Can anything be done about gang violence in Chicago?

In my October 5 post, entitled “What Chicago gangs and Al-Qaeda have in common,” I briefly reviewed the evolution of gangs in Chicago over the past decade and the challenges that evolution posed to communities and the police. On Monday, the New York Times, through its new Chicago News Cooperative, ran a similar story that I found very worthwhile.

As the article explains, the crux of the problem is this:

“Past crackdowns by the police had created a shifting landscape in the world of street gangs; as an older generation of gang leaders was put behind bars, the sociology of gangs changed, spawning fragmentation and turf wars. With no leadership to enforce discipline, once-petty arguments over dice games or girlfriends quickly escalated into violent and even fatal attacks, making enforcement particularly tough…. [T]he department has arrested and jailed so many gang leaders that it has become, in a sense, a victim of its own success.”

The question, of course, is what to do given this situation. One part of the answer may be a new youth anti-violence program–about to be implemented by the University of Chicago and community groups–that includes character education, counseling, and training in Olympic sports.

The buzz around Chicago, however, has been caused by the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Ron Huberman, who has a plan of his own. A recent New York Times editorial describes his program and the students who need it:

“The ambitious plan will offer mentoring, counseling and jobs to high-risk students. To determine who they are, Mr. Huberman analyzed the cases of more than 500 young people who were killed or wounded in gun violence over the last two years. The analysis suggests that nearly 10,000 of the city’s 113,000 high school students are at risk of becoming victims of gun violence and need help. Their lives follow a clear pattern. They are absent from school more than 40 percent of the time, on average. They have fallen behind and are more likely to be enrolled in special education. And they generally attend 38 of the city’s nearly 140 public high schools.”

A story in last week’s Chicago Tribune referred to the 300 adolescents currently at the center of this prevention effort as “ultra at-risk students, who the district believes have a greater than 20 percent chance of being shot in the next two years.”

From what I’ve read about the plan, I like it–in part because of the assumption that underlies its focus, and in part because of who designed it.

The major assumption this plan makes is that a small group of people can deeply impact the larger population, in both good and bad ways. Thus, spending lots of money to intervene with a few hundred of the city’s most at-risk students could positively impact tens of thousands of other students. This is akin to a teacher determining who the “leader” of the class is during the first week of the school year; getting that one student’s support likely will result in many other students giving the teacher their support as well. Malcolm Gladwell writes about this phenomenon in his bestselling book The Tipping Point, and Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler write about it in their new book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. A New York Times Magazine story from 2008 shows how the Chicago-based organization CeaseFire was built on this idea as well:

CeaseFire’s founder, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist and a physician who for 10 years battled infectious diseases in Africa. He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. ‘For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,’ Slutkin told me recently. ‘And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.’”

Next, I have confidence in the plan because Ron Huberman appears to be its primary creator. Huberman is a former Chicago police officer and former president of the Chicago Transit Authority, which means he understands well the landscape (both figuratively and literally) of the city, as well as how its gangs operate. He also earned an MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, one of the nation’s top 10 business schools (note that the Times story above stated that he analyzed the data on past student deaths). On paper, his “on the ground” experience and high-level academic training seem like a good combination that could lead to a successful anti-violence plan.

To answer the question I asked in the title of this post: Yes, I do think something can be done about gang violence in Chicago. One anti-violence plan, no matter how extensive, won’t solve the problem by itself–many other issues, including affordable public housing and economic development/job creation, need to be addressed as well–but it sounds very promising thus far.