Abstract
Roberto Aspholm’s Views from the Streets: The Transformation of Gangs and Violence on Chicago’s South Side is a vital contribution to ethnographic methodology and criminology. As a certain classic of grounded analysis, it addresses vital, timely questions; and as a new standard-bearer for the highest quality gang research, it models a sophisticated approach based in local histories and politics. For students and seasoned experts asking how best to conduct contemporary gang research, Aspholm provides the answer.
Beginning around 2016, headlines blasted reports of soaring murder rates in Chicago, with roughly 50 percent more shooting victims and homicides than in 2015. Aspholm, born in Brazil as a son of liberation theologians, was well situated as a community organizer in Bronzeville and then in Woodlawn, both on the South Side, and as the coach of a track team at a local high school. His research grew out of ongoing interviews with 35 gang members, 30 of whom were active, and relations with five older gang members, three of whom hold advanced degrees.
Aspholm begins where every gang study should, in the history of local social dynamics. Founded between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, Chicago’s major black street gangs were “vertically organized outlaw-capitalist organizations” functioning in the midst of deindustrialization, soaring unemployment, widespread crack-cocaine sales and use, and rising incarceration. Aspholm’s study is committed to explaining why, although the names of traditional gangs endure, they are now organized in ways diametrically opposed to “their hierarchical, corporate-style predecessors” (pp. 16–17).
The first set of reasons concerns the changing drug market. First, the demand for crack plummeted, as the negative epithet “crackhead” discouraged subsequent generations. Second, open-air drug markets disappeared with the rise of cell phones. And third, revenues from drug sales drastically declined as marijuana, less profitable and addictive than cocaine, became the drug of choice, meaning that “gangs could no longer sustain their status as populist employers of their respective memberships” (p. 25).
Furthermore, around this time nearly all of Chicago’s notorious housing projects were destroyed, eliminating long-established gang strongholds. Displaced gang members brought competition and conflict into new areas, as rivals became neighbors. Soon though, young people merged into new relationships across traditional gang lines. Some were forced to switch allegiances, while others formed hybrid identities.
The final reason for the weakening of gang structures and hence the rising rates of homicides was the incarceration of gang leaders due to tough-on-crime policies. While gang leaders could maintain and even strengthen control of their organizations in the 1970s, contemporary leaders were scattered around the country in supermax facilities, often subjected to solitary confinement. Mechanisms of control broke down as snitching increased in exchange for judicial leniency.
These three factors—reduced profitability from drug sales, the destruction of public housing, and the stringent incarceration of leaders—destroyed the local order of neighborhoods, led to increased competition for profits, and nullified prior rules of engagement. Younger gang members, disillusioned with the exploitation of the prior era, began to stand up to established leaders, failed to repay their debts to them, and sometimes simply robbed them outright. As profits declined and authority waned, gang leaders began to acquiesce to their potential successors, with some pee-wees becoming gang leaders for more than just a day.
The rest of Aspholm’s analysis builds on this strong, necessary foundation. He shows how today’s cliques, in contrast to street organizations, reject leaders, hierarchy, and gang ideology. The prior era of obedience is then replaced by a contemporary culture of autonomy. Young people report cliques of no more than twenty members, with women pushed to the margins and few members beyond their mid-twenties. Others become community advocates, parlaying their gang experience into jobs with grassroots organizations. Regardless, prospects for economic survival are bleak, leading some to attempt to cope through substance abuse and many respondents eager for the pittance paid for an interview. Aspholm notes that the city’s summer youth employment initiatives turned away 160,000 people—60 percent of applicants—between 2014 and 2017.
Violence lost its instrumentality, no longer a basis for leadership or control of drug markets, but instead a casual product of rage and the ordinary slights of everyday life. “Drill music” (derived from the slang term for a gang shooting) and social media exacerbate possibilities for harm. Some young people, like Chief Keef, rise up the Billboard chart, fueling youngsters’ aspirations. Yet “confrontations on social media can lead to real-world violence and add fuel to existing gang wars” (p. 103). Older leaders view the new generation as more reckless and indiscriminate, as what is depicted as “gang violence” is mostly interpersonal. Meanwhile, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) espouses a view “utterly divorced from reality” (p. 107), copied from similar materials from the Los Angeles Police Department, although entirely different histories and processes are evident in each locale.
Aspholm provides a convincing explanation of the persistence of gangs and violence in Chicago, grounded in bleak conditions of marginalization, poverty, and violence. Such conditions arose and are perpetuated by neglectful and largely corrupt political elites of a city dubbed in 2015 “the capital of corruption” (p. 113). Gangs, on the other hand, provide informal support groups, “rooted in a culture of acceptance and brotherly love” (p. 115). Such findings, replicated throughout academic studies, belie the crime-centric view of “gangs” and offer insights for reducing violence.
The dramatic rise of violence in Chicago was especially unexpected due to the highly publicized intervention efforts conducted between 2004 and 2015. The focused deterrence and public health models employed by CeaseFire and Cure Violence, respectively, were touted as silver bullets for reducing urban violence. Operation CeaseFire, also known as the Boston Gun Project, operates from the assumption that serious violent crimes are committed by a small number of individuals in gangs who would prefer an “honorable exit.” Yet in Chicago, homicides actually increased after the implementation of CeaseFire, with some participants engaging in shootings immediately after leaving the call-in.
Aspholm analyzes two reasons for the program’s failings. First, “the notion that threats from law enforcement . . . will cause gang members to deter their counterparts from committing acts of violence is fundamentally inconsistent with the horizontal structure of today’s gangs and the fierce culture of personal autonomy that is so central to their individual and collective identities” (p. 146). Second, the model assumes that police know who is responsible for violence; but in 2017, Chicago police “cleared” just 17.5 percent of the city’s homicides, compared to typical rates of about 50 percent in most cities. This is likely due to the lack of legitimacy of the Chicago police, seen by residents as racist, corrupt, and brutal. An indicator of this is CPD’s Strategic Subjects List, in which more than half of all black men in their twenties in Chicago are listed. On the other hand, Cure Violence, based on a public health model featured in the documentary film, The Interrupters, works to mediate ongoing conflicts, connect at-risk individuals to resources to help them desist, and develop relationships with community stakeholders to spread the message that violence is unacceptable. Such an approach underestimates the complexity of street dynamics and overestimates the ability of former leaders to stop violence. Both models divorce “violence from its broader context . . . placing it in an explanatory vacuum of its architect’s own construction” (p. 162).
As an alternative, Aspholm shows that street gangs result from interrelated conditions such as “racist and predatory housing policies and lending practices, global economic restructuring . . . and the vast expansion of the criminal justice apparatus” (p. 170). “Street gangs provide a range of vital material and psychosocial supports . . . cement bonds and strengthen community” (p. 171). Instead of repressing gangs, we need to recognize their histories as a result of sociopolitical dynamics and work with them to build community “from the streets up” (p. 196).