So Few Responsible for So Much Misery

A couple days ago, The Truth About Guns had linked to this article at Chicago Magazine on the distribution of gun violence within Chicago. A study was conducted of shootings (rather than just homicides) in general and links between the people involved. The reasoning for broadening the pool beyond homicides was that the researchers believed that death from a gunshot wound had a certain amount of fortuity that was not present in the case of looking at all shootings. Not surprisingly, the researchers discovered that a relatively small population was responsible for most of the violence. The key point from the article:

Papachristos constructs a social network—not a virtual one in the Facebook sense, but a real one of social connections between people—by looking at arrestees who have been arrested together. That turns out to be a lot of people in raw numbers, almost 170,000 people with a “co-offending tie” to one another, with an average age of 25.7 years, 78.6 percent male and 69.5 percent black. It’s also a large percentage of all the individuals arrested: 40 percent of all the individuals arrested during that period.

Within the entire group, the largest component of that whole co-offender group has 107,740 people.

Within the timeframe—from 2006 to 2010—70 percent of all shootings in Chicago, or about 7,500 out of over 10,000, are contained within all the co-offending networks. And 89 percent of those shootings are within the largest component.

Or, to put another way: the rate of gunshot victimization (nonfatal + fatal) in Chicago is 62.1 per 100k. Within a co-offending network, it’s 740.5—more than 10 times higher.

“This finding has (at least) two implications for our understanding of non-fatal gunshot injuries,” the authors write. “First, the concentration of non-fatal gunshot injuries in networks such as these demonstrate that such incidents are more concentrated than previously thought, and even more concentrated than gun homicide by either demographic group or place. Our findings indicate that 70 percent of all non-fatal shootings occur in networks comprising less than 6 percent of Chicago’s total population. This distribution of shootings within co-offending networks fundamentally changes how we assess the distribution of risk in Chicago.” (Emphasis theirs.)

It is interesting to compare this to another story from about a year ago which noted that the vast majority of homicides were related to drug gangs:

Fewer than 2,000 utterly ruthless, well-armed bad guys may be causing a majority of Chicago's homicides. They're shooting and killing each other, motivated in part by profits from illegal drug sales, according to a veteran criminologist who has worked closely with the Chicago Police Department.

When they began rounding up 41 leaders of a notorious gang last week that allegedly grossed $11 million a year running open-air heroin and cocaine markets on the West Side, it was hailed as a law enforcement landmark, the first use of a new Illinois law designed to target a small cadre of the most violent criminals.

"There's probably 1,500 to 2,000 that are in a network of individuals that are continuously interacting in a negative way and at risk of shooting someone or being shot themselves," Professor Dennis P. Rosenbaum says.

Though he sometimes speaks like the UIC college professor he is, Dennis Rosenbaum has worked closely with the Chicago Police to understand the city's bloody-minded drug gangs. Rising to rule a gang requires an utter ruthlessness, emulated by the wannabe's in gang-dominated neighborhoods, especially in warmer weather when more residents are outside, watching.

"The smallest things can set this off," Rosenbaum says. "People can be disrespectful of someone else's girlfriend, because all these kids have going is their street credibility. And they will fight and die for that."

 Of course, this is not limited to Chicago. Townhall recently published an article on New York crime statistics, which indicated that 40% of the shooting in New York were directly related to small street gangs:

There are more than 300 of them in New York — violent crews of dozens of 12- to 20-year-olds with names such as Very Crispy Gangsters, True Money Gang and Cash Bama Bullies.

Police say these groups, clustered around a particular block or housing project, are responsible for about 40 percent of the city's shootings, with most of that violence stemming from the smallest of disses on the street, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

"It's like belonging to an evil fraternity," said Inspector Kevin Catalina, commander of the New York Police Department's gang division. "A lot of it is driven by nothing: A dispute over a girl or a wrong look or a perceived slight."

The trend of smaller, younger crews has also been seen in Chicago and Northeast cities over the last few years as police have cracked down on bigger, more traditional gangs, experts said.

So, these large cities have tight gun restrictions. Where do these criminals get their firearms? Forbes reported last year on a study that interviewed criminals to try and answer that very question:

And where did the bad people who did the shooting get most of their guns? Were those gun show “loopholes” responsible? Nope. According to surveys DOJ conducted of state prison inmates during 2004 (the most recent year of data available), only two percent who owned a gun at the time of their offense bought it at either a gun show or flea market. About 10 percent said they purchased their gun from a retail shop or pawnshop, 37 percent obtained it from family or friends, and another 40 percent obtained it from an illegal source.