Laquan McDonald and the CPD's Responsibility for Chicago's Gang Problem

      An appropriate uniform design for the CPD

Internal Chicago Police Department documents claimed recently that gangs were attempting to use the protests of the murder of Laquan McDonald to commit crimes and attack police!  Huh?  

What Laquan's murder actually shows is the culpability of the Chicago Police for the severity of Chicago's gang problem.

Police culture in Chicago has always been ugly, racist, and corrupt. It's history, Richard Lindberg summarizes in his book on the CPD is "to serve and collect."  The problem isn't really accountability. The CPD has always been supremely and supinely accountable..... but to the machine not the people. 

My conclusion from more than a decade of research on Chicago gangs is this: corruption and brutality by the CPD  are principle reasons why Chicago has had such an entrenched gang problem. 

Lets look back.  A major reason why the Outfit, Chicago's mafia, has been around now for more than a century is their cozy relationship to the top echelons of the machine and the CPD. Al Capone was best buds with Mayor Big Bill Thompson in the 1920s.  For decades the Outfit got away with murder.....  literally.  Here is what the reform commissioner OW Wilson said in the early 1960s about his CPD's record clearing Outfit murders: 

           Since 1919 there have been 876 gangland-style slayings in the Chicagoland area. [Of these] only two                                have been cleared by arrest and conviction of the killers.

The CPD did more than allow Outfit hitmen to operate with impunity.  In 1997, Chicago Police Superintendent and champion of "community policing" resigned when it was disclosed he vacationed with Outfit figures. In my book, The In$ane Chicago Way, I report Rodriguez's protection of an Outfit hit man, Pierre Zonis, who was also a Chicago police officer. And then there was Deputy Superintendent and Chief of Detectives William Hanhardt who was convicted in 2001 on running jewel theft ring for the Outfit. And don't forget influential Alderman Fred Roti who was indicted in 1990 for fixing a murder trial, racketeering, and extortion.  The FBI publicly named him as mafia "made man'" while Alderman.  The Outfit has persisted for a century in no small part to active support by the CPD and the machine.

The CPD's policy toward African American street gangs, on the other hand, was brutal repression and lawless violence.  Corruption didn't stop, but as I conclude in In$ane, changed its nature and vastly expanded during the war on drugs. When the gangs took over retail drug sales, the Outfit did not also order their loyal servants in the CPD to protect the new vice lords and gangsters. As the "Don," a blue blood Outfit leader told me in an interview for In$ane, "Without the cops none of this could happen." The gangs had to do it from the bottom up while the Outfit did it from the top down as our study of police corruption showed.

However, the main way the CPD has fueled Chicago's gang problem has been by its brutal and lawless behavior. The outright assassination  of Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton by Chicago Police was only a sign of horrors to come. We can never forget how Jon Burge tortured more than a hundred African American gang members.  No officer reported him, though the screams could be heard throughout the station house. Burge represented the attitude by Chicago Police and their machine masters that extreme brutality on black people was acceptable.  To the CPD and machine, black lives have never mattered. Oh, buy off their votes when necessary, but treat them as less-than-human on the streets. If you were repeatedly beaten and locked in cages like a dog,  how would you respond? The history of  racist hostility by the CPD  explains the strength of gang culture in Chicago. And that brings us back to Laquan.

There are three important points about the murder of Laquan McDonald. First is the assumption by officer Jason Van Dyke that gunning down a black man would be acceptable. "I feared for my life" is now the standard response of police killers. Before they were caught on camera, they got away with it — and often still do.

Second, there were good reasons for him to think he could get away with it.  Just as fellow officers heard the screams of Burge's torture victims,  look at all the officers in the video allowing Van Dyke to kill. When gang members are present at a murder, prosecutors charge them all as party to a crime and they are deemed by law to be as guilty of the murder as the shooter.  The CPD may be upset that the community has a no-snitching culture, but the only effective no-snitching culture in Chicago is the blue code of silence.

Finally, States Attorney Anita Alvarez, McCarthy and Emanuel were aware of the murder and kept it under wraps.  John Kass points out that if the video was made public before the mayoral election, Emanuel likely would have lost to Chuy Garcia. If there wasn't a storm of protest and a "smoking gun" video do you think they would have ever fired Van Dyke or indicted him? Even Burge was never indicted for his tortures.   Laquan's murder was not an aberration but business as usual by the CPD.

Protestors are filling the streets. The CPD's ploy to "look out for gangs using the protests to attack officers" fools no one.  It has been the long standing violence by police against African Americans that has fueled Chicago gang hostility and fanned violence in the black community.  To understand why black youth are so hostile just watch the video.  The BlackLivesMatters movement has the capacity to focus the anger on the streets toward police reform and the machine.

A measure of justice for Laquan should include the indictment of all those police present at the shooting who did not immediately arrest Van Dyke. And it should include the resignation of Alvarez, McCarthy, and Emanuel for trying to cover up a murder.

Talking Common Sense About Gangs and Violence

The violence problem in Chicago is mainly about race, not gangs, guns, laws, or cartels.  

That’s what I’ve learned from two decades of gang research in Chicago.  Today there are more Latino than African American gang members and gangs in Chicago.  Yet nearly 80% of homicide victims and offenders are African American.  Despite this, CPD Superintendent McCarthy and Mayor Emanuel continue to blame “gangs" and avoid linking homicide to Chicago’ history of racial oppression.

Other conventional explanations for homicide also fall flat.  There is no evidence that homicide fluctuates with a rise or fall in the number of guns, which have plagued our streets for decades.  The  Chicago Reporter recently pointed out harsher penalties for gun laws are also uncorrelated with homicide drops.

The notion that our homicide rate is a product of drug cartel rivalries is similarly specious.  The cartels are Mexican and their local distribution thrives on kinship connections. The cartels have been at war in Mexico for nearly a decade yet their violence has not spilled over even to the other side of the border, much less Chicago.  El Paso, only a bridge away from violence-plagued Juarez,  is statistically one of the safest cities in America. The DEA may claim violence in Spike Lee’s “Chiraq” is about drug cartel rivalries, but their self-serving proclamations stretch credulity. 

Our homicide rate, with two small spikes and dips, has stayed constant for more than a decade. With an alarming number of gunshot wounds, it makes sense that random fluctuations in the number of people dying of gun injuries account for occasional increases and drops in deaths. Our homicide rate has settled in at about four times higher than New York City and half of Detroit’s. There is no evidence law enforcement tactics or interventions by groups such as CureViolence have had any measurable impact on our city’s homicide rate since its 50% decline from 1992 to 2004.

Superintendent McCarthy blames the gangs for violence but maybe he doesn’t understand that gangs in Chicago are radically different than in the 1990s. My book, The In$ane Chicago Way, explains how organized wars,  led by incarcerated gang chiefs,  brought homicide levels in the 1990s to twice as high as they are today.  Those wars didn’t end because of any new police tactics, but rather exhausted and fractured the gangs, breaking the hold of the old gang leaders. Today’s black gang members particularly are rebellious even against their old gang chiefs. 

Current research by Robert Aspholm and others finds violence is driven by spontaneous,  local incidents, sometimes gang related, sometimes not.  Drill raps on YouTube often replace memorized gang “laws and prayers” as motivations for violence.  What underlies the shootings in black communities are the same factors that for a century have produced higher rates of African American violence:  the daily humiliations of powerless, desperate, unemployed black men.  

From the 1919 race riots to the years of restrictive covenants and “hidden violence” to the building and then destruction of CHA housing projects there has been an unbroken line of oppressive conditions in Chicago’s black communities.  Have things gotten better?  Despite a growing middle class, the black poverty rate has increased since 1960 to reach one third of all African Americans. Indices of segregation have remained unchanged since the 1960s and the black unemployment rate has doubled. The pool of young, poor, unemployed black men are still on street corners and they are killing each other as this 2012 Chicago Reader graphic shows.

The attempt to blame the gangs fundamentally diverts attention from  the fact that to McCarthy’s police — and the Emanuel machine to which he owes allegiance — black lives don’t really matter. In the 1990s CPD clearance rates for homicide ranged from 64% to 69%. The Superintendent admitted that by September 2015, only 23% of all homicides were cleared. Read that again: less than one in four homicides resulted in an arrest.   When the gangs were at war in the 1990s it was relatively easy to figure out who was doing the shooting.  Despite gang claims they don’t snitch to police, court records show they did, pointing their fingers at rival gang shooters. Today, shootings are more spontaneous, and less controlled, making them in a way more dangerous. Young men hand out violent street justice as retaliation since police can’t seem to find the actual offenders.

This means McCarthy should stop his out of date tactics of threatening old gang leaders to control youthful members over which they no longer exercise control. His “Call Ins” claimed their first death October 13 when Tracey Morgan was gunned down after a meeting with CPD officers. While there have been persistent attempts by gangs to minimize their own violence, from the People & Folks coalitions to Spanish Growth & Development,  gang leaders today simply do not have the legitimacy, organization, or authority to stop the shootings.

Blaming the gangs also diverts attention away from police brutality and corruption. Jon Burge’s legacy has not been forgotten and serious attempts to bring real accountability to McCarthy’s CPD have been largely frustrated. My book demonstrated how police corruption helps gangs thrive. While good police work is part of the solution, bad police work is part of the problem.

All violence is paid for, the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu said. Chicago’s “structural violence” of racism and poverty is coming back to haunt us in many ways, including the hostility of poor young black men.  The rebellion that has been going on in Ferguson for the past year may be a portent of the fire next time in Chicago. 

Here is the uncomfortable truth: There is no easy answer to violence in Chicago.  Our city has to soberly confront its legacy of racism in employment, housing, education, and policing. McCarthy and Emanuel should stop blaming the gangs and calling for new repressive legislation. If the mayor is serious about reducing violence he needs to steeply increase investment in black communities. The best way to prevent violence is to provide hope to the desperate underclass of African Americans in our city.