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RESEARCH ARTICLE

C H I C A G O ’ S G R O U P V I O L E N C E R E D U C T I O N S T R A T E G Y

Changing the Street Dynamic Evaluating Chicago’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy

Andrew V. Papachristos Ya l e U n i v e r s i t y

David S. Kirk O x f o r d U n i v e r s i t y

Research Summary This study uses a quasi-experimental design to evaluate the efficacy of Chicago’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy (VRS), a gun violence reduction program that delivers a focused-deterrence and legitimacy-based message to gang factions through a series of hour-long “call-ins.” The results suggest that those gang factions who attend a VRS call-in experience a 23% reduction in overall shooting behavior and a 32% reduction in gunshot victimization in the year after treatment compared with similar factions.

Policy Implications Gun violence in U.S. cities often is concentrated in small geographic areas and in small networks of group or gang-involved individuals. The results of this study suggest that focused intervention efforts such as VRS can produce significant reductions in gun violence, but especially gunshot victimization, among gangs. Focused programs such as

This project was supported by Grants 11-99431-000-USP and 12-101543-000-USP awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and by a CAREER award (SES-1151449) from the Sociology and Law and Social Science Programs at the National Science Foundation. The authors would like to thank the funders and the VRS and Urban Institute Team, the National Network for Safe Communities, and the Chicago Police Department. We also acknowledge the research support of Tony Cheng and the excellent data support provided by Tim Lavery. The opinions and findings expressed in this article are those of the authors and not the funders, the Chicago Police Department, or the City of Chicago. Direct correspondence to Andrew V. Papachristos, Department of Sociology, Yale University, 493 College Street, Room 201, New Haven, CT 06511 ([email protected]).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12139 C© 2015 American Society of Criminology 525 Criminology & Public Policy � Volume 14 � Issue 3

Research Art ic le Evaluating Chicago’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy

these offer an important alternative to broad-sweeping practices or policies that might otherwise expand the use of the criminal justice system.

In August 2010, local and national press slammed Chicago Police Superintendent Jody Weis for a meeting he held with approximately six gang members at a park field house

on the city’s west side. At this “secret gang summit,” as one newspaper branded it

(Bryne and Ford, 2010), Weis and a group of law enforcement representatives, community

members, and service providers met with gang members in an effort to quell escalating gang violence. One side of the political spectrum denounced Weis for “negotiating with terrorists”

(The Huffington Post, 2010). Police, some said, were mollycoddling gang members when

they should be locking them up. “I can’t believe we’re sitting down and negotiating with

urban terrorists who are killing our kids with guns and drugs on the streets,” remarked one City Councilperson (Robinson, 2010). Meanwhile, gang members and other street activists

hosted their own press conference, charging that police were unconstitutionally targeting

gang members as well as threatening to charge members of a gang with the crimes of their

associates. “The police aren’t playing fair,” leveled one activist, asking “how gang leaders could be asked to take responsibility for their subordinates when city government leaders

don’t take responsibility for alleged misdeeds by their employees” (Allen, 2010; theGrio,

2010).

The meeting in question was not, in fact, some secret backroom parlay between police and gangs; instead, it was the first Violence Reduction Strategy (VRS) “call-in,” Chicago’s

incarnation of an increasingly popular gun violence reduction strategy that gained popularity

in Boston, Massachusetts, and has since been replicated in other cities across the country

(Braga, Hureau, and Papachristos, 2013; Engel, Tillyer, and Corsaro, 2013; Kennedy, 2011). The Chicago call-in brought together a group of individuals known to be members or

associates of street gangs currently involved in violent disputes to meet with representatives

from law enforcement, the community (including the families of victims), and social service providers. The objective of a VRS call-in is simple: deliver a message to gang-involved

individuals about the present gun violence situation and tell them, in no uncertain terms,

to put down the guns. There were no negotiations, deals, or breaks. The hour-long meeting

took place not at a police station or courtroom but at Garfield Park Observatory, one of the city’s most stunning public spaces. Everyone went home at the end of the day. No one was

arrested or detained against their will.

Attendees of the meeting, nearly all of whom tend to be on probation or parole, were

told that police are aware of the ongoing disputes and of their group’s current role in such violence. A focused deterrence message is conveyed to attendees that stresses that the next

shooting by their group will elicit the full attention of the criminal justice system to use

every available legal means to go after the entire group, including arresting members, pulling

warrants, revoking parole/probation, and increasing overall pressure on the group (Braga,

526 Criminology & Public Policy

Papachristos and Kirk

Kennedy, Waring, and Piehl, 2001). Representatives from the community are also present,

who express their desire to help the attendees and stress their love for them. “You’re part of this community. Our community. Our families. And, we love you,” one mother of a murder

victim told the room, showing pictures of her fallen son while fighting back tears. Service

providers in the room urge attendees to take advantage of the offer for help—immediately.

In contrast to media reports, the VRS “call-ins” were not entirely new in Chicago. Meet- ings with a somewhat different focus and target population have been ongoing in Chicago

since 2002 as part of Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN). In fact, a quasi-experimental

evaluation of PSN found that the initiative yielded double-digit reductions in homicide

in targeted geographic areas (Papachristos, Meares, and Fagan, 2007). The novelty of the VRS call-in was its specific focus on groups and its use of new analytic tools to guide the

intervention. Specifically, VRS sought to use new data-driven methods—including social

network analysis—that fostered a more precise focus of intervention efforts on those groups

actively involved in shootings. The hope of VRS was that these new analytic tools coupled with a novel intervention

would go far in reducing gun violence in the Windy City. Proponents of the VRS approach

argued that the dynamic of gun violence in most American cities was driven by interpersonal and intergroup disputes that were settled through gunplay; although the specific contexts

of such disputes vary by locale, the central street dynamics were the same (Kennedy, 2011).

If the street dynamic changes, then gun violence will decrease. Opponents of this approach

argued that Chicago is too unique: what worked in Boston, Massachusetts; High Point, North Carolina; or Cincinnati, Ohio will not work in Al Capone’s city. Chicago gangs

have been around nearly a half-century; they are too entrenched in the city, too involved in

large-scale drug dealing, and simply too violent and unpredictable to be amenable to such

an intervention. Chicago’s slight rise in homicide in 2012 seemed to illustrate this point. This study evaluates the efficacy of Chicago VRS at reducing gun violence by using

a quasi-experiment to determine whether those gangs attending a call-in experienced the

hypothesized reduction in shooting behavior. Put another way, did VRS change the street

dynamics among gangs in Chicago? VRS call-ins have been in continuous operation since the initial August 2010 meeting. Through 2013, 18 call-ins reached 149 gang factions and

438 individual gang members. To analyze changes in both victimization and offending, we

use a propensity score matching procedure to match gang factions that attended a call-in

to up to three otherwise similar gang factions that did not attend a call-in. Our analyses find that gang factions participating in VRS were significantly less likely to be involved in

shootings in the 12 months after call-in attendance than otherwise similar factions that did

not participate in VRS.

Homicide, Gangs, and Guns in Chicago Regardless of its actual violent crime rate, the media, political pundits, popular culture, and

at times even academics frequently portray Chicago as one of the country’s most violent

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Research Art ic le Evaluating Chicago’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy

cities. Statistically, crime trends in Chicago mirror the overall national crime decline of the

past two decades. In fact, rates of violent crime and homicide in present-day Chicago are currently at the lowest recorded levels in nearly five decades (Papachristos, 2013). To be

sure, Chicago tallies a greater number of total murders than other cities of comparable size

(e.g., Los Angeles, California, and Houston, Texas) and more than New York, which has a

population three times its size. The city’s overall rates of both violent crime and homicide surpass national averages. But when controlling for population, Chicago’s homicide rate

does not breech the top 10 most violent cities in the United States. In 2012, the year many

branded Chicago the country’s “murder capital,” Chicago’s violent crime rate ranked 19th

among law enforcement agencies serving jurisdictions of 250,000 or more—rates similar to those of Houston or Minneapolis, Minnesota, and far lower than Detroit, Michigan;

Oakland, California; or St. Louis, Missouri (see Table A1).

Such declining crime rates and city-level comparisons, however, mask more severe

disparities in crime and violence across Chicago communities. In Chicago, as in most other cities across the country, crime rates vary tremendously by neighborhoods (for a review, see

Peterson and Krivo, 2010). Also like most cities, homicide and violent crime in Chicago

concentrate in a small number of neighborhoods and geographic microplaces (Kirk and Papachristos, 2011; Morenoff, Sampson, and Raudenbush, 2001; Sampson, 2012). For

instance, Garfield Park, on the city’s west side, had a 2012 homicide rate of 55 per 100,000,

more than three times higher than the city average (approximately 16 per 100,000) and more

than 10 times higher than the national average (approximately 5 per 100,000). Meanwhile, Jefferson Park, on the city’s northwest side, had a homicide rate of effectively zero. Research

since the work of the early Chicago School sociologists documents the remarkable stability of

the high crime parts of the city over long periods of time (for a review, see Sampson, 2012).

Although nearly all of the high-crime communities also experienced significant declines in crime over recent years, the rates in some high-crime communities—like Garfield Park—

remain stubbornly high, generating what some have called a “crime gap” between the safest

and most dangerous neighborhoods of the city (Papachristos, 2014).

Homicide and violent crime in Chicago concentrate not just spatially but also socially. Criminological research since Wolfgang’s (1958) classic study of offenders in Philadelphia

has revealed that a large portion of crime is committed by a small number of offenders—a

finding that seems to be as true today as it was nearly five decades ago and applies to

cities across the country. Recent research employing social network analysis has extended this logic by examining the exact contours of co-offending networks and the placement of

shooting victims within them. A study of one high-crime Boston community, for instance,

found that 85% of all fatal and nonfatal gunshot injuries occurred in a single network of

individuals who had been arrested that comprised less than 5% of the community’s total population (Papachristos, Braga, and Hureau, 2012). Likewise, Papachristos, Wildeman,

and Roberto (2015) found that 70% of all nonfatal shootings in the entire city of Chicago

occurred in a co-offending network composed of less than 6% of the city’s population.

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Papachristos and Kirk

F I G U R E 1

Number of Total Homicides, Homicides Involving a GangMember, and Homicides Not Involving a GangMember in Chicago, 1994 to 2013

20 0

40 0

60 0

80 0

10 00

N um

be r o

f H om

ic id

es

1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012

Total Non-Gang Gang Member Involved

Most strikingly, this line of research found that simply being in such networks exponentially

increases the likelihood that one becomes a victim of a gunshot injury; in the Chicago study, for instance, being in a network with another gunshot victim increases the probability of

being a victim a staggering 900% (Papachristos et al., 2015).

Although the exact estimates vary, there is mounting consensus that a large portion of

gun violence and homicide in Chicago is driven by street gangs, either by gang-motivated behavior (such as turf disputes) or the involvement of gang members in group and non–

group-related interpersonal disputes (Block and Block, 1995; Papachristos and Kirk, 2006).

Figure 1, for instance, displays homicides in Chicago since 1994 disaggregated by whether it

was “gang member involved,” meaning that a member of gang was involved as either a victim or an offender. As just described, total homicides in Chicago have declined steadily since

1994 with a few smaller peaks in 2002, 2008, and most recently in 2012. Disaggregating

by whether the homicide involved at least one gang member shows that non–gang-involved

homicides more closely followed the citywide trend, whereas gang-involved homicides trended upward in 2000 and have remained relatively stable. So, for instance, since the spike

in 2002, the yearly number of gang homicides has only declined by 16%, whereas non-

gang homicides have declined by nearly 36%. This decrease has a significant impact on the

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Research Art ic le Evaluating Chicago’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy

percentage of total homicides that currently involve a gang member—today, compared with

the 1990s, gang-involved homicides constitute a greater percentage of the total homicides in Chicago, roughly 50% to 60%. As such, changes in gang homicide can generate spikes

in the overall homicide rate, as observed most recently in 2012. Hence, to stem the tide of

violence in Chicago, interventions need to be directed toward altering the dynamics leading

to group violence. Part of Chicago’s image as one of the most violent cities in the nation stems precisely

from the reputation of its gangs. Gangs in Chicago have been consistently reported as

being more organized and more heavily involved in organized levels of drug dealing than

gangs in most other cities (Fagan, 1989; Howell, 2012; Spergel, 1995). Many modern- day Chicago gangs—like the Vice Lords, the Black P. Stone Nation, the Latin Kings, and

the Gangster Disciples—trace their origins to the late 1950s and have been involved in

a variety of prosocial, political, and criminal activities across the decades (Dawley, 1973;

Hagedorn, 2008; Moore and Williams, 2011). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many of these gangs entered the drug game by orchestrating sophisticated drug-dealing enterprises

complete with complex distribution practices, rules and regulations, and violent methods

of dispute resolution (Levitt and Venkatesh, 2000; Venkatesh and Levitt, 2000). In some ways, Chicago gangs represent the “worst” of what gangs could become and not, in fact,

what the typical American street gang looks like.

However, in recent years, Chicago has witnessed important changes in the nature of

its gangs and gang-involved violence. One trend noted by police officials is the splintering of once large gang entities into smaller “factions” or geographically bounded crews. During

the height of the crack cocaine era, many Chicago gangs operated under a “corporate” style

of operation or, at least, with more formal hierarchical structures—leaders, subgroups, line

workers, and so on (Venkatesh and Levitt, 2000). Power was concentrated in the hands of a small number of older gang members—some of whom were incarcerated during their

reigns—whereas often younger members assumed the risky “on the street” drug-dealing

and violence-related activities. These hierarchical structures seem to have receded during

the past decade; many of the larger groups have splintered into smaller factions that operate, for the most part, independently. For example, in the 1990s, the Gangster Disciples prided

themselves on their “Board of Directors” and system of “Governors” and “street taxes” that

coordinated thousands of members across the city. Today, however, the Gangster Disciples

name is more of a “brand” than a functioning organizational structure. Factions still use the Disciple moniker, to be sure. But the main identity has become the local or small

group—e.g., The Guttaville Disciples, the 80s Babies Disciples, and so on.1

1. The causes of this gang splintering seem to be diverse and include (a) long-term effects of gang prosecutions and enforcement actions, (b) changes in local and global drug markets, (c) internal conflicts among gang leadership, and (d) the general fading of large gang alliances over time. In many

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Papachristos and Kirk

F I G U R E 2

Intergang versus Intragang Homicides in Chicago, 1994 to 2010

1995 2000 2005 2010

0. 0

0. 2

0. 4

0. 6

0. 8

1. 0

Year

Pr op

or tio

n of

G an

g R

el at

ed inter-gang intra-gang

Note. A homicide was defined “inter-gang” when the victim and the offender were from

distinct (nonaffiliated) gang groups or factions and “intra-gang” when the victim and the offender were from either (a) the same gang or faction or (b) affiliated gangs or factions.

This splintering of gangs has had a profound effect on the dynamics driving violence on the street. Today, compared with 20 years ago, gang violence is more likely to occur

within gangs or gang divisions (or between gangs with some affiliation) than it is between

distinct gangs. Figure 2 plots inter-gang versus intra-gang homicides in Chicago from 1994

to 2010. In this figure, “intra-gang” refers to any homicide in which the victim and the offender belonged to the same gang faction or related gang factions (gang factions that share

some common ancestry of past alliance—i.e., members of the same gang “nation” such as

the Gangster Disciples). “Inter-gang” homicide refers to a homicide in which the victim and the offender belonged to gang factions with no shared alliance or ancestry. This figure

ways, gang factions in Chicago today are beginning to resemble gangs in other cities in that they are increasingly becoming smaller in size and the locus of control.

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Research Art ic le Evaluating Chicago’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy

shows that since the mid-1990s, the number of inter-gang homicides has declined steadily

as the number of intra-gang homicides has increased. The two almost converge circa 2004 and have meandered up and down since.

Recent fluctuations notwithstanding, Figure 2 has two important implications for

understanding gangs, gang violence, and the street dynamic among gangs. First, the unit

of analysis of what constitutes a meaningful point of intervention has changed. Since the 1960s, police in Chicago often have considered “the gang” the largest meaningful unit.

Gang nations—like the Gangster Disciples—represent, essentially, federations of gangs.

Gang members and their groups were lumped into nation units: A member of the Disciples

was considered by police (and, importantly, police data systems) to be a Disciple. But the splintering of gangs has shifted the focus to smaller, often neighborhood-bounded factions

that themselves have unique identities, names, and behaviors. Thus, it matters more whether

a member is of the Guttavilla Disciples or the 80s Babies Disciples, as the nation as a whole

seems no longer to direct organizational behavior in the same way. Second, understanding faction-level behavior means rethinking group dynamics in

Chicago. For decades, gang violence in Chicago has been characterized along first categorical

gang nation distinctions: the Disciples versus the Stones, the Latin Kings versus The Latin Saints, and so on. Enforcement and prevention efforts directed resources accordingly,

focusing on large organizational behaviors. In contrast, faction-level disputes more closely

resemble “family feuds” that tend to be more personal and localized. History still matters,

to be sure, but what is happening on the street today often provides the spark for feuds and violence. If such types of faction-level disputes are increasingly drivers of gang homicides in

Chicago, as Figure 2 suggests, then understanding the proximal motivators for gang disputes

means rethinking how we conceive of gang disputes. We must move away from 1980s and

1990s notions of gang disputes in Chicago being motivated purely around the crack trade and age-old vendettas and toward an understanding of the microdynamics of small group

conflicts.

Taken together, these trends broadly summarize the current homicide and gun violence

problem in Chicago. Despite impressive declines in homicide and violent crime since the 1990s, crime and violence (a) concentrate in a small number of communities and in

small social networks, (b) involve a large number of gangs and gang members, and (c) are

increasingly driven by disputes among smaller gang groups and factions as opposed to large

battling gang nations. Therefore, changing the street dynamics driving gun violence requires engaging these issues in programmatic design and implementation.

Program Intent (and Its Effectiveness) VRS, like many violence prevention and policing efforts, prides itself on being “data driven.” This buzzword translates into many different forms, often with an eye toward appeasing

funding agencies that understand this phrase to mean that practitioners will use data in

the planning, implementation, and evaluation of their programs. A successful program is

532 Criminology & Public Policy

Papachristos and Kirk

evidenced by a decline in the targeted crime type or of crime rates in a specified location. The

extent to which any specific program is data driven derives, in part, from how much data are available, whether data are analyzed thoroughly or cursorily, and whether participants

engage with said data and analytics.

For Chicago VRS, the idea of being “data driven” meant using all available data to

identify specific individuals and groups who are actively involved in gun-related disputes and violence in as close to “real time” as possible. VRS did not seek to analyze a series of

blanket risk factors for its intervention; it has long been well established that young minority

males in specific parts of the city and belonging to street gangs were the most likely victims

and perpetrators of violence (Block and Block, 1995; Morenoff et al., 2001; Papachristos and Kirk, 2006). From VRS’s perspective, going to the city’s disadvantaged and high-crime

communities to look for street gangs was not a focused strategy. Rather, VRS sought to

use the available data to determine which individuals and which groups were involved in

current and ongoing shootings to provide precise and strategic points of interventions. Thus, knowing that “gangs in Englewood” were fighting was insufficient. VRS wanted

to know whether a dispute between the Disciples on 67th Street and a “renegade” set of

Disciples from 71st Street was responsible for the violence. The entire premise of changing the street dynamics behind gun violence in Chicago is first to use data to determine the

actors and disputes of said violence and then to bring the VRS message directly to those

involved groups.

This idea of bringing the program and its message directly to those involved in gun violence is based on the principle of focused deterrence (for a review, see Braga and Weisburd,

2012). Unlike general deterrence, which aims to dissuade the general population from

engaging in particular criminal behaviors by increasing the severity, certainty, and swiftness

of punishments associated with said crime, focused deterrence posits that crime reduction is best achieved by concentrating deterrence efforts on those groups or individuals involved

directly in the targeted type of crime. Rather than enact broad-sweeping policies that

indiscriminately apply across populations and places, focused deterrence efforts honor

traditional deterrence principles while leveraging existing policies and practices in innovative ways directly toward small offending populations. The Chicago VRS program based its

deterrence principles on those pioneered in the Boston Operation Ceasefire efforts of the

1990s, which was designed to reach out directly to gangs involved in ongoing shootings,

saying that gun violence would no longer be tolerated, and then following through on such actions by “pulling every lever” legally available when gun violence occurred (Braga et al.,

2001; Kennedy, 2011).

Chicago (Papachristos et al., 2007); Los Angeles (Tita, Riley, and Greenwood, 2003);

Indianapolis, Indiana (Corsaro and McGarrell, 2009; McGarrell and Chermak, 2003); High Point (Corsaro, Hunt, Hipple, and McGarrell, 2012); and other cities (Braga, McDevitt,

and Pierce, 2006; Engel et al., 2013) that have replicated some version of the original

Boston Ceasefire approach typically deliver a deterrence message to individuals or groups </

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