Teenage mobs and Violence: Chicago Style

by Jamie Freveletti

By now probably half the world has heard about the recent attacks carried out by a group of teenagers against three different people, one a 68 year old. Crime in a big city is not so unusual as to create headlines, but mobs of teenagers heading out of their neighborhood to hit another and doing it in the early evening is news.

Earlier in the year I posted about my concerns involving Chicago's red line subway stop at Chicago/State. You can see the post here. Not surprisingly, the mobs used the red line and exited at this station to get to their victims. Also not surprisingly, the McDonalds there was the scene of an earlier disturbance, where it is alleged over 70 teens converged and the restaurant had to be shut down for several hours.

Two weeks ago I emerged at this corner on my way to the Magnificent Mile and found barrage of police. At least a dozen officers stood in front of the McDonalds. I knew that something must have happened, but this was several months after the McDonalds incident, so now we're talking new. While the show of force was good, it was another thing Chicago is, to my mind, becoming famous for: big talk and little action. And couple of weeks later the attacks happen only two blocks over on Chicago Avenue.

I'm not suggesting that the police can contain all crime, but I am suggesting that Chicago's residents are a pretty jaded group. We have several ex- governor felons, one in jail, one being tried and whole members of the infrastructure being indicted, but still the voters stay home. Our budget is in a shambles, our schools deteriorating and still the voters stay home. Now the one area that may be actually generating the tax base that Chicago needs to continue as a going concern is being attacked by roving gangs of teenagers and journalists wring their hands over whether they should identify the attackers' race (black, and they didn't) and another writes a piece on how the south side is different from the downtown area and crime there isn't reported or acted on enough, as if two wrongs somehow should make a right. And the mother of one of the attackers is quoted in the paper echoing this sentiment by complaining that the bail was too high and if her child had attacked someone on the South Side he would have gotten a lighter bond.

Notice how neither addresses the core problem: crime.

Enough. There is lot of handwringing, but basically a big shrug in the end. Chicagoans need to be outraged. They need to demand better and they need to get their butts to the voting booth and make a change in the best way that they can. And this new Mayor needs to crack down, and by that I mean inside his own City Hall. We've had enough crime start there as the round of indictments show and it spreads outward. As the saying goes: the fish rots at the head.

Let's hope this new fish can get it done. In the meantime, I'm headed to the dojo and then to the track to run. Looks like I'd better keep both skills honed.

The 10 Most Infamous Female Criminals

Fascinating article from the Criminal Justice Degrees Guide on the 10 Most infamous Female Criminals. Check it out.

I only know 5 of them. How about you?

What a glorious mess

By David Heinzmann

It’s not been a quiet week here in Lake Woe… I mean Chicago.

Actually, a couple of weeks. If you like crime and political intrigue, where else could you possibly want to be than Chicago?

I’ll start at the end, at least for me, with the return of Illinois’ most imfamous pawnbroker, Scott Lee Cohen. On Saturday, I broke the story with Rick Pearson that Cohen is going to try to run for governor, amazing as that sounds. After reading the story, which includes the laundry list of almost all (didn’t quite have room in the paper for each one) false statement and embarrassing revelations that collectively imploded Cohen’s candidacy for lieutenant governor earlier this year, a friend of mine joked, “Other than that, it’s a great idea.”

Anytime a reporter can get a prostitute girlfriend, a massage parlor meeting, unpaid child support and an open statewide office in Illinois…. Well, that’s a pretty good story. But the problem is we’ve already been there with Mr. Cohen, so I’m not sure this attempt at running for governor is going to be that much fun. Maybe you don't get to publicly flame out twice in one year, even in this state.

While that sideshow was developing on Friday, the main event in the city was the federal takeover of state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias’ family business, Broadway Bank. Giannoulias is running for U.S. Senate, a campaign that’s bogged down in some seriously thick weeds thanks to the scandals surrounding Broadway. A mountain of red ink and bad loans—some of them to convicted felons who happened to be connected to the Outfit—caught up to the bank on Friday. Oh, look, more prostitutes. (One of the guys the bank gave loans had been convicted of helping run a nationwide call-girl ring.)

It was hard to keep the political corruption stories straight. The day before the feds finally took over Broadway Bank, there was of course the story of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich filing court papers attempting to compel President Obama to testify at Rod’s trial this summer. Details of what Rod was claiming about what Obama might know were supposed to be redacted in the filing. But thanks to the digital age, reporters soon discovered that when you cut and pasted the court document from a PDF to a Word document, all the redacted parts magically reappeared. Rod claims there’s evidence he had a conversation directly with the president-elect about filling Obama’s senate seat. Obama has been on the record maintaining he never talked to Rod about the seat. From the filing, it’s not clear the alleged evidence adds up to what Rod is claiming. Either way, will the leader of the free world have to provide some kind of testimony in a trial that may turn into a real three-ring circus this summer?

Let’s see, what else: three men bound and executed found in a car on the Southwest Side last week; the vicious wilding-robbery attack on two young women in Bucktown last week—both of them bludgeoned with a baseball bat over their frigging purses; lots of bodies washing up on the shore of Lake Michigan.

But the thing that stunned me, a little more than a week ago, was seeing that 17 people had been shot in Chicago in one night, with eight of them dying. In the years I covered the Chicago Police Department for the Tribune, when the murder rate was significantly higher than it has been the last couple years, that would have been a bad weekend. This was all in about 12 hours, on a week night.

When I was covering cops, I became familiar with the phenomenon of weather-change violence. Murders and shootings typically are down in Chicago during the winter because of the harsh cold. Much of the mayhem in this city is casual malevolence wrought by gang-bangers running into each other on the street, arguing about just about anything and then pushing it to the point that they know only one way to settle it—with a gun. So a lot of that kind of crime settles down during the long cold winter. But look out in spring. The first warm weekend—often in March or early April—will bring a little boomlet of shootings as people head back outside to enjoy the weather, only to be reminded of the simmering hostility they felt toward some rival over the long cold winter.

But 17 shootings in one night is not a boomlet. That’s a serious mess and indicates something else is going on. After a few years of lower, stable homicide numbers, murders in 2010 are now on pace to be about 20 percent higher than last year. And when you’re talking about the number of killings being in the 500 range, 20 percent is a serious and troubling increase.

So pay attention, crime fans, it’s going to be an interesting summer.