Is Chicago’s Violence Really Caused by Gangs?
Chicago residents, experts, and former gang members call foul on a popular narrative that blames gangs for the city’s violence.
Landwebs
Data from the Chicago Police Department appears to support frustrated residents and former gang members who say that the ongoing narrative supported by Mayor Lori Lightfoot placing blame for the city’s violence on local gangs oversimplifies the problem and ignores the truth, reports The Trace. Analyzed incident data for nearly 34,000 shootings reveals that in the past decade, detectives labeled fewer than three in 10 of them gang-related. In addition, people distrust the police after decades of misconduct, so they don’t always communicate, leading to fewer shootings being solved.
Since the mid-2010s, the Chicago Police Department has attributed a steadily decreasing share of shootings to gangs, with CPD designating 43 percent of fatal shootings as gang-related in 2020, down from 70 percent five years earlier. Over the same time period, the share of nonfatal shootings officially linked to gangs fell from 34 percent to 7 percent. An analysis by The Trace showed that CPD was more than twice as likely to label a shooting gang-related if the victim was Latinx and detectives were also more likely to attribute a shooting to gangs if it resulted in a homicide. Even in cases where detectives knew enough to make an arrest — less than 3,000 in the past decade — they labeled only a third as gang-related. The motive and cause for 75 percent of nonfatal shootings and a quarter of fatal ones is either left blank or marked as “undetermined.” Interviews with researchers, city officials and community members about what, exactly, is known about the impact gangs have on Chicago reveal that assessing the scope of gang violence in Chicago is difficult, in part because of inconsistent police data and the changing nature of gangs, which have fractured.
