In the 11th, shootings are up by 78 percent compared to a year ago, and homicides are up 89 percent. “It’s the concentration of all of that, all in one place.” Hatch Sr., who has given eulogies for at least 12 victims of violence this year, says of the district, home to his New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church. “It’s about desperation, decadence, depression and rage,” the Rev. Into it all comes a lethal mix of readily available guns, a growing number of splintering gangs and groups, and a sense among some here that the punishment for carrying a weapon on these streets will never be larger than the risk of not carrying one. And people and programs with good intentions come and go, thwarting hopes, reinforcing frustrations while never quite addressing the underlying problems, anyway. Segregation throws up obstacles to economic investment. Struggling, emptying schools result in the closings of the very institutions that hold communities together.
In places like this, cycles reinforce themselves: Poverty and joblessness breed an underground economy that leads to jail and makes it harder to get jobs. Young men gather on this section of the street, and neighbors say they hear calls for “Pills!” or “Flats!”- slang for drugs - in the middle of the day. Garfield Park, once known as Chicago’s Central Park, sits in the 11th’s middle.īut on Walnut Street, one vacant lot has been there so long that walking paths are worn through it. Here, graystone homes and brick cottages line elegant boulevards with wide, grassy medians. Residents along Walnut Street and at other crime scenes told of a fractured community - isolated by this city’s entrenched segregation, hollowed out by joblessness and poverty, and battered by resignation and indifference.