Windy City blown apart
25 October 2009 By Niall StanageThe video clip - the part that matters, at least - lasts barely two minutes. Yet it has reverberated across Chicago, the city in which it was filmed, and across America. It begins behind the windscreen of a car that is slowing to a stop. There is a melee in the road ahead. School-age young men, on the awkward cusp between youth and adulthood, are shouting and running. Car horns are sounding. In the background, a plain brick building looms.
The man behind the lens gets out of the car and walks across the road. The video was reportedly shot from a mobile phone; it is jerky and figures come in and out of the frame. We see a young man in a white shirt and blue jeans shape up into a boxer’s stance and throw quick, strong punches toward the face of an adversary. On the ground are two big, heavy planks. They are stays from railway tracks, the police will later say.
Approximately 30 seconds into the video, a slight youth dressed all in black picks up one of the stays and swings it. His target is half way hidden behind a car, and it is impossible to tell whether he connects.
Then another young man, who is slightly bigger but looks around the same age -17 or 18,maybe - takes the plank from him. The bigger youth, dressed in a red jacket and khaki trousers, looks a bit irritated by the ineffectiveness of his smaller comrade’s manoeuvres. As if to show him how it’s done, he lifts up the plank.
His left hand is at the end closest to him; his right stretches perhaps a quarter of the way down for leverage. For a split-second he looks, incongruously, like a child trying to heave an oversize baseball bat into the air.
The echo of innocence is faint and fleeting.
He takes a couple of quick, short steps and slams the wood into the head of yet another young man. He makes clean contact. As usual when a big blow lands, it does not make the kind of clean crack that punctuates fights in films, but a heavier, more nauseating thump.
The victim teeters and falls to his right. He gets up fast, but is dazed. Someone in red-trimmed shorts throws a vicious right hand punch, their whole body swivelling around behind it. The boy falls again .This time, the first thing to make contact with the concrete pavement is his forehead. Another thump.
There is more shouting, more mayhem, some kicks. In the middle of the road, someone else is holding another of the planks, threatening a shirtless enemy with it. The cameraman swings back to the scene of the earlier exchanges but, in the version of the video that exists now, law enforcement officials have blurred the faces of several people, and exactly what is happening is difficult to discern.
The sounds are clear, though: young, female voices, urgent and scared. It seems to be almost all young women who come to the aid of a prone figure - presumably the same boy who wash it with the plank and punched moments before. They begin to drag him towards the brick building, trying to get him to safety. One of them is so panicked, she begins screaming at the injured boy. ‘‘Get up! Derrion, get up!" she shouts.
Derrion never did get up. His full name was Derrion Albert. Three hours after getting caught in the brawl in the street, he was declared dead. He was 16 years old.
Derrion had been raised mostly by his grandfather, Joe Walker. ‘‘We were crazy about him," Walker told the local newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times. ‘‘He was the type of grandson everybody wished for."
The fatal fight happened on September 24, a Thursday. The following Monday, four youths were charged with Albert’s murder. They are awaiting trial. The eldest is 19 years old, the youngest,16.
Depressingly, the one thing that really made Albert’s case unusual was that his fatal beating was captured on video. ‘‘The only reason you are calling me is that someone had a cellphone camera," Philip Jackson tells me when I phone him. Jackson, the founder of the Black Star Project, which aims to nurture black and Hispanic children in Chicago and, in doing so, close the racial educational-achievement gap, does not say this angrily. He says it as a fact - which it is.
Albert’s killing put youth violence in Chicago under the national and international spotlight. In fact, he was the third pupil in the Chicago public school system to be murdered in the few weeks since the academic year began. Since the beginning of the 2007 school year, an astonishing 67 pupils have met violent deaths.
According to Jackson, those figures only count young people who are still officially in the school system, not drop-outs. His tally of all the fatalities aged 18 or under this year alone is 53.The Chicago Police Department noted that, by the end of August, 20 people between the ages of ten and 16 had been killed this year; nine victims were aged nine or younger.
Chicago is not even that unusual. Its overall murder rate is significantly lower than many other major cities. And, in the US as a whole last year,1,494 people under the age of 18 were killed. At first, Albert’s death struck a resonant chord.
Over 1,000 mourners came to his funeral, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and the controversial head of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, among them. Shortly afterwards, US president Barack Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, came to Chicago for a high profile meeting with the mayor, Richard M Daley, and school officials. Holder said that the video of Albert’s death was, ‘‘for me, a call to action, to address a challenge that affects the whole nation’’.
But has that call been answered? Just a few weeks on, Dexter Voisin, a professor at the University of Chicago who has written widely about the experiences of adolescents in America’s cities, lamented the media’s short attention span - and the lack of action from the city or the local community.
‘‘Where is it now?" he asked rhetorically, referring to the ranking of Albert’s death among media priorities. ‘‘It’s fallen off the radar screen."
If Albert’s death does end up being so fast forgotten, it will be a loss, not just to his family or to the city of Chicago. His fate holds lessons that are applicable beyond the city limits and beyond America’s borders: lessons about the grim consequences of allowing young men’s sense of disengagement and rage to grow unchecked; and a host of sometimes inspiring suggestions as to how such a miserable scenario can be avoided.
Glamour and grit
Any sustained focus on violence and bloodshed sits uneasily with Chicago’s image. This month began with city cheerleaders, including Mayor Daley, insisting that the so-called ‘Windy City’ was in with a strong chance of being chosen to host the 2016 Olympics.
They were wrong, as it turned out, but Chicago is still enjoying a flush of fashion ability, rooted in the fact that it is the adopted hometown of President Obama.
It is a big mistake to look at Obama’s Chicago and see the glamour but not the grit. The future president first moved to the city as a community organiser. He was paid $10,000 per year to help empower the residents of Altgeld Gardens, a massive government housing project on the far southside of the city which had long been bedevilled by chronic social problems. This Chicago incubates the kind of violence that claimed the life of Albert.
The breadth of the problems is startling, even setting violence aside: according to officials within the Chicago public school system, of the 400,000 children and youths they serve, around 84 per cent - over 330,000 - come from impoverished homes.
Many activists argue that crime rates will only be brought down when the economic disenfranchisement that they believe underpins criminality is also dealt with.
‘‘The violence that exists among young people today is not ideological or philosophicalbased violence," Philip Jackson says. ‘‘It is violence based on sociology and economy; based around the fact that, right now, there is a recession and some of the people who have been hit hardest are young, black men."
Jackson sees a deeper malaise than just economic difficulties, however. He points to the extremely low rate - around 37 per cent - of high school graduation among black men. ‘‘They don’t have employment options.
They are stuck - and they know it," he says. ‘‘The only place they are able to express themselves is in the streets."
Even the most liberal observer might shrink from the suggestion that street violence is a form of self-expression. But this is not quite what Jackson means. His argument is that, if nothing exists to draw marginalised young men into mainstream society, they will be left in a place where only the rules of the street apply - and those rules require, among other things, a forceful and often violent reaction to any real or imagined slight.
Jackson rolls through a rapid-fire list of tactics which he believes are proven not to work before going on to those which, he insists, are. Among those he places in the wrong-headed category are a focus on more police personnel; harsher jail sentences for young offenders; direct interventions by community ‘peacekeeping’ groups; and, perhaps more surprisingly, community rallies and vigils.
As for those thing that he argues do work, the list includes investment in programmes aimed at strengthening families; intense work with young people on how to handle conflict without resorting to violence; and the provision of mentors to at-risk children and youths.
Many of these proposals are widely accepted; others, including sentencing policy and the importance or otherwise of police numbers, tend to be the subject of heated debates which often break down along ideological lines.
But Jackson becomes even more animated when he talks about the need to ‘‘eliminate the social and economic causes of violence’’. He refers with pride to having met Obama, and adds that the president is ‘‘a nice man’’. But he contends that not enough is being done from Washington to address the inequities that he believes lie at the root of the problem.
Referring to the $787 billion stimulus plan that was passed in mid-February, shortly after Obama came to office, he says: ‘‘I haven’t seen one penny of the stimulus money hit the streets to impact the young people you and I are talking about."
Dexter Voisin, the University of Chicago professor, talks in a less overtly emotional way than Jackson, but he too shares a level of frustration with the political process.
‘‘When you have a high-profile death, you have a summit, you have a meeting and a lot of it is just window dressing - and then that is all that happens until the next high-profile death."
Voisin argues that the violence that has afflicted Chicago - and other cities - has its roots in a kind of social breakdown that has occurred especially acutely in the AfricanAmerican community. (Voisin, like Jackson, is black.) He says that ‘‘the traditional safety net is missing’’ for young black men - a safety net he sees as comprising not merely economic opportunities or government assistance, but of more nebulous, personal things such as parental monitoring of children and the availability of positive role models.
Gently protesting about the tendency to assume too straightforward a relationship between poverty, school drop-out rates and crime, he notes that ‘‘there is a lot of poverty in the Latino community as well. But the structure of Latino families is very different from that of African-American families:
there is often a higher level of supervision and monitoring’’.
Despite the scepticism about government expressed by Voisin and Jackson, Chicago has been making moves that are intended to address the youth violence crisis. Earlier this month, Mayor Daley announced a package of new measures intended to make schools safer: these included more police officers to cover the perilous journeys that students often have to make on public transport, where classroom rivalries or gang affiliations can flare into open violence. Daley has also pledged an additional $1 million for after-school programmes.
This came on top of a $30 million investment the previous month, announced by Ron Huberman, the head of the Chicago public school system. Huberman’s raft of measures included the provision of mentors to 1,200 students who were regarded as being at-risk, together with an increasing use of social workers and counselors within the system.
Community activists and other experts do not dismiss all of this out of hand, but they do have problems with key elements of it.
Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader, has taken issue with the emphasis placed on policing, and has also suggested that provision should be made to ensure that children do not have to traverse territory controlled by rival gangs in order to go to school. But Daley has been adamant that to factor such considerations into key decisions would represent a ceding of the city to thugs. ‘‘The day that the city decides to divide schools by gang territory, that’s the day we have given up this city," he has said.
Others are looking beyond the standard paradigm that sees the solutions to these issues as being either security-based or reliant upon widespread economic regeneration. Steve Perry is the principal and founder of a so-called ‘magnet’ school in Connecticut which prepares children from low-income backgrounds for college, and the author of a book called Raggedy Schools. He insists that there is a tendency to look towards government to do more than it actually can.
‘‘If government could have solved these problems, it would have done so 20 years ago. The changes we are looking for come about through academic persistence, and that is something that is learned."
Perry asserts that schooling itself - more so than the broader socio-economic issues - is the key. ‘‘The traditional public school system has failed our children," he says.
Perry’s issue with the existing system is that it permits expansive school choices to children of affluent parents, who are often educated privately, while denying those choices to less well-off children who are simply expected to sign up to the school closest to them. The consequence, he argues, is that too many public school pupils receive a second-tier education. In his forthright fashion, he argues that these schools do no more than ‘‘prepare children for their place in the underclass or prison, or worse - in the mortuary’’.
The solution, Perry believes, is government provision of school vouchers - a controversial idea still more popular on the right than on the left. These vouchers would enable parents of modest means to educate their children at schools that require fees. But critics of the concept allege that it would help only a small number of children while further demoralising those - teachers and pupils alike - in the public school system.
Still, Perry’s central belief - that schooling itself has enormous, still untapped, potential to change the mindset of young children who might otherwise slip into the netherworld of underachievement and, ultimately, crime - is bracing. ‘‘A grandmother came into our school yesterday, cussing at one of our teachers," he says. ‘‘You don’t think anyone has told her before that kind of behaviour isn’t acceptable?
‘‘She’s not fixable," he continues briskly.
‘‘The question is, what do we do with our meagre resources? And if you have a child in school six-and-a-half or seven hours a day - and if, as well as that, you have sports and after-schools programmes - there is the chance to do quite a bit."
Back in Chicago, another man has come up with a still more radical idea - and one that appears to be gaining traction. At first glance, Gary Slutkin would not seem particularly well-suited to take on the issue of school violence:
he is a doctor and professor of epidemiology who has spent a good portion of his working life treating epidemics and infectious diseases in developing countries.
But this is precisely the experience Slutkin has drawn on as executive director of an organisation called Cease Fire. To describe his work as pioneering hardly does it justice - when he began, in the mid-1990s, people thought his approach was off-the-wall. But there is more than a little statistical evidence to suggest that he delivers results.
Slutkin treats violence as one would an epidemic. His conversation is dotted with parallels between shootings, tuberculosis and Aids. His approach to violence is three pronged:
the first being to stop specific acts of violence before they take place; the second being to work with people who his organisation has identified as at-risk of falling into violent behaviour in the future; and the third being to work with the wider community to show its revulsion for violence more strongly.
In the first instance, he sends people who are respected in the community and have their ear to the ground - sometimes former gang members - to try to stop specific acts of violence. Since so much violence is tit-for tat, the stopping of one act also prevents those that would have followed on from it ,or so the theory goes.
Slutkin compares the longer-term intervention with people susceptible to committing violence to the act of treating those who are most virulently infected with TB: in both cases, these people are the most likely to ‘‘transmit the infection’’ to those around them.
Almost as controversial as his use of former gang members - perhaps more so in some quarters - is Slutkin’s insistence that violence can be reduced in a big way without poverty also being reduced. He says poverty only increases ‘‘susceptibility’’ to violence, in the same way that overcrowding increases susceptibility to TB without being the cause of it. Just as TB rates can be lowered even if the overcrowding is not ameliorated, so too can violence be lowered in the midst of poverty.
‘‘There are all kinds of places in rural Africa which are incredibly poor and have very little violence. The majority of Bangladesh is poor, and not violent," he says. Slutkin takes particular issue with those who, he complains, are always using the word ‘‘until’’ when talking about the difficulty of reducing violence. ‘‘They say you can’t do it until you get rid of the drugs; until you improve the schools. I call it ‘the everything theory’, because it is the idea that you cannot reduce violence until you do everything else first. The everything theory is completely unproven."
Whether one agrees with that or not, Slutkin has some convincing statistics on his side. He claims that his organisation has been able to reduce shootings by two-thirds in some of Chicago’s worst neighbourhoods.
Independent researchers hired by the US Justice Department last year came up with results that were not quite so dramatic, but were still highly significant: Cease Fire had been able to reduce shootings and attempted shootings by about a quarter, it found.
Slutkin’s approach is not cheap: his organisation needs several million dollars every year to keep going. The more economically focused efforts that Philip Jackson has called for would also carry a hefty price tag. But both men, and many others on Chicago’s streets, know that the price of inaction is much higher: thousands of young people falling through the cracks, and many more deaths like that of Derrion Albert.
‘‘That is not a price I am prepared to pay," Jackson says simply.