When a Gang Member Puts a Murder on Instagram

Does it make the police’s job easier, or does the escalation outweigh the convenience of a record? At Wired, a great piece about social media and gang violence in Chicago:

Last year more than 500 people were murdered in Chicago, a greater number than in far more populous cities such as New York and Los Angeles. The prevalence of gun crimes in Chicago is due in large part to a fragmentation of the gangs on its streets: There are now an estimated 70,000 members in the city, spread out among a mind-boggling 850 cliques, with many of these groupings formed around a couple of street corners or a specific school or park. Young people in these areas are like young people everywhere, using technology to coordinate with their friends and chronicle their every move. But in neighborhoods where shootings are common, the use of online tools has turned hazardous, as gang violence is now openly advertised and instigated online… Foolish as it may be in practice, street gangs have adopted a level of transparency that might impress even the most fervent Silicon Valley futurist. Every day on Facebook and Twitter, on Instagram and YouTube, you can find unabashed teens flashing hand signs, brandishing guns, splaying out drugs and wads of cash.

The police department in Chicago, like other departments in cities like Cincinnati and New York, now actively patrol social media as a way to anticipate violence; “[they] look for inflammatory comments around specific dates: the anniversary of a homicide, say, or the birthday of a slain gang member,” and estimate that “an astonishing 80% of all school disturbances result from online exchanges.” After a 15-year-old was shot in 2011, “rivals soon posted pictures of his corpse to Facebook, doctoring the image with horns and splattered brains, and “within minutes of the images’ appearing on the site, 81 kids at Gregory’s high school were suspended for fighting.”

I can barely imagine all of this, but I can barely imagine living in the most dangerous part of a city where 47 people get shot over July 4th weekend. From a twentysomething who does:

The way he sees it, he is both endangering his life and protecting it. He feels he has to let the BDs know he has big guns just like theirs. It’s an arms race, escalated by the projections of power made on the web every day. “I’m my own police,” Novell declares. “Someone says something to me on Facebook, I don’t even write a word. The only thing I do is post my 30-popper, my big banger.”

In other gang news of a more Now & Then variety: meet the Los Angeles lady bike crew who call themselves the Ovarian Psyco Cycles Brigade.

[Wired]