Joel Hamernick

After getting his start in the Cabrini Green public housing development, Joel Hamernick has spent 30 years working with gangs and neighborhood groups to prevent gun violence in Chicago.

“About 20 years ago, the gangs in Chicago had a strong governmental hierarchy and a lot more structure. But today, almost none of that structure remains.”

“The gangs in the Black community evolved in essentially three phases: You went from the Black Power civil rights era to a drastic increase in violence and drug dealing, and now we’re seeing this complete decentralization.”

“In Woodlawn, for example, there were historically three known gangs. But over the past two decades, 30 or 40 factions of those gangs and others have popped up in the area and you now have this free-for-all.”

“It goes back to understanding what a gang is. When my friend was growing up, his dad was a member of the Black P. Stone Nation and his dad saw it as a path to feeding his children. It might have had a vigilante aspect to it, but it wasn”t fundamentally about killing people.”

“When the drug trade shifted and the Black P. Stone Nation became very involved in it, his dad left. He removed himself from it, but his sons and my friend became deeply entrenched in the Cabrini Green drug markets. That’s when we started seeing more gangs selling drugs, taking control of territory and shootings – activities we traditionally associate with gangs today.”

“Crack use was prevalent back then, too, but the next generation moved away from it and so the use of cocaine went off a cliff. That meant the market for crack disappeared and the gangs weren’t profitable like they had been for decades before, leading to these smaller identity groups forming.”

“It is well documented that a large shift in the nature of the violence occurred when Chicago tore down public housing like Cabrini and uprooted people who had gang associations, spreading them over the city. Many of the most senior leaders of Chicago’s gang system were arrested in the early 2000s as well.”

“Now a lot of the violence we’re seeing is the result of young people with guns making autonomous decisions, as opposed to representing a group or being ordered. And in most cases, its retaliatory in nature.”

“If you don’t have trust between the community and police, you can’t solve crimes, and we have an unacceptably low rate of clearance in shootings and homicides already. We’ve got to change the nature of how we police and faithful implementation of the consent decree has got to be the top priority.”

Joel Hamernick
Founder, The Coach House Solutions Group
Executive director, Strides for Peace
Chicago, Illinois