NOTE: This article is from a newspaper. The remarks are not authored
by me. JEO
****************************************
A look beyond the handgun Ban
By Murray Whyte
Reporter
The Toronto Star
TheStar.com
April 27, 2008
http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/418838
CHICAGO—Deputy Police Chief Eugene Williams had a tough week.
Wednesday
morning, a two-storey house in his jurisdiction on the South Side.
Five
people, shot dead. The following afternoon, two more shootings.
Another
that night, non-fatal, shot in the leg and back. And all of this
following a hail of gunfire that had peppered the city's toughest
neighbourhoods just a few days before: In less than a week, more than
40
shootings, at least a dozen of them fatal.
Williams, an affable 28-year veteran of the force, sat in his office
in
the blue-paneled bunker of the CPD's District 5 headquarters in
South
Chicago. As he managed his constantly pinging email and two
BlackBerrys
vibrating at regular intervals on his desk, he suggested a worrying
paradox.
"The regular citizen in Chicago cannot go anywhere and buy
firearms,"
says Williams, eyebrows raised. "And yet, in one year, in the 1990s,
we
had more than 19,000 weapons recovered. In one year. We've been
averaging 10,000 weapons recovered every year for the last 10 or 12
or
14 years. And that's with a ban."
Toronto Mayor David Miller – who is aggressively pushing the federal
government to institute a broad-ranging national handgun ban as gun
violence in the city spikes upwards – please take note: The city of
Chicago has a broad-ranging firearms ban in place. It has for a long
time. It started with handguns in 1981, and then assault weapons in
1992. (It's worth noting that, as Williams explained the litany of
recent weapons offences in his jurisdiction, one of them involved
three
officers being fired on by an AK-47 semi-automatic assault rifle.)
Chicago's gun laws are among the toughest in the country, making it
and
its anti-gun crusading mayor, Richard Daley, the target of gun
advocates
nationwide. Lobbyists like the National Rifle Association routinely
campaign against what they call "Chicago-style" gun legislation; one
of
those campaigns, challenging the constitutionality of a gun ban in
Washington, D.C., is now being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
And yet, in Chicago, gunfire is a routine feature of the city's
dominant
criminal dynamic, a deeply-entrenched, multi-generational gang
system
with, authorities estimate, close to 70,000 members citywide.
Bans? "That's what people do when they don't understand the
problem,"
says Juan Johnson – or "Big Juan," as he's fairly known in the
hardscrabble neighbourhoods on Chicago's gang-infested west side.
It's mid-afternoon, and for Johnson, a mountain of a man, over six
feet
tall and larger around, his work day is just beginning. In the
basement
of the neighbourhood's Alliance of Local Service Organizations, on a
rough stretch of Armitage Avenue, Johnson and Melvin Santiago, both
former gang members, trade war stories.
Johnson was a high-ranking member of the Cobras, one of the area's
half
dozen Latino gangs. He served 11 years in prison for a murder charge
that was overturned. Santiago, wiry, chatty and quick to smile, did
19
years for a gun murder he committed when he was 17.
The two men used to patrol the neighbourhood, near the axis of Logan
Square and Humboldt Park, for their respective gangs. Now, they do it
as
outreach workers for Ceasefire, a community-based attempt to stem
the
violence.
No easy task here, in a region known for at least a generation as one
of
the city's deadliest. In 2003, when Chicago retook the dubious title
of
the United States' murder capital with 599, it was here – in
Johnson's
territory, police beat 1413 – that held the distinction of being the
most lethal, with 10 killings within its 28 square blocks. Eight of
them
were shootings.
Since then? "The next year, zero. The year after that, zero,"
Johnson,
whose street cred still has currency, says with clear pride. He was
able
to broker a peace between the two strongest warring factions, the
Latin
Kings and the Maniac Latin Disciples.
"Most of the time, they don't even know what they're fighting about
–
just that they have to," Johnson says. "There's no such thing as a
gun
ban. Once you've got them, you can't get rid of them. There's
military
hardware on these streets. There's always a way."
Indeed, in modern crime prevention, where illegal weapons flow freely
on
long-established routes between states and nations in the hundreds
or
thousands, a gun ban seems, at best, naïve. It's the Hail Mary pass,
a
swing for the fences, a last-minute pull-the-goalie push: When
you've
already lost, what have you got to lose?
That's why, in America's most violent urban patches, better ways are
constantly being pursued.
"We can't take all the guns away," Santiago says. "But what we can do
is
change the mindset: `If somebody calls me a bitch, I have the right
to
blow his head off.' They don't know they have a choice. They think
that's what they have to do."
Santiago is touching on a relatively new way of addressing gun
violence
in America: Not with sterner laws, but social interventions. A
generation of rampant violence has shown, says deputy chief
Williams,
"that we can't arrest ourselves out of this situation. We have to be
open to different approaches."
The Chicago Police Department has been using its roughest
neighbourhoods
as a laboratory. In 2002, with federal backing, Chicago police
embarked
on a program called Project Safe Neighborhoods in two of its
worst-afflicted districts. Working with academics like Tracey
Meares,
now a professor of law at Yale on the city's west side, Williams'
force
embraced a novel approach: Try talking to them.
The program focused on trying to get ahead of the problem: As a
condition of parole, gun offenders had to sign a form stating they
understood their next firearms offence would be pushed to the
federal
level, where sentences are sterner and parole nearly non-existent,
to
say nothing of where they're incarcerated. "You wake up on Idaho,"
Williams says. "That means your homies aren't driving 10 miles down
the
road to visit."
Signing the form also obligates them to attend a forum, where
they're
told in no uncertain terms what can happen on their next gun
conviction.
Once they establish consequences, they throw them a rope: Education,
emergency housing, medical attention for drug rehabilitation. The
program also puts forward employers willing to give jobs to
ex-offenders
if they're sincere about wanting out.
"We tell them they have a choice to make," Williams says. "`You can
go
back to doing what you've been doing, slinging dope and get arrested
with a gun and face the consequences, or you can step out of that
life,
and we'll help you do it.'"
In the two police districts where the program was applied, homicide
rates were cut by almost half – numbers, Williams says, the
districts
have been able to maintain or better since. From the initial two,
the
model is now being applied in six of the city's 25 districts.
Results
are encouraging: The events of the past week notwithstanding, gun
violence in Chicago has been declining steadily over the past 10
years.
With the south side now the reigning gun violence district,
Williams'
transfer there, from the west side, is no coincidence.
"We put a lot resources into (the west side), and we had a major
impact," says Williams. Behind him, maps of the various south side
districts line the walls, divided and colour-coded in gang-claimed
swaths: The Black Disciples, the Four Corner Hustlers, the Vice
Lords.
"Now, this is where the most difficult challenge lies," Williams
says.
Outside his office, a boy no older than 13 is led by an officer, his
hands cuffed behind his back.
"We need to do here what we did there: Reduce the desire of young
people
to pick up a gun."
David Kennedy, an anthropologist at the John Jay College of Criminal
Justice at the City University of New York, is the godfather of this
approach. In 1996, when he was a professor at Harvard, Kennedy
launched
the Boston Gun Project, the first intervention of its kind. It
reduced
gun crime in the city by 60 per cent. Since then, it has blossomed to
a
number of cities across the U.nited States.
Kennedy views bans, like the one Miller is pushing for, as a symptom
of
the problem, not a cure. "For people desperately searching for a
solution, it seems like it makes sense," says Kennedy. "What they
don't
understand is that there are better tools that don't require law to
implement, and are practically cookbook and off-the-shelf."
Chicago's Project Safe Neighbourhoods is close to Kennedy's
prescription
(he helped advise on the project); Cincinnati's Initiative to Reduce
Violence is its full manifestation. In Cincinnati, gun-related
homicides
spiked in 2006 to 89, more than double the annual average, since
1991,
of 43.
Kennedy's research team unpacked what he calls typical trends: They
identified 69 distinct street groups, comprising about 1,000 people.
Of
the 89 homicides, these 1,000 people – less than half a per cent of
the
city's population – were connected to more than 75 per cent of them.
Identifying the problem makes the solution relatively simple,
Kennedy
says. "If we change the behaviour of these people, we solve the
problem."
Simple, but not easy. Still, Kennedy's methods have had impact: In
Boston, in Chicago, and in Cincinnati, where homicides were cut in
half
the first year.
The solution lies not with trying to remove guns from the equation –
the
proverbial impossible task – but communicating to their users both
consequences and options. In Cincinnati, any offender who asked for
help
back to a crime-free life was welcomed. In a year, 20 per cent of
the
1,000 took the offer.
In Logan Square, Johnson – officially, a "violence interrupter – has
a
task at hand. A teenage gang member – a high school student – had
been
shot in the chest the night before, the victim of a rival gang
member.
"Now, it's my job to stop the retaliation," says Johnson,
matter-of-fact.
As he slips into the street on foot, bound for some tough
negotiations
("Usually, you've just got to talk them into taking a day, two
days,"
Johnson says; "by then, they realize they don't really want to do
it")
Santiago cruises in his Jeep, pointing out gang borders. "That's
Cobra
territiory, over there is Disciples," he says, rolling slowly past
modest bungalows and well-kept lawns. "You've got to know the
borders,
or you could be in a lot of trouble."
He rolls to a stop near an alleyway, where the boy was shot the
night
before. A broken box spring, the alley strewn with trash. The Eagles,
an
upstart faction, did the shooting here, in Cobra territory, Santiago
explains. It makes the job more complicated, but not impossible.
Ceasefire, with its street-bred outreach workers, may lack the
scientific basis that Project Safe Neighborhoods can claim. But
still,
it can claim results: In the worst police beat in America, a
reduction
in gun violence over four years of more than 80 per cent.
Minus the data, the message rings clear. "We're the little breath
they
need to rethink their actions," Santiago says. "They think they need
to
do this. They don't. I had a choice not to pull the trigger. I was
looking to make a name for myself, I ended up killing somebody and I
paid the price.
"We let them know: This is not what you want to become."
************************************************
Professor Joseph Olson, J.D., LL.M. o-
651-523-2142
Hamline University School of Law (MS-D2037) f-
651-523-2236
St. Paul, MN 55113-1235 c-
612-865-7956
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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