The Little Village Gang Violence Reduction Project in Chicago

effects, in particular their offense reduction. This contingency is provided for by examiningpolice histories, which were integrated for all program youth, whether interviewed one or moretimes. We will see that the trend of changes in program-youth offense patterns is generallyconsistent with the trend of changes in their arrest patterns.Self-Reported Offense (Arrest) ChangesWe examine crime and/or deviant activities reported by 127 program youth, and changesin these activities between the Time I and Time III interview periods. We describe and comparethe mean frequencies of self-reported offenses (and self-reported arrests) for the total programsample, for the two gangs separately, the three Cohorts, the various age groups, and for differentlevels of offenders. The self-report list of offenses is short and not inclusive of all offenses orcrimes the youth may have committed. It is also less inclusive than the list of crimes or offensesindicated in the Chicago Police Department offense code which we use in the next chapter.However, it is an efficient list focusing on offenses – particularly violence – likely to becommitted by gang youth.The research interviewers asked the program youth whether they had committed any ofsixteen 1 offenses, and how many times they had committed them. The offenses, which weretypical and traditional among gang youth in Chicago and probably elsewhere, were: 1) writingnon-gang graffiti; 2) writing gang graffiti; 3) destroying property worth $300 or less; 4) breakingand entering a building to commit theft; 5) shoplifting; 6) stealing a car for joy-riding purposes;1 These offenses are not necessarily equivalent to the larger listing of official criminal justice offense codes(see Chapter 11). There is a seventeenth offense category, “other.” It was not frequently used, and when it was, wewere usually able to reclassify the offense into one of the regular sixteen categories. The crimes which were notreclassifiable were included only in the analysis of total self-reported offenses/(arrests).10.2