Serving UIC's Great Cities Commitment: Solutions for Today's Urban Challenges

Haroun Cowans, executive director of Impact Empowerment Group (left), talks with former gang member Trey Staples about their friendship and their anti-gang work in Denver, Oct. 23, 2015. Donna Bryson

The Christian Science Monitor quotes John Hagedorn, former GCI scholar and professor of criminology, law, and justice, in an article about Denver-based anti-gang efforts.

Experts draw on research, some of it sponsored by the federal government’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, when they say that communities must implement a combination of factors to effectively deal with gangs. Arresting the most dangerous players is important, but so is ensuring that young people in struggling neighborhoods have educational and employment opportunities, plus mental health support to handle generations of trauma. One crucial factor, the experts say, is the involvement of community organizations like Cowans’s Impact Empowerment Group, as well as the involvement of former gang members like Staples.

“The roots of violence are very complex, and they’re not responsive to [simply] flooding the streets with cops or flooding the streets with social workers,” says John Hagedorn, a criminal justice professor at University of Illinois in Chicago who has written extensively on gangs and on the racial and economic inequalities he sees as their incubators.

Full Story from The Christian Science Monitor »

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is taking a political beating, largely because of crime and problems in the police department. Charles Rex Arbogast / AP file

A NBC News online article about the firing of Chicago Police Superintendent Gerry McCarthy includes an excerpt about Chicago Police corruption from “Corrupt Illinois,” a co-authored book by Dick Simpson, former GCI scholar and professor of political science. Simpson is also quoted in the article.

Critics have also accused city officials of papering over the department’s problems with panels and re-organized internal-affairs units.

Those critics include Dick Simpson, a former city alderman and a law professor at University of Illinois at Chicago. He co-wrote a book called “Corrupt Illinois” that devotes an entire chapter to Chicago police corruption.

“Chicago’s failure to rein in its errant officers, the department’s lax discipline, and its active involvement in cover-ups have led Chicago’s 12,000 police officers to believe that they can break the law with near-total impunity,” Simpson and co-author Thomas J. Gradel wrote.

That history set up the department, and Emanuel, for the current crisis, in which the city has been accused of delaying an internal investigation until after the mayor’s April re-election.

Had the scandal broken during the campaign, “he would have lost,” Simpson said in an interview.

Full Story from NBC News »

Bernardo Tapia Garcia guides a steel beam while working on the City CenterDC complex in April. The District’s transformation began slowly downtown in the 1980s and 1990s and, in more recent years, has accelerated, raising property values and rents. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

The Washington Post quotes John Betancur, former GCI scholar and professor of urban planning and policy, on a poll showing that African Americans in Washington do not feel that urban redevelopment benefits them. Betancur, an expert on gentrification, said that redevelopment and improved city services soon lead to higher rents and property values, displacing African Americans.

“When redevelopment comes, police follow, and there’s more safety in the neighborhoods and people think that’s great,” said John Bentancur, an urban studies professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “But they do not enjoy that very long. Soon those services make those neighborhoods candidates for gentrification, and the people celebrating the benefits are displaced.”

Full Story from The Washington Post »

Candles have been lit at a makeshift memorial in front of “Le carillon” restaurant one of the site of the attacks in Paris on November 15, 2015, in the 10th district of Paris. (LOIC VENANCE / AFP/Getty Images)

Chicago Tribune columnist Dawn Trice, writing on the terrorist attacks in Paris, mentions the Great Cities Institute’s recent symposium, “City/Cite: A Transatlantic Exchange.” The symposium featured Andrew Diamond, a professor of American history at the Paris-Sorbonne University and a former Chicagoan who wrote “Mean Streets: Chicago Youth and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908-1969.”

Andrew Diamond lives near the Canal Saint Martin in Paris’ 10th Arrondissement, a five-minute walk from a popular intersection that’s home to a Cambodian restaurant, a pizzeria and a bar with an expansive terrace frequented by tourists and the neighborhood’s “Bobos,” or artsy bourgeois bohemians.

It was in this area where one of Friday’s terror attacks occurred.

A professor of American history and civilization at the Paris-Sorbonne University, Diamond lived in Chicago when he wrote “Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908-1969.”

I talked to him Sunday afternoon because earlier this month he returned to Chicago for a trans-Atlantic symposium that included discussions on how high unemployment, income inequality, social exclusion, poverty, and racism in Paris and in Chicago can make it easier for young folks to be radicalized.

These conditions also inspire marginalized and disaffected youth to join gangs of thugs who commit horrendous acts of terror — or as we prefer to call it here in Chicago, gun violence. On both continents, the weaponry is too easily accessible.

The symposium, called “City/Cité: A Transatlantic Exchange,” was a joint production of Chicago’s French Consulate, the University of Chicago and the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Full Story from Chicago Tribune »