The Gangs of Chicago
GANG-RELATED VIOLENCE HAS PLAGUED CHICAGO SINCE THE 1960S, BUT 2016 HAS BEEN THE BLOODIEST YEAR IN ALMOST TWO DECADES
He sprinted down State Street as one bullet pierced his arm and another flew past him and hit a woman walking out of a Starbucks with her afternoon coffee. Yvonne Nelson was pronounced dead at a hospital 40 minutes later. “She was a working-hard lady, a city worker,” says James who asked me not to use his last name because he fears more attacks. “She lost her life for nothing.” Nelson died in a nice neighborhood, a block from Chicago Police Department (CPD) headquarters, where the police had just announced the arrest of almost 100 gang members.
About a week after the shooting, James learned on Instagram that his would-be assassin was a 15-year-old affiliated with a gang called Murder Town. James was targeted because he used to run with a small crew associated with the Gangster Disciples, the city’s largest gang. “I did stuff in my past. I ain’t no perfect child,” he says. “He ain’t know me. Somebody sent him off. A little kid trying to earn some stripes.”
Nelson was the 238th homicide in Chicago this year. In early March, experts worried the total number of homicides could reach 600 in 2016, a startling increase over any year in the past decade. But the pace of the killings accelerated, and by the end of November, the city had more than 700 murders for the first time since 1998; that’s more murders than in New York City and Los Angeles combined. (Smaller cities like New Orleans and Detroit have higher per capita homicide rates.) The national murder rate, while historically low, is projected to increase by 13 percent this year— with almost half that increase attributable solely to Chicago, according to the Brennan Center.
Here, in the biggest city in the American heartland, teens murder each other over Twitter beefs, and grown men shoot children in the head—sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose. The carnage has even earned the city a grim nickname:
ON A FRIDAY AFTERNOON IN MAY, JAMES, A SOFT-SPOKEN 19-YEAR-OLD, HAD FINISHED HIS SHIFT MAKING SANDWICHES AT JIMMY JOHN’S AND WAS WALKING IN CHICAGO’S BRONZEVILLE NEIGHBORHOOD WHEN HE HEARD FOUR OR FIVE LOUD GUNSHOTS RING OUT. “I LOOKED,” JAMES SAYS, “AND I SEE MY ASS BLEED.”
Chiraq. As Chicago-raised rapper Kanye West raps in his song “Murder to Excellence”: “I feel the pain in my city wherever I go/314 soldiers died in Iraq, 509 died in Chicago,” a reference to the death tolls of those places in 2008.
Roughly 90 percent of this violence, police say, flows from gangs. And the rivalry that police say led to Nelson’s death reflects the changing nature of criminal organizations in Chicago. Massive gangs like the Gangster Disciples and the Black Disciples used to operate with a corporate-like hierarchy and business planning, but aggressive federal prosecutions and the teardown of public housing splintered and scattered the gangs.
Chicago’s modern history of gang violence, especially on its West and South sides, goes back to the 1960s. (As bad as 2016 is, the total number of murders will still be well below the over 900 annual murders in the early 1990s.) But over the past year, two things have accelerated the attacks: Budget cuts reduced the number of anti-violence social workers who once cooled the simmering feuds, and a series of deadly police shootings and alleged misconduct by police have torpedoed the relationship between cops and residents.
Over the past 18 months, the drawdown of police and social workers has led to an explosion of violence not seen in almost 20 years—in August, 90 people were killed. It’s as if Chicago pulled its firefighters off a massive blaze and now residents are watching the flames engulf the entire city.
BEFORE THE WEST SIDE BURNED
ON A WARM NIGHT in September, Alonzo Lee was sitting outside his family’s South Chicago home with his 3-year-old son, Akil, waiting for Alonzo’s father, Benny. Benny is a college instructor and respected social worker who teaches classes on the gangs of Chicago, but as a young man he was a feared leader with the powerful Vice Lords gang. Akil yells, “Main man!” as he runs to greet his grandfather, who scoops up the barefoot boy into his arms and quietly replies, “Hey, little rascal.”
Benny, a serious, soft-spoken man, has a photo of the boy as the background on his phone. Alonzo says that when he was a child, Benny would tell him stories about gang life, and about how he and his childhood friends ended up in prison. But Alonzo still ended up joining No Limit, a renegade offshoot of the Black P Stones. Until November 2015, Alonzo says, he made $3,500 a day selling marijuana. Last fall, police raided Benny’s house looking for Alonzo, who also got into a gunfight with a rival from a different set of his gang.