442
killings were gang related, police statistics show.

In all, more than 60 percent of the killings this year have involved a
victim or an offender with a known gang association or a gang-related
motive. Police officials did not measure this statistic in 2008.

Ernest Brown, an assistant deputy superintendent and the city’s
organized crime chief, said, “Our strategies are coming to fruition.”
He noted that aggravated battery with a handgun, a common crime among
gang members, is down 20 percent this year in Englewood, one of the
city’s most dangerous neighborhoods.

Gang experts outside the Chicago police force see the data
differently. Many view the lack of improvement as evidence of gang
chaos on the streets.

“Now there’s no structure,” said Michael Cronin, a retired anti-gang
officer. “This corner is one faction of the Gangster Disciples, the
next corner another. They’re not paying homage to no general.”

Even before Mr. Weis’s cleanup effort, Mr. Cronin said, the ranks of
gang leaders had thinned. As a growing legion of gang leaders landed
behind bars, the smartest gang members graduated from street crime
into more sophisticated acts, such as mortgage fraud.

By deploying platoons of seasoned officers, the police hoped to
capitalize on the disarray by collecting street-level intelligence and
moving against gang members before they retaliated against rivals in
disputes major and petty.

Mr. Weis also has de-emphasized dragnet sweeps that pick up people for
offenses like drinking in public, instead favoring the use of
wiretaps, informants and information-sharing partnerships with federal
officials to identify gang members deemed most likely to commit
violent crimes. If a gang member is shot, for instance, the police
track down his associates and try to prevent retaliation.

Mr. Weis reaches out to the community more regularly than his
predecessors, too. He routinely meets face to face with preachers and
other leaders of the communities hit hardest by violence.

Comprehensive as it is, his plan has serious drawbacks, critics say.
The effort to send the police into critical areas of the city and
focus more officers on gang enforcement sounds reasonable — the aim is
to abandon the artificial borders imposed by the boundaries of the
city’s 25 police districts. Yet, Mr. Cronin said, the strategy takes
some of the Chicago police force’s most effective officers out of
familiar territory and drops them onto street corners they may not
know.

John Hagedorn, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago
who has spent decades tracking Chicago gangs and police crackdowns,
sees little new in Mr. Weis’s approach. The program does little to
combat the deeply rooted social developments that give rise to the
prevalence of urban gangs.

“You’ve had a war on gangs for 40 years,” Mr. Hagedorn said. “It’s the
same basic kind of strategy.”

Mr. Hagedorn said the tearing down of public housing dispersed gang
activities into areas where members square off against rivals. Other
Chicago residents say the closing of some public schools has forced
children to cross several gang lines on the way to class, igniting
violence by gang members ready to attack those they perceive as
vulnerable.

Even the apparent improvements in crime statistics can prove illusory
when Mr. Hagedorn examines them. Homicides are down this year, but
gangs were not at the root of last year’s spike.

The violence continues to plague low-income neighborhoods that are
primarily African-American or Latino, like Englewood and Lawndale.

Dr. Gary Slutkin, executive director of CeaseFire, said: “Violence has
simply become ‘normal.’ It’s expected.” He believes that the Chicago
police need to expand beyond traditional policing methods.

CeaseFire, a program that treats street shootings as an epidemic
similar to an outbreak of the flu, is one such unconventional
approach. The group employs community members as intelligence sources
on brewing conflicts. Before a dispute can erupt into violence,
CeaseFire dispatches resolution specialists to intervene and help ease
tensions.

The CeaseFire program was recently called a national model for
violence reduction by the Department of Justice. Yet inconsistent
state and local financial support has blunted the group’s impact, and
low funding levels have limited the program’s use to just a handful of
Chicago neighborhoods.

Mr. Weis’s approach relies in part on rallying the community against
gang violence. But community resolve often wilts in the face of
attacks like the one that ended the life of Denonte Williams. He was
found dead on a sidewalk after a 3:20 a.m. drive-by attack on the
South Side.

Shenicka Sturghil, the cousin of another victim killed by a street
gang, expressed her despair at a South Shore community meeting last
month.

“I’m paranoid, scared to stand at a bus stop,” Ms. Sturghil said. “I
might get gunned down.”

Ryan Blitstein is a freelance writer based in Chicago. Katie Fretland,
a Chicago News Cooperative staff writer, contributed to this report.