The latest Chicago Crime Commission gang report is out, and it totals an enormous number of gang members in Chicago—68,000 or more.
According to Jody Weis, who now runs the Commission, that makes Chicago the most gang-ridden city in the country. That's not what the FBI found in its 2011 gang assessment, but the numbers aren't far off: the feds had Los Angeles at number one in 2010 with over 68,000, and Chicago/Cook County in second with just over 60,000 (larger, mostly legible version here ). Either way, it's still a surprising statistic, given that Chicago has far more gang members than New York, Miami, Dallas, Houston, or any other major city besides Los Angeles. The disparity between New York and Chicago is particularly surprising; despite its vast size, New York has less than a third the number of Chicago's gang members. One of the more compelling arguments for why Chicago's gang problem has persisted so long in the face of New York's relative success is the city's approach to public housing. In a 2001 piece for The American Prospect , U. of C. sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh com...