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New Chicago Gang Study All Things Considered (NPR); 11/29/1993 All Things Considered (NPR) 11-29-1993 NOAH ADAMS, Host: Gang warfare and death in Chicago. ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: That story in this part of All Things Considered. [`All Things Considered' theme music] ADAMS: A new study indicates that drug trade is an overrated factor in homicide rate among Chicago gang members. SIEGEL: Some teenagers at Chicago's Taft High School say they won't give up their guns, even though if they commit certain crimes they could be treated as adults. They say they need the protection. TAFT HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT: I'd rather go jail then die. I mean, come on. I mean, wouldn't you? I mean, wouldn't you- what's the point? I just- I'd rather go to court, you know, be treated like an adult and then- instead of getting shot at. ADAMS: Also, the joy of trombone shout music from the United House of Prayer in Charlotte, North Carolina. SIEGEL: Those stories in this half hour after a news update. [newscast] [`All Things Considered' theme music] SIEGEL: This is All Things Considered. I'm Robert Siegel. ADAMS: And I'm Noah Adams. Tomorrow President Clinton is expected to sign the Brady Bill, which imposes a five-day waiting period for the purchase of hand guns. The waiting period, another provision to the crime bill now before Congress, are intended to address the much-publicized crisis of urban crime. That is the subject of the next two items. In a moment, report from Chicago on gangs and guns at a neighborhood high school. SIEGEL: First, the findings of a study of gang-related crime in Chicago. Carolyn Rebecca Block is a researcher at the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, where she's been studying gangs, homicides and drug-related crime using the records of the Chicago Police Department. Among her findings, gang-related crime and drug-related crime are by no means the same thing. Also, a rise in gang-related homicides in the late 1980's had less to do with a rise in violence than in the sophistication of firearms. She reached that conclusion after finding that as gang-related killings became more common, other non-lethal acts of gang-related violence became less common. CAROLYN REBECCA BLOCK, Sr. Research Anal., Ill. Crim. Justice Info. Authority: And these were similar, these were all street-gang related, so it would be the same thing if we found that robbery homicides had gone up, but robberies hadn't. You would want to look for why. SIEGEL: And what you found, or at least what you're positing here as an explanation, as I understand it, is that the number of incidents in which somebody goes out and does something violent with a gun may not have gone up all that much during this time, but the result of that action has changed a lot. Much more commonly, it results in homicide. Ms. BLOCK: Yeah, it's easier to- you know, if you're a bad shot, it's easier to kill somebody with a semi-automatic or a large caliber weapon. SIEGEL: It turned out that some of the gangs, and in Chicago you're not only talking about many little gangs, but four huge gangs, they count for the majority, I gather, of gang members and gang-related crimes. Some of them are heavily involved in drugs in an entrepreneurial way and some of them are not and are more involved in the kind of turf wars. Ms. BLOCK: And different neighborhoods have different kinds of gangs. SIEGEL: Which kind of gang is responsible for the higher rate of gang-related homicide? Ms. BLOCK: Well, if you take all of the non-lethal violent crimes - street gang related violent crimes, the assaults, the batteries - and you look at where the hot spots of those are throughout the whole area, they will be in the areas where traditional West Side Story type of turf battles are. SIEGEL: Uh-huh [affirmative] Ms. BLOCK: And then if you take the homicides and just see them as like little points and put them on the map and see where they are, the homicides will be right in those turf-battle hot spots. They won't be in the drug hot spots. SIEGEL: As you note, at the outset of your report, Chicago police statistics show that there've been more than 19,000 homicides between 1965 and 1990, actually the period you were looking at. And of those, I believe, about 1,300, one thousand three hundred eleven, were classified as street gang motivated. One might look at that share and say gang violence is disproportionately discussed and is really not nearly so common as the newspapers would have us believe. Ms. BLOCK: There's two points that are important to point out. One is that the Chicago definition of street-gang motivated offenses is a very conservative definition. There has to be evidence that the street gang motivated the incident. For example, if two street gang members get into a fight over a girlfriend and one gets killed, that is not street-gang motivated. Other cities like LA, it's just enough if someone's a member of a street gang, they have a lift. SIEGEL: You can see the point they're making there that people other than gang members get into fights over girlfriends. Ms. BLOCK: Right. And this is- yeah, yeah, no I think the Chicago definition, the conservative definition, is really- I'm much more comfortable with that. SIEGEL: You were about to say there's a second. You said two points. Ms. BLOCK: The second one is, yes, I agree with you, there's a barrier to dealing with the problem of violence with most people. They don't want to think that it could be me, it could be my husband, it could be my kids, it could be my neighbors. It could be the sort of thing that could happen in my home. They want to think of violence as having some, you know, wicked offender that's out there, a stranger who attacks another stranger on the street, or gang members who maybe don't live in my neighborhood. They're not comfortable with talking about so many of the- of the other kinds of homicides like domestics and child abuse, barroom brawls, you know, neighborhood fights and that kind of thing that occur at home, essentially. SIEGEL: Carolyn Rebecca Block is a Senior Research Analyst at the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority. [The preceding text has been professionally transcribed. However, in order to meet rigid distribution and transmission deadlines, it has not been proofread against audiotape and cannot, for that reason, be guaranteed as to the accuracy of speakers' words or spelling.] News Topics | Home | Research | History | Blood Gangs | Crip Gangs | People| Life in a Gang | Gallery | Iraqi Cards | Memorial | Migration | Graffiti | Resume| Injunctions Homicides | Maps | California Prisons | Contact

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