1. focus: Crime
By Mark Guarino / Staff writer
Chicago
I
t’s the weekend, but the streets are mostly
empty in the Austin neighborhood on Chi-
cago’s impoverished far West Side.
“It’s summertime! You don’t see any
kids out here,” says Darrell Turner, grilling
spits of meat as soul music blares from a radio.
“They’re too scared to come out.” A squeeze of
lighter fluid stokes the flames higher. He shakes
his head: “different times.”
Street violence has beset Chicago’s poorest
neighborhoods for years, but a spike in homi-
cides since January – many of them shootings
on public streets – has adults in neighborhoods
like this one corralling their kids at home.
That’s doubly true since June 27 when, two
blocks from where Mr. Turner works his grill,
a spray of bullets ended the life of 7-year-old
Heaven Sutton, the city’s 251st homicide victim
this year.
Year-to-date homicides are down in New
York City and Los Angeles, but they are up 39
percent in Chicago, with 263 killings by the end
of June.
Outrage is building as young children are in-
creasingly caught in the line of fire. The number
of public school students shot during the past
school year jumped almost 22 percent from the
year before, according to police figures. In June
and July, more than one-fifth of the killings in
each month were of people age 20 or younger.
Says Kaleiah Spencer, a 16-year-old who
lives a block from where Heaven was shot: “You
can barely walk the streets because you don’t
know what’ll happen, who’s going to shoot.
“Here, you hear gunshots, and you can’t
sleep,” she says.
Murder rates need to be analyzed over a
much longer period than a few months to track
trends, criminologists say. Indeed, Chicago
homicides are low compared with decades past
– 928 in 1991 versus 433 in 2011, for example.
However, that hasn’t blunted the perception
that something is terribly wrong in Chicago,
posing a serious test for the new administration
of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Adding to the alarm
are statistics like this one: January-to-June
murders here were 58 percent higher than the
number of US troops killed in Afghanistan dur-
ing the same period.
The police and city officials say street gangs
are responsible for 80 percent of all shootings
this year. Chicago recently surpassed Los Ange-
les – the longtime gang capital of America – in
total gang membership and activity, say crime
Chicago:heatandhomicide
Murder rates in the Windy City
are rising. What’s the solution?
WE remember: Tavares Harrington signs a condolence card for his cousin, 7-year-old Heaven Sutton, who was shot and killed while selling candy outside her Chicago apartment.
Paul Beaty/Special to the Christian Science Monitor
VNEXT PAGE
18 The Christian Science Monitor Weekly | July 23, 2012

2. experts.
Just how many gangs operate in the Chi-
cago area is debatable – sources say between
59 and 70, with as many as 150,000 members.
But the big street gangs that dominated here in
the early 1990s have splintered into as many as
600 factions, according to police. These splinter
groups identify with the heritage of the long-
established gangs – borrowing their name
mainly as a brand – but they tend not to be
bound by their rules.
Whereas the historic gang warfare was
between monolithic crime organizations that
controlled thousands of members each, today’s
street violence more often stems from personal
squabbles and retaliatory conflicts among
smaller hybrid groups whose control extends
only a few blocks.
“Instead of fighting old enemies, when it
was the Hatfields and the McCoys, now it’s the
McCoys and the McCoys,” says Andrew Papa-
christos, a sociology professor at Yale Univer-
sity who has studied gangs in Chicago. “Gangs
are no longer hierarchical. They are now much
more elusive and complex.”
Added to the mix – and no doubt raising the
stakes – is the illicit drug trade. Chicago is the
distribution hub for the Midwest, and its street
gangs operate almost like corporate distribu-
tors for the Mexican cartels, say officials and
criminologists. Four major cartels – Sinaloa,
Los Zetas, Juarez, and Tijuana – have extended
their networks into the Great Lakes region,
according to the 2011 National Drug Threat
Assessment from the Justice Department’s Na-
tional Drug Intelligence Center.
Law enforcement officials say they are
changing their drug-fighting strategies to focus
more on the cartels than on neighborhood
dealers – and they’ve netted some fairly big fish
of late. Last year, José Gonzalez-Zavala, who
headed the Chicago distribution network of La
Familia Michoacana cartel, was sentenced to
40 years in federal prison for distributing more
than $5.7 million in cocaine through Illinois,
Wisconsin, and Indiana. Then, in November, the
FBI arrested 12 Chicago men associated with
the Zetas cartel and charged them with con-
spiracy to possess and distribute cocaine, using
safe houses on the West Side and in Berwyn, an
adjoining suburb.
The greater cartel presence means “that
almost the entire open-air drug market in Chi-
cago is run by gangs” – a relatively recent trend,
says Yale’s Mr. Papachristos.
The Chicago Police Department (CPD),
under new Superintendent Garry McCarthy,
has also shifted its antigang strategies – and
not without controversy. Previously, police re-
sponded to street shootings with blanket arrests
of known gang members. Now, the department
is conducting “gang audits” to assess turf fights
and affiliations in a bid to prevent retaliation
shootings. It is also tracking gang activity via
Facebook and Twitter to pinpoint hot spots and
to identify individuals projected to be involved
in future violence.
“They’re reviewing the shootings and linking
people with specific groups,” says Papachristos,
who favors the new method. “It’s an about-face
from the old strategy of ‘let’s lock up every gang
member.’ ”
CPD spokeswoman Lt. Maureen Biggane
says beat officers now have at their fingertips
data such as outstanding warrants, parole vio-
lations, and arrest records of all known gang
members. “When one gang member commits
a shooting, the entire gang is put on notice [by
police], and they [all] are targeted,” she says.
The group accountability approach resulted
in the arrests of 488 members of the Maniac
Latin Disciples since June 2011, when the gang
was involved in two West Side shootings, Lieu-
tenant Biggane says.
Some residents and city council members,
though, want more aggressive tactics, such as
random frisking or police strike forces. Mr.
McCarthy, who most recently was police chief
of Newark, N.J., does not grasp the nuances of
policing Chicago, they complain.
“We need to bring the mobile strike force
units back. They were ... highly motivated of-
ficers who had special training knowing how
to come into the community and calm conflicts
down with the gangs,” says Anthony Beale, an
alderman representing the city’s Ninth Ward,
on the far South Side.
Biggane counters that the latest strategy is
designed to bring a more consistent police pres-
ence to the neighborhoods, with an eye to sta-
bilizing the streets so that violence decreases
over time. “They get to know the areas they are
surveying. They are not simply popping in and
popping out like the old teams did,” she says.
For Mayor Emanuel, just 14 months into
his term, the homicide spree is putting intense
scrutiny on his administration’s response. He
was criticized after extra police officers were
deployed to tourist-dominated downtown in the
wake of a few street attacks and muggings, and
after the Chicago Sun-Times reported in June
that at least 100 police officers were sent to se-
cure a wedding attended by President Obama.
“I don’t think there’s a recognition [in the
mayor’s office that] there’s a full city out there,”
says Alderman Leslie Hairston of the Fifth Ward
VNEXT PAGE
Cuffed: Chicago police are trying to crack down on
suspected drug dealers, linked to a rising murder rate.
Robert Ray/AP
The Christian Science Monitor Weekly | July 23, 2012 19

3. By Mark Guarino / Staff writer
Chicago
Only eight blocks separate the home
of Heaven Sutton, the second-grader
killed June 27 by bullets meant for
someone else, and the home of the man
charged with shooting her – and between the
two stands a gang-riddled neighborhood that
both sets of traumatized parents say poses far
too many dangers.
This is Austin, a community of brick two-
flats and block-shaped apartment buildings
on Chicago’s West Side, where unemploy-
ment is endemic and almost 3 in 10 resi-
dents live in poverty. Heaven had lived here
with her mother and three older brothers for
only 10 months. Jerrell Dorsey, charged with
her murder, grew up nearby, in the modest
bungalow where his family has lived for 26
years.
Heaven is not the only child to be killed by
errant gunfire on the mean streets of Chicago.
In the past school year, 24 students were killed
and 319 wounded in shootings, police reports
show. But the circumstances of her death – she
was shot at a candy stand her mother had set
up on the front lawn outside their two-flat –
have sparked more than the usual muffled
cries of anguish. Reports that the gunfire was
a gang shooting elicited Mayor Rahm Eman-
uel’s first public comments about the city’s
mounting homicide count.
“This is not about crime. This is about
values,” he said in a tongue-lashing aimed at
the perpetrators.
Heaven’s mother, Ashake Banks, appreci-
ates the mayor’s personal involvement in the
case. “I love him. I really do,” Ms. Banks says,
standing under the tent of the former candy
stand that, filled now with stuffed animals,
messages, balloons, and photos, has become
a public shrine in Heaven’s memory.
Banks characterizes the gang members in
this area as “baby thieves” and says the po-
lice “need to stop those predators from taking
these lives.”
She is filled with regret about moving to
Austin. But she had lost her job as a beauti-
cian, and a friend of her brother’s invited her
to move into a building he owned. Despite her
reservations about moving her children to a
neighborhood she knew was violent, Banks
says she reluctantly accepted.
“I didn’t want to be here. But I wanted my
own place,” she says. “I was too proud.”
The candy stand was Banks’s idea – an op-
portunity to make a little money and to keep
her daughter under close supervision. On the
evening of June 27, Chicago police say, one of
the men near the stand, alleged to be affiliated
with a splinter group of the Vice Lords gang,
was the target of gunfire from another gang
known as the Four Corner Hustlers. Jerrell,
police say, is a Hustler who sprayed 10 bul-
lets at the man, striking him in the ankle and
Heaven in the back. She died 30 minutes later,
in her mother’s arms.
Vernell Dorsey, Jerrell’s father, says that his
son did not fire the shots and that “the police
made a bad mistake.” “He ain’t that kind of
person; he don’t go around and cause trouble
... it’s not in his character,” Vernell says.
He describes Jerrell as “very responsible”
in his job as a caretaker for a younger brother,
who needs intense physical care because of a
disability. The Dorsey parents, who both work,
paid Jerrell to feed his brother, get him to the
bathroom, and administer his medicine.
Vernell says the neighborhood has gone
downhill during the decades his family has
lived here. “It was pretty good when we moved
in. It didn’t have stores open 24-hours a day,
didn’t have liquor stores on the corner, didn’t
have gas stations open all night,” he says.
“That brings in different people.” He blames
lack of jobs for “kids having nothing to do but
stand around a lot.”
“You can always tell your children ‘stay
with the right crowd,’ but who is the right
crowd? You never know,” Vernell says. “Some-
times people act different around you.”
After Jerrell’s arrest, his parents temporar-
ily took time off work to care for their disabled
son. Jerrell’s girlfriend recently moved in to
help out.
As for Banks, she says she plans to move
out of Austin as soon as she can find a job.
“Even if I have to live in a hotel, I can’t stay
here,” she says.
With her only daughter killed outside her
front door, she says there is only one choice
to keep her three boys safe: “I don’t let them
leave the house.” r
on the South Side. “[Emanuel] is from the
North Side, and all his communities are being
well served. But the programs and policies are
not the same on the South Side. There’s defi-
nitely a disparity.”
Emanuel said recently that he appreciates
the “impatience” of his city council critics
and that he shares their alarm. He has lately
launched initiatives to attack the violence from
the back end – cracking down on convenience
and liquor stores that he says can attract ille-
gal activity and seeking to demolish about 200
buildings identified as gang havens. In late
June, he announced $1 million for programs
for CeaseFire – a violence-mediation program
that enlists former gang members – for two
neighborhoods on the South and West Sides.
Some say all the focus on gangs and police
tactics is misplaced – and may not be the real
problem. “The violence is largely spontaneous
and out of control. It’s triggered by all sorts of
unrelated events,” says John Hagedorn, a crim-
inal justice professor at the University of Illi-
nois at Chicago who studies gangs. “The whole
policy discussion is
not dealing with the
long-term problem,
and that’s the inabil-
ity of people to have
hope.”
City and state cuts
to mentoring and
summer programs in
recent years directly
correspond to more
street violence, says
Rick Velasquez of
Youth Outreach Ser-
vices, a group that
serves Austin and other poor Chicago neigh-
borhoods. The same week of Heaven’s murder,
Mr. Velasquez notes, he laid off 10 CeaseFire
workers in Austin because state funding had
run out.
“Violence is like a virus in how it spreads.
Having adults around kids who are helping
shepherd them is extremely important,” he
says. “Those things have been removed from
the communities that ... need them the most.”
In these tough fiscal times, cuts have been
widespread. Last year, Chicago trimmed po-
lice spending by $67 million over the previous
year. State, city, and Chicago Public School
budgets are forecasting deficits, a sign that
cuts to crime-prevention and social efforts may
continue.
“The city is extremely serious about the
crime problem, but the challenge you have ...
is the budget situation,” says Jens Ludwig of
the University of Chicago Crime Lab, which re-
searches gangs. “The idea you can take an ax
to police, public schools, and social programs
without seeing some kind of blowback on the
crime problem doesn’t seem realistic.” r
focus: Crime
Astraybullet,aninnocentvictim
Heaven Sutton, 7, was selling
candy when gunfire erupted.
Vfrom previous page
Police‘need
to stop those
predators
from taking
these lives.’
– Ashake Banks, mother
of Heaven Sutton, age
7, who was killed in
June outside her home
on Chicago’s West Side
Paul Beaty/Special to the Christian Science Monitor
20 The Christian Science Monitor Weekly | July 23, 2012

4. Chicago: heat and homicide