STOPPING GANGS AND DRUGS
By JAMES E. GIERACH, Executive Director, The Drug Corner
Gangs and drugs are coming to town, and the gang
members are not tourists but our own residents. Evidence of the gang phenomenon is found everywhere
graffiti, colors, signs, shootings and, of course, drugs.
Gangs at work in many Chicago neighborhoods is
old news, and frequent gang shootings and drug busts
are the expected norm. In February, Alderman Ed
Smith, representing Chicago's West Side, led his umpteenth march against gangs and drugs, but both continue to thrive there. One marcher joining Ald. Smith
complained that almost every block is controlled by a
gang and that kids going home from school must know
signs for five or six gangs in order to make it home
safely. Less expectedly, the march of gangs and drugs is
reaching into Chicago's nicer neighborhoods and the
suburbs.
In November 1995, two high school students were
shot to death as they sat in a van in the Clearing neighborhood on Chicago's Southwest Side, victims of gang
gunfire. School, community and law-enforcement authorities promptly assembled in a gymnasium to read
brochures and hear speakers that apprised parents how
to recognize the early signs of gang growth and development. As one might expect, the brochures encouraged parents to talk to their kids, spend time with them
and offer them constructive alternatives to gangs. But
the march of gangs and drugs has continued incessantly
despite the brochures and prayers of parents.
In December and January, a pair of double homicides struck the suburban Cook County communities
of Calumet City and DesPlaines. Investigators attribute
the murders to drug activity in one case and retaliation
for the theft of drugs in another. February also brought
gang shootings to Bridgeview with three teens shot, and
an outbreak of gunplay between rival gang members
hit the Humboldt Park neighborhood in Chicago particularly hard.
Nationwide, for the first half of 1995, murders
dropped 12 percent, but the collar counties of DuPage,
Kane and Lake experienced soaring murder rates. The
establishment of drug and gang-turf boundaries certainly contributed to the downward blip in the murder
statistics of major U.S. cities including Chicago, but suburban and rural areas, not yet suffering from the full
impact of the war on drugs, stand out as fertile prohibition turf as gangs advance there to stake out new drug
territory.
Lamentably, gangs and drugs flourish in drug prohibition soil, and municipalities have no meaningful
strategy in place to stop them. Most frustratingly, municipalities are without access to any tool to stop the
gangs and drugs in an environment where black-market, prohibition forces are simply awesome. Municipalities are left to fight a holding action against gangs and
drugs with very limited weapons, such as new community policing strategies, more federally-funded police,
cul-de-sac crime prevention, harsher juvenile laws,
anti-gang ordinances subject to constitutional attack,
calls for school uniforms and the creation of gang task
forces on the state and local level.
From the office of the president to the office of a
local prosecutor, the escalation of anti-gang and anti-
drug symbolism marks the federal contribution to the
fight against gangs and drugs. Jim Burns, U.S. District
Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, claimed
that the mass arrest of Gangster Disciple (GD) leaders,
one of the nation's more successful drug gangs, had "cut
the head off" the monster. Yet, GD drug sales flourish in
May 1996 / Illinois Municipal Review / Page 25
Chicago and, reportedly, in thirty-five states. In January, President Clinton nominated a much-decorated
soldier, General Barry McCaffrey, to replace a much-
decorated chief of police, Lee Brown, as U.S. drug
czar. The appointment is a symbolic escalation of a
domestic drug war. But the economic force of prohibition — black-market prices and unlimited profits —
goes unaddressed by political leaders. Despite slow
progress, signs of hope and drug policy reform are
within reach.
In January of this year, the Chicago Tribune, in a
dramatic change of editorial policy, courageously
called for the creation of a national commission similar
to the Wickersham Commission to study and, possibly,
recommend changes in America's drug-prohibition policies. President Herbert Hoover created the Wickersham Commission preliminary to the end of alcohol
prohibition in the midst of Tommy-gun shootings,
gang-war executions, public corruption and prohibition-invented highballs. In February, America On Line
also took the lead by surveying its subscribers, "Is
America winning the war on illegal drugs?"
In overwhelming response, 91.30% of 17,994 responders said, the U.S. was not winning the war. The
survey results and subscriber comments — like the war
is a "joke," "unwinnable from the outset" — were so
lopsidedly anti-drug war that AOL's survey report said,
"Maybe the AOL survey should have asked whether the
U.S. should legalize drugs since so many members not only feel the present program has failed but favor legalization as the appropriate course of action."
Mounting public sentiment against the drug war
could yet move the drug war issue center stage before
the November elections, forcing candidates to address
prohibition and its consequences. In this writer's estimation, the end of the drug war is inevitable and on the
horizon.
Once the drug war is behind us, municipalities will
again have a fighting chance to promote the public
health, safety and welfare. Schools will be able to disassemble their metal detectors. Students will return to
their books. Gone will be the warped value taught to
kids by draconian, mandatory-minimum prison sentences that it is best to set up and inform on friends to
save oneself from his/her own "drug crimes." Also,
with the end of the drug war, municipal budgets like
federal and state budgets will turn from red to black,
and the march of gangs and drugs will be but a trampling of the past. •
Page 26 / Illinois Municipal Review / May 1996