One Third of Victims: Black Youths are City's Top Murder Risk

By: Barnaby DingesYoung Black males in Chicago are nine times more likely to be murdered than their white counterparts, The Chicago Reporter found in a study of murder rates in the city's 25 police districts. Black murder victims ages 14-to-29 outnumbered white victims 708 to 83 during the last three years, even though there were slightly more white youths in that age group in 1987.

Young black men are more likely to be killed in fights with friends or acquaintances than in gang or drug battles, the Reporter found. Sociologists attribute this high rate of black-on-black crime, in part, to a lack of self-esteem among young African American men.

"Many young blacks have become convinced that their lives don't matter and neither do those of the black men around them," said University of Pennsylvania sociologist Elijah Anderson, who has studied the effect of crime on Chicago's black neighborhoods.

The Reporter's study of murder rates among young males, the most common victims of violent crime, revealed that young black males make up only 5 percent of the city's population but are the victims in 34 percent of the murders.

The Chicago Police Department each year produces an extensive murder analysis but does not combine data showing the race and age of murder victims. The Reporter calculated murder rates using police department data and population estimates from the city's Department of Planning. Murder rates were calculated per 100,000 people per year, as is standard, making the Reporter's analysis comparable to previous murder studies.

The yearly murder rate for young black males was 152 for every 100,000 people (between the ages of 14 and 29) between 1987 and 1989. Hispanic males were slain at the rate of 102 per 100,000, six times the 17 per 100,000 rate of whites that age.

Police Supt. LeRoy Martin was not surprised by the statistics and said the high murder rate for young black males is not strictly a law-enforcement problem.

"Society, not the police department, has been remiss in not addressing the needs and problems of this exploding population group with limited job skills," he said.

Police, he said, have done their job by confiscating about 28,000 illegal guns in the city in the last two years.

"I see some light at the end of the tunnel because citizens realize this is not just a police problem," Martin said. "Police can only control killings on public ways, and most murders occur in peoples' homes among friends and family. The root causes of these killings are poverty and drugs."

Murders Without Gangs
High murder rates among Chicago's under-30 males commonly are blamed on gang battles over the lucrative illegal drug market. But such street activity accounts for fewer than one in five of the murders of young males in Chicago, according to police records.

Police data show that gang crime played a part in only 8 percent of the murders of young black males and 19 percent of young whites males since 1987.

Gang activity, however, did account for almost half - 49 percent - of Hispanic murders. The number of young Hispanic males murdered jumped from 55 in 1988 to 78 last year, including 24 gang-related murders in 1988 and 45 in 1989. Hispanic males were 64 percent of the city's 70 gang-related murder victims last year, up from 40 percent of the city's gang murder victims in 1988.

"Hispanic gangs are growing in size and number and in some neighborhoods there are three gangs right on top of each other," said Robert Martin, director of the Department of Human Services' Chicago Intervention Network. "The Hispanic gangs are just now learning how to divide up areas for drug sales. In the meantime the trend will be some random killings, like shooting up the rival gang members on a street corner."

The actual number of gang-related murders may be higher, but Chicago homicide investigators link murders to gangs only when there is an obvious connection, Detective John Gavin said. Many murders, he said, are recorded as "narcotics related."

In the last two years narcotics-related murders in Chicago outnumbered gang-related murders 158 to 131, Gavin said. But these 289 murders linked to gangs and drugs explain only a fifth of the city's 1,401 murders since 1988.

Young black males, unlike their white and Hispanic peers, are much more likely to be murdered in fights among friends and acquaintances than in gang or drug battles, according to Chicago crime experts.

Deadly Poor
"It is a lucky black male that grows up around Garfield Park and lives to age 30," said Charles Ramsey, Harrison Police District commander for the past two years.

The residential neighborhoods around Garfield Park on the West Side are scattered with dilapidated and abandoned housing. Young men spend their days huddling on street corners or in junk-filled lots.

Garfield Park is 99 percent black, and community leaders say the residents are considerably poorer than 1980 U.S. Census figures which show a 20 percent unemployment rate and a 40 percent poverty level.

"We got people here who are stealing food just to feed their families," Ramsey said.

Though the police district - which includes most of East and West Garfield Park and south Humboldt Park - is home to several violent gangs, Ramsey said 80 percent of the serious crime in the area is drug-related and is not necessarily linked to gangs.

"It is not uncommon to find three to four drug houses on a block, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a block with no drug houses," Ramsey said, referring to residences being used for illegal drug operations.

"There are probably no more people using drugs in this neighborhood than there are among those working in the Sears Tower," he said. "The difference is here they have no money. So they find someone to rob."

Violence and death, Ramsey said, are themes imbedded in the minds of young people growing up around Garfield Park. "We have 5-year-olds who know all about murder, junkies and prostitutes," he said. "There are so few people working here that drug dealers have become the role models."

One proven path to success in the community is Providence St. Mel, 119 S. Central Park Blvd. The all-black private school draws 75 percent of its students from within a few miles and sends most of its 60 graduates to college each year.

"One of the reasons kids from here are successful is they learn to gerrymander their way around the violence," said Principal Paul Adams. "We help them by running a school that doesn't let the neighborhood that's outside get inside the building."

Murder Motives Vary
A study of Chicago murders from 1979 to 1981 by Carolyn R. Block, senior research analyst at the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, found that almost half the murders of black males ages 15 to 29 were assaults by friends or acquaintances.

Most murders of young Latino males, however, involved street confrontations with strangers. Block's research showed that domestic homicides are much rarer among Hispanics than among blacks and whites.

"Hispanic men tend to respect their women and their old people more than do their black and white counterparts," Block told the Reporter. "They do their killing out on the streets, and often with strangers they run into who test their macho character."

Block's study showed that murder rates for Hispanic males peak in the late teens and remain high through age 44. The Reporter's study, though, indicated that murder rates for Hispanic males dropped steadily as they move through their 20s.

Hispanic males ages 14 to 19 have nearly the same murder rate (112 per 100,000) as do blacks that age, the Reporter found. But the annual Hispanic murder rate dropped to 82 per 100,000 among men ages 20 to 24. And the rate declined even further to 51 per 100,000 for Latino men ages 25 to 29.

"A reduction in Hispanic murder victimization among males in their 20s would represent a whole new trend for Hispanic culture in Chicago," Block said.

Murder rates jumped for all groups of young black males since 1980, the Reporter found. The murder rate among black teenage males increased almost 80 percent since then. In the past three years, 189 of the city's estimated 57,000 black teenagers were murdered, bringing the yearly rate to 111 per 100,000, up from 62 in Block's 1980 study.

The Reporter study found the annual murder rate rose to 157 among black men ages 20 to 24. The rate was 159 between ages 25 and 29. Block's research showed the murder rate for black males remains high even at age 60, with annual rates of about 70 per 100,000.

The white murder rate peaks at 22 per 100,000 in the 20-to-24 age group, the Reporter found. The disparity in murders among black and white males in Chicago was greatest among teenagers; blacks were the victims 67 percent of the time, and whites only 6 percent.

But when a black person is murdered in Chicago, 97 percent of the time the offender, too, is black. The typical murder in Chicago involves one black male killing another.

Some black men kill others believing "there's no justice for blacks in America, and black men, in particular, don't matter," said the University of Pennsylvania's Anderson.

The rising murder rates that the Reporter identified, Anderson predicted, are just an early sign of what young urban black males will endure in the 1990s.

"Black males are desperately striving for status and identity," Anderson said. "And since so many can no longer assume the roles of breadwinner and reliable husband, they attempt to prove their manhood by waging war against other black men."

Black-on-black crime, he said, is spurred on by a sense that society will not aggressively pursue and punish those who commit violence against blacks.

"We are seeing violence emerge as a quick means to resolve disputes," Anderson said. "You can see the lack of respect black males have for each other when they fight. The first thing they do is call each other 'nigger.' Society has convinced them it's a crime to kill a white man, but not a black man."

Low Self-Esteem
The low self-esteem felt by so many young black males may be heightened by the loss of manufacturing jobs, which once paid good wages to workers with only high school educations.

Many black laborers were lost in the nation's transition from a manufacturing to a service economy. University of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson has estimated that for every 100 black women in their 20s there are only 50 black men who have jobs.

The grim economic prospects for so many young black men, combined with the mounting numbers of murders in poor black neighborhoods, have added strain on Chicago's "depressed African American community," said Randolph Stone, the Public Defender of Cook County. His office handles about 200,000 criminal cases a year, 75 percent involving black male defendants.

Black Men Rendered Marginal
The hopelessness among Chicago's legions of poor, unskilled, uneducated young black males, creates a feeling of being "rendered marginal" by society, Stone said. "When you have no skills and no reason to expect long-term success, you start to expect no more than immediate gratification."

Louis W. Sullivan, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has said: "Not since slavery has so much calamity and ongoing catastrophe been visited on black males." Sullivan, the Bush Administration's top-ranking black official, has urged a stronger federal effort to reverse the 1980s trends of rising death, unemployment and poverty rates among black males.

But as Public Defender Stone said: "The only hope for the underclass and its dying black males is for this country to make the type of commitment it did in the 1960s when we put a man on the moon."