Gang Violence

In the recent year of two-thousand sixteen, the city of Chicago’s gang homicide rate has been the highest in over fifteen years, and is said to be the deadliest year. Hundreds of innocent people have perished from being caught in crossfire, and no one is trying to stop it. The violence is absolutely out of control and it needs to be stopped. The killings spreading over the city have reached extreme lengths, as Josh Saul expresses in his article by saying, “by the end of November, the city had more than 700 murders for the first time since 1998; that’s more murders than in New York City and Los Angeles combined,” (Saul, 2016, para. 4). Chicago is commonly called “Chi-raq”, and was also mentioned in a song by Kanye West because the murders
Pastor Brooks would invite the gangs into his church and also bring in their elders. Gang elders are those who once participated when they were younger, but later decided that there are better things and got out of it. They are still active with the youth, trying to bring down what they’re beginning to create. They have recently been bringing their problems to the elders in search of answers, which is progress, but there are still unsupervised kids with no one to go to who are using murder as an answer. During these meetings, Pastor Brooks would perform peace talks, and even accomplished to get the two rivals to agree to a truce; the truce, though, was soon broken due to the shooting dispute on the corner (Elgion 2016). As for the other side, the kids committing these crimes are blinded; almost all of them use, sell, and kill over drugs. While they were growing up, they had little to no supervision. They either grew up in the lives that they are living, or they strayed into it. There isn’t an alternative for these kids, due to high unemployment in the area or the unsafe conditions of most of the
Now, anyone in a gang will go shoot anyone over a dispute without thinking twice. Previously, it was said that permission had to be granted from the gang leader, and punishment was to be given to anyone who disobeyed these rules, because they don’t want to attract police attention or start a dispute with rivals. They also went from having leaders to branching off into their own gangs, a group of twelve or so. They see themselves as on the same level. Within these small groups, there is no one to apply rules. They have no remorse for who may be caught in the middle of the disputes. Innocent children are being killed in their front yards from a drive-by gone wrong