The Little Village Gang Violence Reduction Project in Chicago

questions by the Gang Crime Unit officers, they tended to give generalized or evasive answers.They preferred not to refer to specific gang youth. Participants at these meetings seemed to betalking past each other.At the first meetings, the Project Coordinator explained what the key Project objectiveswere. A first task was to determine an appropriate format and set of procedures for sharinginformation conducive to achieving the goal of gang violence reduction. This had to beachieved, he explained, through:• Team members targeting those same gang youth, 17 to 24 years of age, responsible formajor gang violence in Little Village;• Developing a proactive, common, yet differentiated approach to the prevention andcontrol of gang violence through appropriate interrelated measures of suppression, socialsupport, and provision of social opportunities to the targeted youth;• Coordination of Project staff-member efforts through communication with each other atstaff meetings and otherwise;• Participation in community mobilization, including the development of a communityadvisory structure.To achieve these objectives, we would have to: 1) develop procedures for identifyingthose gang youth currently engaged in serious gang violence, as well as those who wereinfluential in stimulating or creating such violence; 2) verify that such information was correctthrough at least one other source to be sure that such youth were properly eligible to receivecontrol and social services; 3) take special care, at first, not to identify or select wannabe,4.5