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Subject: Chicago street gangs
Replies: 22 Views: 719

shadow27 9.09.20 - 04:24pm
Chicago is still the third largest city in the US and the home base of past President Barack Obama. Votes counted in Chicago have played decisive roles in past Presidential elections as well. ''Chicago Rule'' are a byword for determining political outcomes through fraud, bribery, and violence.

Chicago has actually reverted to gang rule in the last twenty years. Although murders in Chicago seemed to level off in the 2005-2010 period, the percentage of murders attributable to gangs actually went up significantly. Nearly two thirds of murders in Chicago are committed by gang members. * +

shadow27 9.09.20 - 04:24pm
This has happened because of the close working relationship between gang leaders and many Chicago aldermen and City Hall functionaries. Major gangs have enjoyed substantial if not complete official protection from the Chicago police and prosecutors for at least twenty years.

The single best account of how this works was provided in Chicago magazine in a cover story entitled Gangs and Politicians in Chicago: An Unholy Alliance. Replete with detailed neighborhood maps of gang territories and specific criminals in working relationships with specific aldermen (an alderman is a Chicago city councilman), the article is a goldmine of information. Unsurprisingly, gang territories correlate strongly with the number of murders committed in those territories. * +

shadow27 9.09.20 - 04:25pm
Chicago has many gangs but most members belong to one of just half a dozen or so large gangs. Even people outside of Chicago are sometimes familiar with names such as the Gangster Disciples, Black Disciples, Black P Stones, Vice Lords, and Latin Kings. Collectively, these gangs have between 70,000 and 125,000 members, or 6 to 10 times the size of the 12,000 member Chicago Police Department.

Although Chicago magazine enjoyed many complimentary letters-to-the-editor from readers for having addressed this matter, progressive Chicago expressed dismay that the magazine had the bad taste to write a story on such a subject. And, the story has been studiously ignored by the ''mainstream media'' almost everywhere else in the United States. * +

shadow27 9.09.20 - 04:26pm
A major source for the story was Hal Baskin, a well-known Chicago figure, sometime aldermanic candidate, friend of black rabble rouser Jesse Jackson, Congressman (and former Black panther) Bobby Rush, and Gangster Disciples founder Larry Hoover (now serving six life sentences in the Florence ''Supermax'' facility).

Baskin explained that many aldermanic candidates sought out the support of gangs in a humble fashion. * +

wakeup4 9.09.20 - 04:27pm
Rahm Emmanuel is the biggest gangster in Chicago * +

shadow27 9.09.20 - 04:27pm
Referring to a series of well-organized meetings between candidates and gang bosses leading up to the February 2011 municipal elections, Baskin said:

At some of the meetings, the politicians arrived with campaign materials and occasionally with aides. The sessions were organized much like corporate-style job fairs. The gang representatives conducted hourlong interviews, one after the other, talking to as many as five candidates in a single evening. Like supplicants, the politicians came into the room alone and sat before the gang representatives, who sat behind a long table. ''One candidate said, I feel like Im in the hot seat,''' recalls Baskin. ''And they were.'' * +

shadow27 9.09.20 - 04:28pm
The former chieftains, several of them ex-convicts, represented some of the most notorious gangs on the South and West Sides, including the Vice Lords, Gangster Disciples, Black Disciples, Cobras, Black P Stones, and Black Gangsters. Before the election, the gangs agreed to set aside decades-old rivalries and blood vendettas to operate as a unified political force, which they called Black United Voters of Chicago. ''They realized that if they came together, they could get the politicians to come to them'' explains Baskin. * +

shadow27 9.09.20 - 04:29pm
The gang representatives were interested in electing aldermen sympathetic to their interests and those of their impoverished wards (not that the two groups have precisely the same interests, of course). As for the politicians, says Baskin, their interests essentially boiled down to getting elected or reelected. ''All of [the political hopefuls] were aware of who they were meeting with,'' he says. ''They didnt care. All they wanted to do was get the support.'' * +

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