This past Monday saw Chicago reeling from another bloody and violent weekend that left 9 people dead, another 44 wounded by guns, according to the Chicago Tribune. The weekend’s violence even spilled over into the city’s downtown, with three reports of mobs attacking innocent people. Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, making the media rounds, urged patience, while admitting the problem of gang violence in Chicago is “not going to be solved overnight.”
Camden’s police chief, Scott Thomson, like Chicago’s law enforcement, linked the upsurge in gun violence to gangs. Camden’s Courier Post reported that Thomson’s department will rely on “sound intelligence” as a resource to tackle the problem. In an email to the newspaper, the police chief insisted: “cold-blooded killings, shootings and retaliation over perceived acts of disrespect must cease.”
However local news newspaper and television stations are keeping daily scores on the dead and injured, as in Camden:
“A fourth man died shortly before 6 p.m. Tuesday in the 1200 block of Princess Avenue, just blocks from the Langham Avenue crime scene. In addition, seven men have been wounded by gunfire in the past week.”
Residents may be wondering if gang violence is out of control when pitted against their law enforcement agencies’ manpower and resources, which may also be a concern for local elected officials.
Camden’s mayor, Dana Redd, realized she needed to weigh in as the surges in violence made state, then national, headlines. She told the media last week that, like police chief Thomson, she is “concerned” and the city’s law enforcement officers “are revising their strategies as need be and putting every available boot out there on the ground to try to quell the violence.”
Camden’s number of “boots” was halved last year with the city’s deep cuts into the police force resulting in a 28 percent increase in homicides for 2011, and with gang and gun violence in 2012 continuing to lead the local news.
Chicago’s mayor Rahm Emanuel also announced that he was addressing his city’s headline-making violence; that combating gangs “was a priority.” After a violent Memorial Day weekend and before last weekend’s fatal shooting flare-up, Emanuel announced an anti-gang strategy.
The mayor’s strategy, unveiled with Police Supt. McCarthy, like Camden’s, relies on “intelligence,” specifically: “The efforts to tackle gang violence from the city’s 59 gangs and 625 gang factions specifically emphasize trying to figure out when and where gang retaliations will take place in order to prevent them from happening.” And, according to McCarthy, 75-80 percent of Chicago’s crime crisis is due to “the increase in violent crime attributable to violent street gangs.”
Gang membership in Chicago is estimated to be at least 100,000, making it one of the largest concentrations in the country, NBC Chicago reports. That statistic, along with a record of 203 homicides from January to late May, (an increase of more than 50 percent during the same period last year, as cited by theGrio), set off alarm bells in the state’s capitol. Governor Pat Quinn, comparing the violent escalation by gangs to the Mafia, yesterday signed a RICO-like bill into law. (Under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Acts convicted gang members could face a 30-year prison sentences and fines upwards to $250,000 dollars.)
Gov. Quinn, with the support of city and state officials, puts this new law in place as a deterrent and also as a means of putting away gang leaders. But will the threat of hefty fines and long-term imprisonment stop the surge of violent gang and drug related crimes erupting, which, so far, defy the means of local and state law enforcement divisions?
Gang and drug-related gun battles and killings have gone viral, not only in Camden and Chicago, but in larger and smaller communities across the the country. Newark got a wake-up call in January when its city was ranked among the nation’s highest gang-related murders fueled, like Camden is now, by the drug trade.
Newark police director Samuel DeMaio pinpointed the new crime wave for the Star Ledger:
“It’s not the gang members who are dealing drugs, it’s drug dealers who happen to belong to gangs.”
In the same article, the Star Ledger reported that years of decline in homicides in violent crimes is countered by an increase in slayings by gangs which, according to DeMaio, is due to not only the gang against gang but to drug trades where gangs work together:
“Criminals are more loyal to drug money than gang affiliation.” DeMaio says he’s seen “Bloods and Crips work together to control several drug corridors.”
Paterson, New Jersey, a city with a population of just under 150,000, saw what was described as “an unprecedented rate of gun violence that led to the death or injury of more than 100 people last year” and that “hadn’t slowed in the first three months of 2012.”
As with other urban areas, Paterson made deep cuts in law enforcement, shaving its police department by 20 percent. And, like the elderly woman residing on a quiet street in Camden, the owner of a fish store in Paterson now realizes how close he lives to the escalation in violence, after he and employees had to clean up the blood of four victims shot in front of his business.
Gangs using guns and violence are also making news in the quiet corridors of the southwest. Earlier this year, Oklahoma City TV station, News 9, headlined its website reporting on the growing problems of drugs violence, with an additional alarming warning: “Drug and Human Trafficking Violence Making Its Ways into Oklahoma City”, which had already been listed from 2003 to 2008 as one of 17 cities with the highest rate of gang-related murders.
“They’re the type of crimes you think of on the other side of the border — in Mexico — but beheadings and other drug-related violence are happening right here in the metro,” the website quoted a concern resident.
Arizona, and its border with Mexico, for years has been wary of the cross-border drug trade, and sees the spread of gun violence as inevitable, if alarming.
“What used to be a trickle has turned into a torrent. The violence in America, in Mexico, is here and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.”
A local farmer tells Oklahoma City News 9 he does his best to counter the new violence: “I wear a bulletproof vest at night. I’m scared,”
Oklahoma police understand how ruthless drug dealers are. Even when law enforcement has state-of-the-art resources and sophisticated personnel, during those dealings with the dealers, “In the end, if you cross the cartel there’s only one thing that’s going to happen. Your life is going to end.”
As cash strapped cities like Newark and Camden make severe reductions in law enforcement and cut public safely priorities to the bone, can they stem the unimpeded flow of gangs, guns and drugs? And if not, who and what will rule vulnerable urban areas already struggling to maintain law and order, civic and social justice when, among the young, four deaths in 24-hours is about to become the norm?
Long time Chicago community activist 74-year Jean Carter-Hill shakes her head over the escalation she now sees in the city’s Englewood neighborhood and wonders if the police chief, the mayor and the governor’s actions will make a difference, in an interview with The Grio.
“This killing is too much. We’re burying too many people. This suffering is too much. Young people are traumatized by these killings. Everybody in the house is messed up by this (violence). Can we imagine what’s happening to these young people attending funerals every week?”
Carter-Hill says it’s not just laws and law enforcements that should address the problem of gang and drug violence. “It is a community issue. We have to put time into changing the mindset in the community. The community needs to sit down with politicians and law enforcement and work with our youth before they get to the guns. Right now if they don’t have one (a gun), they know somebody who does.”
The list, details and statistics of the dead and wounded are beginning to read in local and regional newspapers and TV reports like the casualties unfurled during the height of the “War on Terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan – only the victims die on American soil and so many aren’t old enough to vote, let alone sign up for combat.