THE TOMORROW GAME

A street-smart sociologist looks at gang warfare in Chicago as a machine that, once set in motion by various forces, is hard to stop.

Intergang turf wars are fueled by many pipelines. In the case of one South Side Chicago neighborhood, one of those pipelines is the willingness, even avidity, of rural folks to sell guns to city kids who drive “downstate” to procure their arsenals. Case in point is a gangster named Harpoon, who in one visit “purchased fifteen used handguns from a rural family that has gathered up the cache from neighbors.” As Venkatesh shows, though, there are other factors. The author writes about one imprisoned drug dealer in particular, who was busted not just for drugs, but for having enough weapons to make the police nervous. Fearing that rival dealers were trying to seize his territory and that his teenage crew on the streets wasn’t tough enough to defend it, he ordered his lieutenant to take down suspected rivals. The lieutenant decided his victim would be a high schooler he had been bullying. Consequently, that kid, hitherto fairly well behaved and nondescript—“Ordinary never got no one in trouble,” his parents have instructed—was pushed into assembling a gang and getting guns for himself. Add to this the jailed dealer’s Machiavellian conclusion that a shooting war would be good precisely because it would bring down the police and keep those rival dealers away for fear of being arrested, and you have the makings of mayhem. The eventual resolution is an unexpected but inspired part of Venkatesh’s ethnography, involving clergy, a peacemaker of a police officer, and not least some of the teenagers who willingly laid down their arms. Even the imprisoned dealer contributed something positive, telling one of them, “If I was you, I’d get the fuck out.”

A good choice for anyone interested in how troubled neighborhoods are policed and conflicts mediated.