How the coronavirus and Chicago’s gun violence are related

Why hasn’t violence in Chicago decreased since we have all been ordered to stay at home? Why are the poorest African American neighborhoods that have been plagued by violence now the hardest hit by the coronavirus?

We think these problems have common roots and common solutions.

Gov. J. B. Pritzker issued a statewide shelter-in-place order five weeks ago in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Since that time, Chicago has had over 20,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 873 virus-related deaths. In that same time period, at least 294 people have been shot and 55 people have been killed in Chicago, placing the city on pace for roughly the same number of shootings and killings as in 2018 and 2019.

The virus and violence have race and poverty in common. African Americans comprise roughly 30% of Chicago’s population but make up nearly half of its poor residents and 80% of its homicide victims.

Similarly, blacks represent at least 40% of Chicago’s coronavirus cases and 55% of its pandemic-related deaths. Part of this overrepresentation can be explained by black Chicagoans’ disproportionate rates of chronic health conditions, employment in “essential” economic sectors, reliance on public transportation and uninsurance, all of which increase one’s chances of infection and severe symptomatology.

But another key link between violence and the virus are large numbers of alienated young people on Chicago’s South and West Sides. Like in many other places, young people are ignoring the stay-at-home and social-distancing orders coming from elected officials, heightening the risk of viral infection and transmission. In Chicago, these young people are often the same ones involved in the city’s rampant gun violence that has persisted throughout the pandemic.

Our research with gang members in Chicago over the last 20 years indicates that today’s gang wars are vendettas driven by young people facing desolate circumstances and few, if any, meaningful prospects for a better life.

In other areas of the world, organized crime groups have stepped in to respond to the pandemic, filling voids left by the retreat of the state. In Mexico and southern Italy, drug cartels and Mafia groups are distributing packages of food to desperate residents. In the favelas of Brazil, drug gangs are imposing a curfew and South African gangs have organized peace treaties and are providing community aid.

Chicago, however, has no such organized gangs, particularly in its black neighborhoods, where the monolithic gangs of the 1980s and 1990s have shattered into small, hyperlocal, horizontally organized cliques. There has been no organized response to the pandemic from these groups, since they lack the organization and resources to form any such response. The old gang days are over, and the new cliques are hanging out as usual.

What is needed on Chicago’s South and West Sides, however, is not more organized gangs; it is a more legitimate and benevolent state. The desperate conditions in these communities that are driving both the gun violence and coronavirus crises have been caused by decades of private sector abandonment and a public sector that has largely abdicated its role in ensuring people’s welfare in favor of policing and incarcerating.

The public response should not be to lock these youth up in death traps like Cook County Jail, but to invest in the South and West Sides to give these youth essential resources, hope, and a reason to live. Mayor Lightfoot’s INVEST South/West proposal would do much to reverse decades of city abandonment in these communities, but without explicit protections for current residents, these efforts are likely to result in rent intensification and displacement for their targeted beneficiaries.

A broad-based public employment initiative is perhaps the most desperately needed intervention in communities where Depression-era levels of unemployment existed even before the pandemic — and are doubtlessly much worse now. The relative disorganization of today’s gangs and their often-marginal involvement in the illicit drug economy greatly enhances the potential success of such an initiative. Importantly, however, such a program wouldn’t be limited to these communities and would likely enjoy widespread support given the broader economic devastation wreaked by the coronavirus pandemic.

While the City of Chicago and State of Illinois should marshal whatever resources possible toward this end, they should also demand of their counterparts in Washington — both current and hopeful — that a robust federal response is needed. The recent $3 trillion stimulus proves that funding is no valid obstacle — that where there is a will, there is a way.

Let’s exert the pressure needed to create that will and tackle not only the current coronavirus pandemic, but the ongoing gun violence crisis as well.

Roberto R. Aspholm is an assistant professor of social work at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the author of the recent book “Views from the Streets: The Transformation of Gangs and Violence on Chicago’s South Side.” John M. Hagedorn is a senior fellow at the Great Cities Institute and author or editor of six books, most recently including “The In$ane Chicago Way: The Daring Plan by Chicago Gangs to Create a Spanish Mafia.”

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