Relatively Small Social Networks Responsible for Large Portion of Shootings in Chicago, New York City, According to Study, Police

A pair of stories touch on
similar issues of gun violence in New York City and Chicago. First,
a claim from the New York Police Department (NYPD) about who is
responsible for approximately 40 percent of shootings in the Big
Apple,
via the AP:

There are more than 300 of them in New York — violent
crews of dozens of 12- to 20-year-olds with names such as Very
Crispy Gangsters, True Money Gang and Cash Bama Bullies.

Police say these groups, clustered around a particular block or
housing project, are responsible for about 40 percent of the city’s
shootings, with most of that violence stemming from the smallest of
disses on the street, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

“It’s like belonging to an evil fraternity,” said Inspector Kevin
Catalina, commander of the New York Police Department’s gang
division. “A lot of it is driven by nothing: A dispute over a girl
or a wrong look or a perceived slight.”

The trend of smaller, younger crews has also been seen in Chicago
and Northeast cities over the last few years as police have cracked
down on bigger, more traditional gangs, experts said. While the
Bloods, Crips and Latin Kings still exist, operating such
money-making schemes as drug dealing, their members are usually
older and understand the timeworn mantra of organized crime:
violence is bad for business.

For years police in New York City and other cities in the Northeast
and around the country have specifically targeted organized, or
“traditional,” gangs like the Bloods and Crips. It shouldn’t be
surprising that those efforts have led to the replacement of these
gangs by even more violent successors. Law enforcement also
understands violence is bad for business. It’s axiomatic for the
drug war, where drug use is combatted, literally, by introducing
violence into the otherwise non-violent acts of buying, selling,
and using certain subsatnces.

Meanwhile, a
research study out of Yale University follows up on previous
research about the small homicidal social networks in Chicago by
extending it to non-fatal shootings.
Chicago Magazine explains:

Papachristos constructs a social network—not a virtual
one in the Facebook sense, but a real one of social connections
between people—by looking at arrestees who have been arrested
together. That turns out to be a lot of people in raw numbers,
almost 170,000 people with a “co-offending tie” to one another,
with an average age of 25.7 years, 78.6 percent male and 69.5
percent black. It’s also a large percentage of all the individuals
arrested: 40 percent of all the individuals arrested during that
period.

Within the entire group, the largest component of that whole
co-offender group has 107,740 people.

Within the timeframe—from 2006 to 2010—70 percent of all shootings
in Chicago, or about 7,500 out of over 10,000, are contained within
all the co-offending networks. And 89 percent
of those shootings are within the largest
component.

The study’s results would suggest that assaulting the gun rights
of the broader communities in Chicago, New York City, or the rest
of the country is a nonsensical non-solution to gun violence. And
by the NYPD’s own assertions, neither is “stop and frisk” a
solution. The numbers of “crews” the NYPD estimates works out to
between 7,000 and 14,000 youths (depending on how many dozen are in
any crew) responsible for 40 percent of shootings. It’s
a tiny subset not only of the total population of New York City but
of any demographic group the NYPD might decide to
profile.

Neither of those rights-violating approaches, anti-gun
legislation or stop and frisk, make sense to curb violence, but
they are easier than the kind of police work (like walking beats)
or community work (like wider access to gun rights) that could
actually put a damp on gun violence.