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Gang violence along with assaults -- sometimes vicious -- on teachers and staff are increasing in and around Chicago's schools while CTU leadership refuses to deal with the roots of the problems and joins some others in blaming law enforcement for the city's plague of 'violence'...

George N. Schmidt - April 01, 2017

Despite attempts by some of the leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union, some of its intellectual gurus, and some of its community allies to pretend that the problems of violence are caused by racist police, the Black P. Stone gang "nation" in Chicago is as powerful in 2017 as it was since it was consolidated more than 50 years ago by Jeff Fort and other leaders of what was then known as the "Blackstone Rangers," a local street gang in Woodlawn. The above graffiti shows many of the symbols of the BPS (Black P. Stones), including the pyramid and the five-pointed star. Also shown are the symbols declaring that the Stones will kill members of the opposing gangs (the six-pointed star "Folks"), most notably by the declaration "Folks Killa." On March 30, 2017, Black P. Stone members murdered four young men at and near a restaurant in Chicago's South Shore community. But the roots of the violence in those communities (which usually are designated by the gangs by street and zone, as in "K Town" or "South Cs") go back to the 1960s and 1970s, while the gangs' power has continued to increase because the gangs have been running Cook County Jail and the Illinois prisons from the "inside" for decades.Organized drug gang violence has been increasing in Chicago's public schools this school year, as the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union looks the other way or -- worse -- declares that students who engage in gang activity or even those who assault teachers and other staff should be given alternative punishments, no matter how hard the crimes or how serious the attacks. As Spring begins in Chicago, it's more than clear that the problems of the city are not being caused by the police or by the Trump administration, but by the fact that Chicago has some of the largest, best organized, and most violent drug gangs in the United States. But because the ideology of some of the leaders of the CTU and some of their allies in some community organizations refuses to admit that the gangs exist and are violent bot inside and outside the schools, things are getting worse in 2017.

Yes. There is "carnage" in Chicago. And it's not the fault of the current administration in Washington, D.C. The majority of violent activities, including gun murders, in and around the schools and on the streets stems from the city's major drug gangs. These gangs, as they have been for decades, are organized into two huge "Nations" -- the "People" (five-pointed star; led by the Black P. Stones and Latin Kinds) and the "Folks" (six-pointed star; led by the various factions of the Disciples street gangs, both Latino and African American).

As the first graphic with this article depicts, the "People" are continually at war with the "Folks." But unless the Chicago Teachers Union, the Chicago Board of Education leadership, and others provide teachers with rank and file education about these simple but brutal facts, the only ones clueless in the schools are the adults. And since the gangs are organized in a corporate hierarchy, that means that younger gang bangers (which is what they are still called, the younger ones being the "shorties") are coached, by their executives, in how to milk the "Restorative Justice" scam to the benefit of their gangs and their "Nations."

Gangster Disciples (and Spanish Gangster Disciple) graffiti depicts the same wars as the above Black P. Stone graffiti-- but from the point of view of the "Folks" "Nation." The symbolisms above show the six pointed star gangs killing (LKK) the Latin Kings (whose crown is broken) and other People "Nation" gangs. The above depiction, from Chicago's West Side, also notes that at the time it was generated, the folks from the Folks who created this piece of art were also at war with the Four Corner Huslters, a street gang that long held the territory around Laramie and North Ave (the four corners) in much the same way that Terror Town and South Cs fifteen miles away were being held by the Black P. Stones and their allies, the Latin Kings.The decision to ignore gang violence in the schools, even when the violence is directed against teachers and other staff, also comes from the "top." Currently, the Chicago Teachers Union leadership is using a controversial form of "data driven management" which cripples many local union delegates in their efforts to control gang violence in and around their schools. The "data" show that the majority of school suspensions in Chicago are to minority males. As a result, for the past five or six years, Board of Education members and union officials have been demanding that suspensions be reduced. But the problem arises when they violence isn't reduced, because instead of noticing that their violent acts have consequences, gang bangers, some as young as the lower elementary grades, view the system as weak, ready to gamed.

It hasn't always been that way, and it doesn't have to continue that way. The inner city drug gangs have been a constant in Chicago since the 1960s, when they were first organized as (in the black community) the "Blackstone Rangers" (the ancestors of the "People" Nation) and "Woodlawn Disciples" (the ancestors of the "Folks" Nation). Led originally by Jess Fort (Rangers) and David Barksdale (Disciples), the gangs slowly spread across the viciously segregated black communities of the South Side. As they moved into new communities, they took over territory and gave certain areas names. Like "Terror Town" for a section of what most people consider the "South Shore" community. Of "South Cs" -- for the area at 87th and Colfax where the Black P. Stones have maintained a lucrative drug trade for decades.

As some recently published research has shown, the gangs work to control areas adjacent to the city's highway exits. Recently, for example, the Chicago Sun-Times published a map correlating heroin overdoses and drug sales centers on the city's West Side. Some law enforcement people have dubbed the Eisenhower (Congress) Expressway "Heroin Highway." That's where wealthier suburban persons can get off the expressway, cop drugs safely (usually) in less than ten minutes, and then be back on the expressway heading back to suburbia.

Despite recent claims, the Chicago drug gangs haven't become "fragmented." Some of the branches of the Disciples have, but the main gangs, including large parts of the Gangster Disciples, remain coherent, corporate, and in charge. The most important locations where they exercise their power (in addition to the turf controlled within the city, especially at the corner drug markets like those along "Heroin Highway") are at Cook County Jail and in the Illinois prisons. One of the obvious consequences of the cutbacks in public funding for rehabilitation over the past quarter century has been that the control over the prisons has been privatized to the gang "Nations" and their leaders. It's not just in recently video series like "The Wire" (about Baltimore) or older movies like "American Me" and "Colors" that the extent of gang power within the prisons is depicted. On the streets in Chicago, especially in the segregated inner city, "everyone" knows these facts. When they are not utilized to build safer public policies, as today, then things get worse. Seven murders in one part of South Shore (was that "Terror Town"?) in two days is just a recent example.

But the spillage of those terrors into the schools has not been treated with firmness of late.

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