Is Chicago slowly dying?

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  • DelayDelay 4,530 Posts
    DB_Cooper said:
    Delay said:
    Chicago has a 50 year old gang culture imbedded in its history. Nothing on the east coast can be compared.

    T**, I respect you. But this goes back to the 1800's on the East Coast. Each successive wave of immigrants had to fight against the previous group to earn and own the lowest levels of manual labor. That is the nature of our system. I could tell you the tales of Irish immigrants fighting on the docks in Boston to the death, but it is the same story as the Italians fighting with the Irish. Or the Black people fighting the Italians. Or the current wave of South American immigrants fighting the Mexicans. It's like we're a worldwide gang. Blood in, blood out. Chicago is different in the fact that it is not about that. It's about blood. Full stop. And I don't exactly know why or how how it can be fixed.
    I'm not talking about the dead rabbits... I'm talking about cabrini-greene and gang culture in black america.

  • Jonny_PaycheckJonny_Paycheck 17,825 Posts
    Simply quoting the murder rate and saying "NYC did it!" is not serious. Imagine if NYCHA demolished its housing projects and re-settled the residents in Kingsbridge, Baychester, Yonkers, New Rochelle, East New York, Stapleton, Canarsie, Jamaica, Cambria Heights, Maspeth, Brownsville, Far Rockaway, etc.

    No easy solution.

  • HorseleechHorseleech 3,830 Posts
    Jonny_Paycheck said:
    Simply quoting the murder rate and saying "NYC did it!" is not serious. Imagine if NYCHA demolished its housing projects and re-settled the residents in Kingsbridge, Baychester, Yonkers, New Rochelle, East New York, Stapleton, Canarsie, Jamaica, Cambria Heights, Maspeth, Brownsville, Far Rockaway, etc.

    No easy solution.

    Yeah, I wasn't attempting to solve Chicago's problems on Soul Strut.

    You think NYC's solution was easy?

    Acting like NYC had a cakewalk and that Chicago is an unsolvable puzzle isn't serious.

    Nobody is saying what worked in NYC will work in Chicago, that doesn't mean it's time to give up.

  • Jonny_PaycheckJonny_Paycheck 17,825 Posts
    It's just not remotely the same thing and I have not advocated giving up in any way.

  • Fred_GarvinFred_Garvin The land of wind and ghosts 337 Posts
    PatrickCrazy said:
    Doesn't Chicago have strict gun control laws?
    It does, though it's worth noting that Wisconsin and Indiana don't, both of which are a short drive from Chicago.

    The thing I find a bit puzzling about the constant questioning of what's going on in Chicago is that 1) Chicago's murder/violent crime rate has dropped dramatically in the last twenty years... it's far lower than its high in the early 90s (which was part of a nationwide high), and it's lower than it was at this time last year; and 2) in gun homicide rate, Chicago doesn't even crack the top 10. New Orleans, St. Louis, Memphis, Miami, Oakland, Atlanta, Cleveland, Richmond, et al. all have higher rates than Chicago, and yet no one seems to be asking what's wrong with those cities.

    I also can't help noticing that we started hearing a lot more about Chicago's problems after our current president took office. Comes with the territory, I suppose.

  • ReynaldoReynaldo 6,054 Posts
    Fred_Garvin said:
    PatrickCrazy said:
    Doesn't Chicago have strict gun control laws?
    It does, though it's worth noting that Wisconsin and Indiana don't, both of which are a short drive from Chicago.

    The thing I find a bit puzzling about the constant questioning of what's going on in Chicago is that 1) Chicago's murder/violent crime rate has dropped dramatically in the last twenty years... it's far lower than its high in the early 90s (which was part of a nationwide high), and it's lower than it was at this time last year; and 2) in gun homicide rate, Chicago doesn't even crack the top 10. New Orleans, St. Louis, Memphis, Miami, Oakland, Atlanta, Cleveland, Richmond, et al. all have higher rates than Chicago, and yet no one seems to be asking what's wrong with those cities.

    I also can't help noticing that we started hearing a lot more about Chicago's problems after our current president took office. Comes with the territory, I suppose.
    Yup, real talk. It's the reporting that has increased. The numbers don't lie, but feelings can. This is why people should usually look at the relevant numbers first before forming opinions.

    Although I wonder what the yearly numbers are for injured by (but not killed by) guns in Chicago. These youngsters could just be inefficient killers and were they better shots, the homicide numbers would be closer to the actual number of attempts to murder.

  • DocMcCoyDocMcCoy "Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,913 Posts
    Jonny_Paycheck said:
    Delay said:
    Chicago has a 50 year old gang culture imbedded in its history. Nothing on the east coast can be compared.

    And they locked up all the leaders so its a bunch of teenagers with a surplus of guns.

    Operation Trident, the Met's programme for combatting black-on-black crime in Greater London, had a similar side-effect on the city's nascent gang culture. Once the o.g.'s, who effectively performed a mentoring role for the younger gang members, were all banged up, the stabilising influence they provided quickly disappeared. This created a power vacuum which was filled by all the hotheads and which led to the rise of The Postcode Wars, where kids could be shot or stabbed just for being caught in the wrong postal district.

  • kitchenknightkitchenknight 4,922 Posts
    Louis Menand just wrote a great piece in the New Yorker about the fight for the Voting Rights Act that is highly recommended:

    http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2013/07/08/130708crat_atlarge_menand

    I post that to excerpt this passage about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the summer of 1966, which illustrates just how long this sort of thing has been going on in Chicago... I found this passage in particular to be profoundly moving:

    The activists in sncc were not the only ones who thought King was an opportunist. So did Marshall, the man who argued Brown before the Supreme Court. So did J. Edgar Hoover, who tried to convince Kennedy that King was a dupe of the Communists, and who suspended the F.B.I.???s practice of warning political figures of death threats in King???s case.

    So, for a time, did Roger Wilkins, an assistant attorney general in Johnson???s Justice Department. Then, in 1966, Wilkins went to see King in Chicago, where, in the face of neo-Nazi violence, King was trying to get the city to address the problems of inner-city poverty. King had rented a walkup in a slum neighborhood. When Wilkins and another Justice Department lawyer got up the stairs, they found King in a small, airless room in a railroad apartment, talking to forty or fifty gang kids. He was holding a seminar on nonviolence. ???For hours this went on,??? Wilkins later told one of L.B.J.???s biographers. ???There were no photographers there, no newsmen. There was no glory in it. He also kept two assistant attorney generals of the United States waiting for hours while he did this.??? It was four o???clock in the morning when King finished. He woke Coretta and she made coffee. ???We sat and we talked,??? Wilkins said. ???He was a great man, a great man.???

  • bassiebassie 11,710 Posts
    Excellent, heart-wrenching radio documentary. Worth listening to.

    Harper High School, Chicago

  • HarveyCanalHarveyCanal "a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
    Fred_Garvin said:
    2) in gun homicide rate, Chicago doesn't even crack the top 10. New Orleans, St. Louis, Memphis, Miami, Oakland, Atlanta, Cleveland, Richmond, et al. all have higher rates than Chicago, and yet no one seems to be asking what's wrong with those cities.


    Umm...


  • DJSORCE1DJSORCE1 25 Posts
    ppadilha said:
    anyone seen this film? I think it's on Netflix now:



    It's about a group that's been trying to prevent gang violence in Chicago by stopping the cycle of revenge that usually fuels these murders. Been meaning to watch it but haven't worked up the courage really, it looks pretty intense. By the same guy who did Hoop Dreams, among other amazing docs.

    Thanks for sharing this looks like a great movie.

  • Horseleech said:
    Jonny_Paycheck said:
    There are no good answers.

    People said the same about NYC.

    Sorry, I don't buy it.

    I gotta say that I agree with Jonny that chicago and nyc have so many different multi layered problems that I believe that you cannot simply say if nyc 'fixed' their problems why cannot chicago. i mean lets take the fact that chicago has closed mad schools and consolidated many into one . so now you have rival gang members from different parts of the city sharing one school; that's a recipe for trouble. many of the chicago neighborhoods from the southside to the westside have never really recovered from the troubles of the past. Also lack of real opportunities for people of color have been widespread for many many decades in chicago; more so than in nyc i believe.

    like batmon, i grew up during the early 70s and 80s were off the charts on the coast for violence but chicago is on another level.

  • batmonbatmon 27,574 Posts
    davidwingate said:
    Horseleech said:
    Jonny_Paycheck said:
    There are no good answers.

    People said the same about NYC.

    Sorry, I don't buy it.

    I gotta say that I agree with Jonny that chicago and nyc have so many different multi layered problems that I believe that you cannot simply say if nyc 'fixed' their problems why cannot chicago. i mean lets take the fact that chicago has closed mad schools and consolidated many into one . so now you have rival gang members from different parts of the city sharing one school; that's a recipe for trouble. many of the chicago neighborhoods from the southside to the westside have never really recovered from the troubles of the past. Also lack of real opportunities for people of color have been widespread for many many decades in chicago; more so than in nyc i believe.

    like batmon, i grew up during the early 70s and 80s were off the charts on the coast for violence but chicago is on another level.

    Maybe im in a fantasy world, i've seen shootouts, but ive NEVER seen a shoot out between two large groups of people.
    I never had to skip whole neighborhoods. I still walked through projects after gunshots were heard the night before.

    In my private mind, gang shit has another level of chaos than drug and beef related shit.
    The gangs in hood bitd day when there were "colors/uniforms" were on some Warriors type shit. There werent machine guns involved.

  • DuderonomyDuderonomy Haut de la Garenne 7,778 Posts
    Chicago's fine. Detroit just filed for bankruptcy.

  • SO OPSO OP 10 Posts
    I live in New York now but I'm from Chi and went back recently. The South Side is looking worse now than any time I can remember- and this is while they are making improvements on the North Side. I don't know- feels like racism to me. I love my town but the shit makes me sad.

  • LaserWolfLaserWolf Portland Oregon 11,517 Posts
    Welcome.

  • gareth said:
    soup said:
    I always feel like a chump bringing up NPR but the recent This American Life about Chicago gang violence was pretty bugged...

    http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/488/harper-high-school-part-two?act=2

    That shit was gut wrenching, and incredible radio. I totally endorse this product and event... a gruelling two hours.

    Cosign.
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