Threat Assessment
Hundreds of gang members will be invited to a summit in Chicago in an attempt to broker peace in the bloodiest neighborhoods — 20 years after “gang summits” here and in other states drew national attention, organizers said Wednesday.
The Rev. Gregory Tatum, a California pastor with Chicago roots, said he hopes the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton will attend the Sept. 27-28 summit. Jackson spoke at a gang summit two decades ago in Chicago, delivering a message to gang members that they were the “new frontier of the civil rights struggle.”
“Next year, we will go to Los Angeles, then Detroit,” Tatum said. “The whole goal this year is black on black crime in Chicago.”
The gang summits in 1993 sought to forge truces among Chicago’s Vice Lords, Black Disciples, Gangster Disciples, Black Souls, Cobras, Stones and Latin Kings — as well as LA’s Crips and Bloods.
It’s unclear whether the 1993 summits had an impact on crime. Chicago’s murder total actually jumped 9 percent to 931 the year after the 1993 summit before steadily falling over the following two decades. Last year, there were 506 killings in the city, 45 percent fewer than in 1993. Still, Chicago’s murder rate dwarfs New York’s and LA’s.
The gang dynamics in Chicago have changed since 1993, too. The Gangster Disciples and other former “super gangs” no longer have a corporate hierarchy that dictates the daily activities of thousands of members — as the gangs did in the early ‘90s. That’s partly because the feds began hammering the leaders of the GDs and other gangs in the 1990s.
The Gangster Disciples, for instance, have fractured into smaller “cliques” that control blocks instead of the entire city. They often battle other GD factions and sometimes hang out with members of rival gangs such as the Black Disciples.
Tio Hardiman, former director of CeaseFire Illinois, said he plans to recruit 300-400 hardcore members of the city’s more than 600 gang factions to attend the summit in September. “You cannot reduce violence without bringing the killers to the table,” he said.
Last month, CeaseFire Illinois decided not to renew Hardiman’s contract after he was arrested on a domestic battery charge that was later dropped. On Wednesday, he incorporated his own non-profit group, Ceasefire Violence Interrupters, which he said will continue to try to prevent retaliatory shootings.>>more from the suntimes<<
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