"No Big I's and Little You's": The Structural Breakdown of Chicago's Black Street Gangs

Background and Purpose: Chicago is home to some of the nation’s oldest and largest street gangs, and these gangs are integrally involved in much of the serious violence in the city.  Street gangs and gang violence, however, are not unitary phenomena, and they are prone to wide variations over time.  Yet little research exploring changes in the nature of Chicago street gangs and the violence in which their members are involved has been conducted since the turn of the century.  This study seeks to address this gap in the literature by answering the following research questions: (1) In what ways are Chicago street gangs currently constituted? (2) What is the nature of the violence in which gang members are currently involved? (3) In what ways do gang members believe that this violence can be reduced?

Methods: In-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews were completed with 30 African American male gang members ages 16–32 actively involved in violence on Chicago’s South Side.  Participants were initially recruited through relationships that the author and a participatory researcher developed as a community worker and a former member of this population, respectively.  Additional participants were recruited via snowball sampling.  Interviews lasted approximately 90 minutes and were recorded on a portable digital recording device.  Interviews were transcribed verbatim and then thoroughly stripped of potentially-identifying information.  The author and participatory researcher then analyzed these transcripts using a grounded theory process.

Findings: Data analysis indicates that the hierarchical gang leadership structures that had existed in Chicago for decades have largely, if not entirely, broken down among the city’s African American gangs.  Findings suggest that the roots of this structural breakdown are multifaceted, but, most centrally, include intense intergenerational conflict in which participants described rebelling against the selfish and exploitative leadership of older, higher-ranking members and adopting an intense ethos of personal autonomy.  Indeed, participants reported that loyalties on the streets were increasingly based upon personal relationships as opposed to membership in a specific street gang.

This paradigm shift has shaped the violence in which gang members are involved, as well, as the findings suggest that current gang wars are generally rooted in parochial animosities as opposed to traditional gang antagonisms or drug-related warfare.  Further, although participants reported that nearly all of the violence of gang wars consisted of planned “hits,” they insisted that this violence typically occurred in the absence of specific situational antecedents or approval from fellow gang members. 

Conclusions and Implications: Findings highlight the relatively recent and dramatic breakdown of leadership structures within Chicago’s black street gangs and the consequences with respect to intra- and inter-gang dynamics as well as gang violence.  These shifts have important implications for community practice and gang policy, including calling into question the potential effectiveness of two fashionable approaches to reducing gang violence—utilizing the supposed influence of former gang leaders and law enforcement warnings to current influential gang members.