Why Chicago's Gangs Are Unstoppable
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.”
He sprinted down State Street as one bullet pierced his arm and another flew past him and hit a 311 dispatcher walking out of 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 superintendent 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. By 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: 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 gun 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.
