Roberto Aspholm, one of the authors of GCI’s report The Fracturing of Gangs and Violence in Chicago, is quoted in a WTTW Chicago Tonight story on the need to change the police departments response to gangs and violence in Chicago.
“When you look at the 1980s and 1990s, the era of the corporate, hierarchical street gangs in the city of Chicago, today we have a very different scenario with a very fragmented, fractured gang landscape,” said Roberto Aspholm, author of “Views From the Streets: The Transformation of Gangs and Violence on Chicago’s South Side” and an assistant professor of social work at the University of St. Thomas.
“The notion that the neighborhood groups today represent factions of these larger organizations, I don’t think it is really an accurate assessment of what’s going on,” Aspholm said. “These are really independent, neighborhood-based groups that don’t exist in relation to any broader hierarchy or cross-neighborhood formal coalition.”
