Violence and drugs: Communities across the country look for answers

The past week was without chilling stories of innocent victims such as Adam Sherman, a 23-year-old honorably discharged from the U.S. Army in August whose bitter homecoming included a paralyzing bullet to the neck at the hands of gang members.

Nor did the community have to learn about another Leo Griffin Jr., a West Aurora High School sophomore shot to death at random in April.

Their stories and years of others like them have led to outrage, shock and finger pointing throughout Aurora. They've led, too, to this week's importance, this week's poignancy, and maybe this week's lull in the local cycle of violence. Except for a foot chase that ended with police shooting a man in the shoulder — after the man had pointed a gun at them — the week was relatively calm.

This week, for a change, the positive outweighed the negative. Seven local street gang members or associates were arrested Wednesday on cocaine trafficking charges in raids that involved more than 100 federal agents and local police. On Tuesday, East Aurora High School students marched through their neighborhood with a message of peace. Throughout the week, speakers talked to students about the dangers of drugs and violence, and students talked amongst themselves.

This week, Aurora took on its problems, with talk and action.

Aurora doesn't exist in a vacuum, however. This city's problems are the nation's problems. The recent resurgence in gang violence — a national epidemic — shows that Aurora's problems are unique only to a point.

Cycle of violence

Modern gang violence in the United States came to a statistical head in 1993, when 1,362 people lost their lives in gang-related violence. The two following years, 1994 and 1995, offered little in the way of relief, as 1,340 and 1,338 people were killed nationwide.

In the mid 1990s, as the nation responded to the wave of violence and the media furor brought about by the rising numbers, violence started to slow.

In 1999, the most recent year with national statistics available, there were 841 gang-related fatalities. Despite the near disappearance of the much touted gang epidemic from the nation's headlines, the 1999 figure still towers above the 428 people who died in gang violence in 1988, or the 129 who lost their lives in 1976.

Aurora's trend mirrors the nation's — or it did until this year's upswing here, which has already seen a 100 percent increase in gang homicides from last year. In 1994 there were 12 gang homicides, 1995 saw 13, 1996 had 16 and there were 13 in 1997. Like the rest of the country, Aurora saw a recent low of four gang-related homicides in 1999.

But those numbers, as numbers often do, tell only part of the story. Not only does no consensus exist on the current trend in gang violence, there's no agreement on what a gang crime is or even who is a gang member, which can make it difficult to tell how successful anti-gang efforts are.

"It's really difficult to know (the trend) because the data is not very good," Richard McCorkle, author of Panic: The Social Construction of the Street Gang Problem, said.

"What little data there is suggests a slight decrease. There is no accepted definition of a gang or a gang member. Across law enforcement jurisdictions, the definition changes."

Gangs and crime

Despite the lack of clear statistics on the overall trend of gang violence, McCorkle uncovered another trend: Public perception polls consistently show people believe gangs are responsible for between 40 and 60 percent of violent crimes and drug activity.

His own research into a large southwestern city, however, showed that known gang members accounted for only about 10 percent of all violent crimes. He also pointed to a study of Los Angeles drug traffic linking about 90 percent of trafficking to "private entrepreneurs" and not gangs.

His findings were not an exception, McCorkle said, and other studies have shown people blame more crime on gangs than they are actually responsible for.

If McCorkle's findings are not an exception to the rule, then the situation in Aurora is. In each of the past 10 years, between 44 and 80 percent of homicides have been gang related.

"Clearly there's a large percentage of people crimes that you can attribute to gangs and gang activities," Aurora Police Chief William Lawler said. "Typically we know more about motives of homicides and shootings. The majority of shootings and homicides are gang-related activity. A high percentage of (drug) activity is linked to gangs and gang activity."

Nationally, the percentage of homicides involving gangs hovered around 5 percent for much of the 1990s. Even if there are cities where the hype over gangs outweighs the actual problem, here the gang problem is as virulent as it seems. In the national context, that puts Aurora in a unique position — to a point.

"My own analysis of gang homicides it that the last few years have been very strange," David Curry, a professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, said. Curry is author of Confronting Gangs: Crime and Community.

"In some cities gang homicides have increased and in some cities they have decreased."

Curry said the reasons for the increases after a steady decline in gang violence through the mid 1990s are "totally mystifying to me." He points to Chicago and Los Angeles as two areas where gang violence has been on the rise. Rockford and Gary, Ind., two nearby cities that share striking similarities with Aurora, have also seen gang crimes escalate.

Economy and crime

The resurgence of violence here cannot ultimately be linked to one factor, but instead results from multiple trends, a surprising number of which are national.

The recent economic downturn certainly plays a part. During the boom economy of the late 1990s, "all kinds of crime was going down," Curry said.

"The relationship between economics and crime is a very solid one," he said.

Former Pulaski County Coroner Steve Nawojczyk, who oversaw Little Rock, Ark., and is a nationally known gang expert, agrees that, "when you have a downturn in the economy, crime goes up" and that drugs are more prevalent in a poor economy.

His main concern is that the bad economy will cause community programs to lose funding and further perpetuate the gang problem. He believes a gang's ability to recruit members is mainly due to poverty, calling those most eligible for gang life members of the "5H Club," teen-agers who are hungry, hopeless, homeless, hugless and helpless.

McCorkle takes the economic influence on gang-related crimes a step further.

"The problem is not so much gangs," he said, but instead groups of men "who don't have money and don't have hope."

Incidents of gang violence are rarely isolated, and, with numerous gangs in close proximity on Aurora's streets, gangs here really are part of the problem.

"Everything on the street is driven by retaliation, respect and reputation," said Nawojczyk, who runs the Web site gangwar.com.

When a homicide results from a conflict between gangs, most often fights over turf or drug trafficking, retaliation is often inevitable. More killings lead to more killings as gangs try the impossible, evening the score and winning a gang war.

That need for retaliation can live on, even through years in prison. As more people arrested in the first wave of anti-gang efforts are released, old street tensions are renewed and new tensions aggravated.

In Rockford, one of the causes of their recent rise in violence, which has claimed 19 lives this year, is due to "a lot of people that had gone to the penitentiary and are now back out on the street," Deputy Chief Dominic Iasparro said.

"A lot of gang members and drug leaders that were locked up six, seven, eight, nine years ago are getting out now," Nawojczyk said. "There's more violence because people are coming back and trying to reassert control."

Shaking up the turf

Having gang members back on the street isn't the only change that can spur warfare. Almost anything that shakes up the normal functioning of a gang can lead to increased violence.

Case in point: the FBI-led drug bust that culminated on July 24 — which netted 110 pounds of cocaine, $620,000 cash, dozens of weapons and charges of drug trafficking against 20 gang members — left local gangs scrambling for control of the drugs coming into Aurora from Mexico on their way to Chicago. When operating smoothly, this pipeline and the continued popularity of crack cocaine is still a major source of gang violence.

"What happens when you do a sting, or when they target gang leadership, is that there's a vacuum created on the streets," Nawojczyk said. "You have the lieutenants who are always wanting to be the colonel."

A shake-up in Gary caused by the arrests and convictions of two warring gang leaders at about the same time last year led to an increase in the murder rate there, which had reached a record low in 2000, according to FBI Supervisory Special Agent Mark Becker.

Some reasons for increased violence seem too obvious. Nawojczyk said the average age of a burglar is 16 and a murderer is 20, and, simply, there are more 16-year-olds and 20-year-olds alive now.

If the ups and downs in homicide rates are part of a cycle, what is being done to stop the inevitable return of higher crime rates? The answers are out there. Some of them are right here in Aurora, some in Gary, Rockford, Chicago and Boston.

The battle against gang violence has attracted creative, hard-working, determined people, and those people have come up with as many ways to fight gangs as there are gangs themselves.Coming next Sunday: How Aurora is working to combat gang violence; and the winning and losing strategies other communities have used to try to solve their own problems with gang violence. Contact Garrett Ordower at (630) 844-5829 or gordower@scn1.com.