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Gang violence in Chicago changing, but policymakers slow to catch up, report says

Chicago Tribune - 1/29/2019

Jan. 29--With the structure of storied supergangs like the Gangster Disciples and the Vice Lords long gone, Chicago's policymakers need to catch up and refocus efforts to reduce Chicago's persistent violence on its root causes of economic disinvestment and historic segregation, argues a report released by the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"Let's get off this gang talk. Let's look at these devastated neighborhoods," longtime Chicago gang researcher John Hagedorn, one of the report's authors, told the Tribune. "Chicago is a city of neighborhoods. Why are we neglecting these neighborhoods? Let's talk about hope and security and safety in these neighborhoods."

The report was written by the UIC's Great Cities Institute, which held a conference in April to explore Chicago's gang problem and how it connects to violence.

Gang and urban policy experts at the conference concluded that policymakers, the news media and police too narrowly define Chicago's violence by outdated ideas about gangs and the drug trade.

Shootings are no longer fueled by large-scale territory disputes authorized by gang leaders. Instead, the violence is concentrated in areas where young men -- confronted by a chronic lack of jobs and opportunity -- align in block-to-block cliques. While drug disputes still drive some conflict on the West Side where open-air markets thrive off easy access to the Eisenhower Expressway, much of the violence today is driven by interpersonal conflict and retaliatory shootings, according to the report.

"Violence is more spontaneous and tends to be initiated by individuals, rather than ordered by gang leaders or hierarchies," the report said.

Underlying all the violence, the report concluded, is the historic lack of opportunity and economic resources in African-American neighborhoods where there has been "chronic and concentrated joblessness." Chicago's plight reflects other Rust Belt cities that also experienced "de-industrialization and widespread urban abandonment," it said.

Chicago violence fell in 2018 for a second consecutive year, but it remains concentrated in the same neighborhoods at alarmingly high levels. The answer to combating this persistent homicide problem, the report concluded, is to confront "the city's deep-seated issues of racism, disinvestment, and concentrated poverty."

Hagedorn, a former criminology professor at the University of Illinois and current fellow at the Great Cities Institute, said constantly referring to Chicago's violence as a gang problem is the "wrong diagnosis."

"Maybe we should focus on the problem rather than something that has been used as a scapegoat," he said. "Rates of violence can fall, but there has be a much more serious effort on the part of City Hall to change, shrink these areas of concentrated poverty."

William Sampson, a DePaul University public policy professor who had not seen the report, agreed that the long-running lack of economic opportunity in Chicago'sAfrican-American community has steered young people to gangs.

"It is not folks who are 'successful,'" he said of those who join gangs. "You don't find, for the most part, middle-income or successful working-class folks joining gangs. Everybody wants to be somebody, and if our economic, social and racial structures won't allow that, then folks will join gangs."

The report also examined how living amid chronic poverty, troubled schools and aggressive policing has created for many a "hypersensitivity" to insult and a "hypermasculine" response to conflict on the street. This leaves little room to back down, fueling the retaliatory violence.

The report calls for community intervention strategies for those involved in violence to help restore feelings of self-worth and dignity through conflict resolution -- not just traditional gang mediation of specific disputes.

Hagedorn said the report is not calling for police to back off from investigating or arresting those who commit into violence. But police should be working to restore trust at the same time, he said.

Some of what is called for in the report -- including restorative justice -- has been happening for years in Chicago. And more recently, two violence-reduction programs, funded largely with private money, have launched both job-training and placement services as well as therapy for participants.

DePaul's Sampson, however, expressed concern that the investment required is so massive that its success is a long shot.

"We're going to have to make some fundamental changes in how we deal with poverty and racism in this society," Sampson said. "It's expensive, politically and economically."

asweeney@chicagotribune.com

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