The Little Village Gang Violence Reduction Project in Chicago

gangs as part of their police tactical work, and did not know much about the traditional CPDapproach to youth gangs. R. C. indicated they did know patrol officers who had known thesekids almost from the time they were born. These regular beat officers knew the families of thesekids and said maybe they could help R. C. and G. S. They could “talk to the dads” whom theymay have locked up years ago. Or they would say, “you know this kid is going to have an uphillbattle because I locked up his dad for murder and he already has a hard-on for the police.”The Project Coordinator (I. S.) asked a series of questions of R. C. and G. S., with theirresponses tape recorded, as follows:I. S. What happened when you first came to the Project?G.S.Part of the problem in the beginning was that there was no direction. Nobody reallyknew what they wanted us to do. We kind of looked at it as, we’re at the law end of it. Ifone of the kids is the bad apple, we can pull him out. If we can pull that shooter out, orthe guy that’s doing the stick-ups, maybe we can quiet the rest of them down. We’regoing to go out there and find out who these guys are, and when they screw up, we’regoing to do our job, and we’re going to try to get them incarcerated. If we don’t getlucky and put them in jail for a long time, then maybe we’ll get them on probation andkeep an eye on them twenty-four hours a day. And everybody’s got to work together andfigure out what the kids are doing.R.C.Community policing was just starting and nobody was paying much attention to us... so6.14