Gangs and Urban Disadvantage

The study of the urban street gang is not a study of deviant behavior, but of a distinct social organization that is the product of neighborhood conditions. The earliest work on street gangs stems from a period nearly a century ago, describing a mosaic of different social worlds based on ethnic segregation between different European immigrant groups. This early era of street gangs gave way to new Black and Latino-centered street gangs as “white flight” to growing suburbs, urban economic decline, and waves of deindustrialization reshaped social contexts across neighborhoods. Recently, however, the relationship between the gang and the neighborhood has been changing. As technology rapidly advanced, some neighborhoods underwent changes in crime rates and racial demographics while other neighborhoods experienced continued segregation and disadvantage.  Given that gangs and neighborhoods are part and parcel, this research investigates how neighborhood changes relate to changes in the social organization of street gangs.

In my first paper in this line of research my co-author and I investigate how the geography, practices and organization of Chicago street gangs evolved amid prevailing trends of gentrification in some neighborhoods and continued poverty concentration in others. Through a mixed-methods analysis of interviews from long-time former gang members and longitudinal spatial data on street gang turfs, we contribute evidence about how gentrification has impacted the locations and activities of both African American and Latino street gangs, for variable reasons. Importantly, even among the many neighborhoods that have not experienced gentrification, gangs have altered their practices in response to policing, technology advancement, and interactions with other gangs.

Building further on this with data from highly ritualized interactions in public media, I examine how changing neighborhood dynamics—particularly enhanced policing and surveillance techniques—shape changes in gang group dynamics. The data reveal how hyper-surveillance is reorientating street gang culture. I find that rather than system avoidance, gang members associate being surveilled with status at both the individual and gang levels.  As surveillance cameras spread through Chicago neighborhoods, a new "status of the surveilled" emerged wherein gang members pointed to nearby police cameras as a signifier of their toughness and importance. In exploring these dynamics, this project reveals unique, unintended consequences of hyper-surveillance that disproportionately impact people of color.

Work in progress

Hess, Christian, and John Leverso. “It depends where you are at: Understanding the varying relationships between neighborhood gentrification with gang presence and practices in Chicago” (Revise and Resubmit).

Leverso, John. “The Status of the Surveilled: Gangs and Hyper Surveillance.”