Gangs, Guns and Violence - The In$ane Chicago Way

Gangs, Guns and Violence - The In$ane Chicago Way, John M. Hagedorn

With money comes power and with power comes respect. In order to maintain this respect and power they had to be willing to protect it by all means necessary. We taught the C-Notes$ they could do this by utilizing their resources. The boys had three pipelines for weapons available to them; one was from West Virginia, one from Texas, and the other from Wisconsin.....
The Texas connect was a member from the Ohio Street faction that was on the lam for several crimes that he was being sought for back in Chicago. He found that all you needed to purchase a weapon in Texas at the time as a Texas driver's license. Before long he opened up his new line of money-making, purchasing and selling guns illegally. .....
In fact, one tactic the C-Note$ employed was to take advantage of the Chicago police mandate to "get guns off the street." When C-Note$ were caught in a drug bust, the Note$ offered firearms to the arresting officers if the charges would be dropped.......Sal laughed and said it was a "win-win." The Note$ didn't go to jail and the cops got brownie points for turning in guns.

Law enforcement always wants to take credit when homicides drop but blame the gangs when it goes up. However, the reasons the Mexican cartel was has not spilled over to the US side surely reflect more than policing and include the conscious, rational decisions of both cartel leaders and powerful US prison gangs.
To better understand this dynamic, we can turn to the 2011 United Nations Global Study on Homicide. It points out that levels of homicide in most times are related to lack of development and inequality. It is the most undeveloped areas, like sub-Saharan Africa, with high numbers of desperate young men, that have the highest rates of killing. The report adds that when homicide rates shoot up stratospherically it is typically because gangs go to war, as in Colombia between the Cali and Medellin cartels, the 1990's mafia wars in Italy, and more recently the Mexican Sinaloa vs Zetas cartel wars. The report adds that violence often sharply declines when wars end.
The standard notion by US criminologists that "neighborhood characteristics" of social disorganization predict homicide rates makes little sense at times of war when murders double or triple in a single year.

"...To me, the instrumental culture of organized crime is a bizarre mirror image of the paramount importance of success in US society and its worship of money and power.
     In the case of both SGD and the Outfit, accomplishing these goals often meant murder. Like Robert Merton, I think this success culture is embedded deep within our society, and some - Merton mentions Al Capone - use violence and corruption to get what they want. Public officials condemn this culture in organized crime at the risk of hypocrisy. The world of politics, sports, government, and business are filled with examples of men and women doing whatever it takes to win. As in A World of Gangs, I argue our main struggle with gang youth is a cultural one, and the target of our struggle should be mainstream, instrumental, hypermasculine, capitalist culture, not some deviant, vicious gang subculture. For me, there are other cultural values - such as nonviolence and human rights - that are more important than money or power."

"History tells us that gangs, corruption, and organized crime will probably never go away, no matter what we do, but it does matter what we do.... One lesson of this book is that Chicago has always had a serious gang problem because it also has always had a serious problem with corruption and police brutality. In Chicago and elsewhere, history shows the gang problem is broader that just a problem of gang members."