Change Management ( Kaisen, CAT and NYPD)

REPORT 43

R E P O R T

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

Predicting murder on Chicago’s South Side By Monte Reel

Twenty-year-old Da- vonte Flennoy was killed on a Monday night in June 2012. As the set- ting for a murder, South Rockwell Street, in Chi- cago’s Marquette Park, was familiar enough to border on cliché. The last thing Flennoy saw as bullets entered his chest, arm, and head could have been the dumpsters artlessly ranked in the alley behind him or the razor wire curling atop a nearby chain-link fence. More than fifty other people had been shot throughout Chicago in the preceding ninety-six hours, ten of them fa- tally. Most of the shoot- ings, and every one of the murders, occurred on streets like this one, in low-income neigh- borhoods on the city’s South Side.

That spring was a bloody one in the city, with homicides up nearly 35 per- cent over the year before. More than three fourths of the victims were black, most from a cluster of neighborhoods in the south and west: Englewood,

Chicago Lawn, New City, Roseland. South Side activists feared the consis- tency of the crime reports might have a numbing effect, allowing people in the safer and whiter parts of town to tune out the distinctly personal tragedy of each shooting. On the day Flennoy was killed, dozens of activists had put on identical white T-shirts spattered with red paint, and nine of them had

lain on the lawn outside St. Sabina church in the South Side neighbor- hood of Auburn Gresh- am. “These are not just statistics,” shouted Mi- c h a e l P f l e g e r, t h e church’s pastor, when NB C  5 showe d up. “These are human be- ings.” They hoped to individualize the vic- tims, but their matching costumes only seemed to underscore the anonym- ity of the body count.

In fact, the sort of cold statistics P�eger decried had identi�ed Flennoy as a special case worthy of hands-on intervention. Almost three years ear- lier, the Chicago public schools had launched a pioneering program to determine exactly which of their 400,000 students

were most likely to get shot. Consul- tants from MIT and the University of Chicago developed algorithms to comb through archived information such as juvenile-detention reports, attendance records, and test scores, initially �ag- ging more than 200 names. Flennoy was high on the list, deemed more than twenty times more likely than the aver- age student to suffer a gunshot wound.

Monte Reel is the author of Between Man and Beast and The Last of the Tribe.

Memorial for a murder victim on 87th Street All photographs from the ongoing series South Side © Jon Lowenstein/NOOR

44 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2014

For the next two years, the school dis- trict assigned him a mentor in an at- tempt to defy the odds.

The schools’ violence-reduction program had burned through most of its funding by the time Flennoy was shot, but the core idea has been ad- opted by another city institution. Ear- ly in 2013, the Chicago Police Depart- ment launched a pilot program that would use crime data to rank thou- sands of Chicagoans according to their chances of being involved as ei- ther victim or offender in a murder. In March, each of the city’s district com- manders was handed a list of twenty names. It was a radical departure from traditional “hot spot” policing, which treats everyone in high-crime neigh- borhoods as potential victims or threats. Big data, already widely ex- ploited in such �elds as marketing and health care, had entered the territory of the beat cop. The case of Davonte Flennoy might suggest how powerful the new analytic techniques can be, but it should also serve as a warning

that predicting a death isn’t the same as saving a life.

Chicago’s foray into victim prediction began in 20 09, when President Obama appointed the city’s schools chief, Arne Duncan, to be his educa- tion secretary, and Mayor Richard M.  Daley named thirty-seven-year-old Ron Huberman to replace him. Hu b er m a n, a fo r mer neighborhood cop, had helped oversee the cre- ation of a system that sift- ed real-time data to iden- tify evolving crime hot spots and supply officers with information on sus- pects, including aliases and gang af�liations. Tout- ed by City Hall as the larg- est and most sophisticated police database in the na- tion, it won Chicago mil- lions in grant money and Huberman his reputation as a number-cruncher with a political future.

This ex-cop with two master’s degrees walked

into a school system with a well- publicized violence problem: at least 290 students would be shot by the end of the school year; thirty-four of them would die. Reports of violent incidents on school grounds were up 20 percent from 2008. Parents demanded action, and Huberman secured a federal stimulus grant, steering about $60  million over two years toward a new, data-driven violence-reduction strategy. Steven D.  Levitt, the University of Chicago “rogue economist” who co-authored the best-selling Freakonomics books, was among those asked to help develop the predictive model. Levitt, who made his name by using data to tease out hidden correlations—most famously, he sug- gested that legalized abortion could be linked to lower crime rates—was in- trigued by Huberman’s idea. Mathe- matical models had been used to calcu- late the probabilities of victimization before, but he’d never seen one applied to practical policy.

Using data provided by the school district and the police department, the economists considered basic variables such as race and gender alongside fac- tors such as test scores. They found that

their task amounted largely to quanti- fying common knowledge. Gender was the most important predictor: 97 per- cent of the students on the list were male. Another signi�cant variable was the historical per capita shooting rate of the school where the student was enrolled. Having spent time in a juvenile-detention center increased a student’s likelihood of being shot by 2.5 percentage points. Although black and Hispanic students dominated the list—only one of the 232 originally picked for the program was white—the economists determined that race itself was statistically insigni�cant as a pre- dictor in this population. What mat- tered more than being black was hav- ing poor grades. “You don’t need a statistical model to know that if you identify those kids, they are at high risk,” Levitt said. “The models help quantify some of those effects, but they

aren’t magical and they cer- tainly are no crystal ball.”

Even to some of his friends, Flen- noy didn’t seem much different from the other sophomores at Gage Park High School in 2009. “I didn’t really think of

him as being high-risk, per  se,” recalls Star Wells, who dated him throughout high school and is the mother of his son, Davon- te  Jr. “Friends he’d hang around with got him in- volved in not-so-good situ- ations, but he wasn’t like a ‘gang member.’ ” In fact, Flennoy sometimes pro- jected an image of someone who went out of his way to avoid trouble. That year, he published his �rst and only op-ed in the student news- paper, complaining that gangs on the South Side were setting “a bad example for the younger children” and that encouraging stu- dents to go to college might help combat street vio- lence. Public image aside, here are some of the salient factors that put Flennoy near the top of the at-risk list during his sophomore year: he missed more than ninety days of school, his

Gang graf�ti on the back of a closed elementary school in Englewood

REPORT 45

father was serving a five-year prison sentence on a federal drug charge, his name regularly showed up in reports of interpersonal con�icts on the school grounds, and he was a year older than most of the other students in his grade.

Two of Flennoy’s best friends were on the list as well. Freshman Dimonte Pr yor a nd s ophomore Br a ndon Harris—half brothers who see that term as too weak to describe their fra- ternal bond—had known Flennoy since 2007, when they met playing bas- ketball next to Flennoy’s house. In middle school, the three friends devel- oped a shared interest in Chicago foot- work, a fast-paced style of hip-hop dance. At house parties and shopping malls they’d circle up with rival squads and one of their guys would shuf�e to the center, skating and kicking to rhythms that pulsed upwards of 150 beats per minute. Girls watched. Adrenaline flowed. Sometimes the

scene escalated into a �ght. Shortly after Flennoy, Harrison, and Pryor be- gan high school together, their group— now about thirty members—began to call itself Rec City.

The name didn’t mean anything in particular, but its suggestion of ur- ban recreation seemed appropriate at first. In high school, however, the group’s focus shifted from footwork to self-defen se. Two of Ha r ris’s friends got into a �ght with another circle of students, many of whom Harris had known since elementary school, who began calling them- selves Hit Squad. Photos from those early days show the members of Rec City in sparsely furnished apart- ments, holding plastic cups and smil- ing, their arms around each other or their girlfriends. But one shows Pryor standing outside in a doorway, his left hand �ashing the Rec City hand sign, his right clutching a .38  Spe-

cial. Around the same time, Flennoy began to carry a 9mm.

When the school district’s analysis identi�ed the three friends as high- risk, they were assigned to the same mentor, a forty-year-old Baptist minis- ter named Stevie Powell. Every morn- ing for two years, Powell picked the boys up and drove them to school. The program found after-school jobs for all three students, and Powell made sure they reported to work on time. Sometimes he and his wife would go on a double date with one of the boys and his girlfriend, taking the younger couple out to a bowling alley or a movie. He arranged for Flennoy, Harris, and Pryor to be transferred to alternative high schools for students who had failed in traditional class- room settings.

In 2011, the designers of the school’s prediction model published a report assessing the program’s effectiveness.

A young man at a block party in Auburn Gresham jumps on a trampoline

46 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2014

Comparing the ultra-high-risk stu- dents who had received mentoring during the first year with another high-risk group of students outside the program, they found the rates of gun- shot victimization to be about the same in both groups. But the number of students receiving mentoring was so small that such comparisons were sta- tistically meaningless. “Despite a large and intensive effort,” the report con- cluded, “there is little evidence of im- proved educational outcomes and in- suf�cient power to evaluate the impact on shootings.”

As the mentorship program faced funding cuts, the Chicago Tribune re- ported on Powell’s work with the stu- dents, describing Flennoy opening up to a men’s group in a local church about his experiences of violence and his responsibilities to his son. Behind Flennoy’s bravado, Powell saw some- thing quiet and kind, a young man

with good intentions and bad role models. He challenged him to stop playacting the thug and be the ideal- ist who’d written the op-ed, who sometimes dreamed aloud about go- ing to college. Flennoy became one of the program’s success stories—he’d been on track to �unk out of school but was now preparing to graduate.

Powell lobbied program adminis- trators, college admissions of�cers, a state representative—anyone who might be able to help send Flennoy to a college somewhere outside Chicago. The Tribune article helped persuade the school program’s administrators to fund an “exploratory visit” to At- lanta Metropolitan State College in Georgia, where Flennoy’s grandmoth- er lived. Powell spent a week pleading with the college’s recruiter to over- look Flennoy’s spotty academic re- cord and unimpressive test scores. “Mr.  Powell, I have never done for a

student what I am doing for Davon- te,” Powell remembered the recruiter saying. “But I can tell this is some- thing special. We’re gonna make this work.” Powell raised several thousand dollars in donations from friends, church members, and community leaders to rent Flennoy a studio apartment near campus. In August 2011, he drove Flennoy to Midway

Airport and put him on a Georgia-bound plane.

Most homicides in Chicago are gang-related, and the police de- partment’s interest in predictive ana- lytics is partly a response to an evolv- ing gang landscape. In the 1980s and 1990s, vast stretches of the city were dominated by “nations,” several with tens of thousands of members. People who lived in neighborhoods ruled by the Gangster Disciples or the Vice Lords, for example, often knew the

Friends and relatives of Starkeisha Reed outside her Englewood home in March 2006. Reed, aged fourteen, was shot in her living room as she was preparing to leave for school

REPORT 47

gang leaders by name. But when, in the mid-1990s, federal authorities started locking up the kingpins on drug and conspiracy charges, the or- ganizational hierarchies collapsed. Entry-level gang recruits had less in- centive to fall into line. Younger kid s st a r ted for mi ng t heir ow n cliques or factions. Chicago’s annual murder rate dropped from around 900 in the early 1990s to an average of 458 between 2004 and 2011. But then, in 2012, the numbers started to rise again.

By the �rst week of that spring, the city had marked its hundredth homi- cide of the year, and its murder rate was defying a long downward trend in other major American cities. It had been an unusually mild winter, draw- ing more people out onto the streets, but police superintendent Garr y McCarthy discouraged his colleagues from blaming something so ungov-

ernable as the weather. Instead, he sometimes spoke of permissive gun regulations in neighboring states and weak sentencing laws in his own. Narcotics agents accused the Mexi- can cartels of in�aming drug-related violence. The police union blamed a staf�ng shortage. All was fodder for internal debate, but everyone seemed to agree that the killing was mostly connected to street gangs, and that those gangs had changed. Police have estimated that 625 gangs now exist in Chicago, some with only a handful of members, others with several hundred (three people is enough for a group to be considered a “gang,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice and the Chicago City Council). The esti- mate is based on traditional crime re- ports and also on “gang audits,” infor- mational sessions at which police work with neighborhood residents to connect speci�c crimes with speci�c

factions and create detailed maps marking territories and disputes.

The audits were initiated in 2010 with the help of Andrew Papachris- tos, a young sociologist at Yale who has a long personal history with the sorts of criminals the audits try to identify. In 1992, as a �fteen-year-old on Chicago’s North Side, Papachris- tos watched his parents, who owned a local restaurant, refuse to buckle under extortion threats from a neigh- borhood gang. He began to go on regular anticrime foot patrols with the Guardian Angels. After the gang burned down his parents’ restaurant, he developed a lasting obsession with �guring out how gangs work. Papa- christos has analyzed two Chicago communities—West Garfield Park and North Lawndale—that together saw 191 homicides during a recent �ve-year span, a rate more than three times that of the city as a whole.

A man lies in an alley in Grand Crossing minutes after a double shooting

48 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2014

Simply by using arrest records to identify links between individuals in those neighborhoods, he mapped a social network that consisted of about 4 percent of the neighborhoods’ pop- ulations, among whom about 40  per- cent of the homicides occurred.

At criminology seminars, Papa- christos illustrates his social-network analysis using an overhead projector. He displays two dots, which represent two men arrested for gun possession. The dots touch each other, because the men were arrested together. More dots appear, symbolizing more arrests made over time. Eventually, as more individuals are implicated in crimes together, dense clusters of dots begin to take shape. Links, both direct and indirect, can be seen within the easily de�ned clusters. “What you don’t see in this picture—and remember this is Chicago—you don’t see a hierarchy,” Papachristos explained during a 2011

seminar in New York City. “You don’t see a ‘corporate’ gang.” The clusters represent relatively small criminal groups with little division of labor and few distinctions between the types of illegal activity performed by their members.

In 2012, police had noticed that the names of a couple of factions were popping up with stunning frequency when they questioned witnesses at crime scenes. In one of the deadliest South Side police districts—Chicago Lawn—homicides had already jumped 156 percent by July, while many other districts had experienced little or no increase. That October, police would attribute the neighborhood’s rising murder rate, which they said was skewing crime data citywide, to a con�ict between two factions in Chi- cago Lawn and Englewood: Hit Squad and Rec City. In the press, the police described Rec City as a faction of the

Gangster Disciples, which wasn’t technically correct. Although some pledged a loose allegiance to that gang, others claimed kinship with the Black P Stone Rangers or the Black Disciples. Some didn’t identify with any other gang at all. The group had formed around a core cluster

of a half dozen friends who liked to dance.

A week after Flennoy got to At- lanta, while he was struggling through placement exams, a seventeen-year-old girl named Charinez Jefferson was shot in the head, chest, and back near her apartment in Englewood. The build- ing where she lived sits well inside Rec City’s declared territory, which occu- pies eight square blocks on the South Side. West 63rd Street—a busy artery of check-cashing shops, coin laun- dries, cell phone stores, and Mexican restaurants—cuts through the middle

A shop selling memorial T-shirts in Roseland

REPORT 49

of it. The side streets are lined with brick, bungalow-style houses built for the middle class in the 1920s, then abandoned to a mostly struggling underclass in the 1960s. It’s easy to see examples of what comes across as a heroic sort of residential pride: ce- ramic reindeer ornamenting snow- covered lawns in the winter, replaced by birdbaths and tidy rock gardens in the summer. But boarded-up windows in run-down apartment complexes aren’t hard to �nd, either.

Jefferson lived in one of those com- plexes, just off a corner on 64th Street where a police surveillance camera is mounted high on a streetlight. If any Rec City members ever needed refuge, from either the police or a rival clique, she’d open the doors of her building to them. Today, members of the group tell stories about how they’d lie low in the halls of her building, sometimes dozens of them at once. She went out with a good friend of Flennoy’s. Wit- nesses told police that she had begged her killer to spare her, revealing to him that she was eight months pregnant. An eighteen-year-old with ties to Hit Squad was arrested. Doctors delivered Jefferson’s baby, but the boy had suffered perma- nent brain damage. He survives in a vegetative state on life support, cared for by his grandmother.

W hen news reached Flennoy in Atlanta that Jef ferson had died, he broke down in tears. He blamed himself, telling his grandmother that Jeffer- son wouldn’t have been killed if he hadn’t left Chi- cago. He called Powell and said he couldn’t go through with college, and his old mentor tried unsuccess- fully to talk him out of coming home. After re- turning to Chicago by bus, he quickly fell in with his old friends. He told Star Wells he felt he had let people down. In the nine months that followed, she noticed that he didn’t talk much about Atlanta.

At about 10:40 p.m. on the night of June 11, 2012,

Flennoy called Wells to tell her that he was coming over. “Stay woke,” she remembers him saying, “I’m gonna stay the night at your house.” About forty-five minutes later, Flennoy’s mother called Wells to tell her he’d been shot. The alley where his body lay was four blocks outside Rec City’s territory, less than one block from the residence of the Hit Squad member who’d been charged in Jefferson’s kill- ing. Police found a 9mm under Flen- noy’s body. The story that eventually emerged on the streets was one of mistaken identity: Flennoy and a cou- ple of friends had �red shots in the di- rection of a group of men, believing them to be Hit Squad members. When Flennoy realized that they were not who he had thought, he tried to apologize. One of Flennoy’s companions yelled something and ran off, prompting retaliatory fire and leaving Flennoy exposed. To date, no one has been arrested for his killing.

At t he f u neral, F len noy wa s dressed in his best gray suit. The printed programs handed out at the door honored his intelligence, kind- ness, and talents, which existed “in

spite of the overwhelming odds and statistics so heavily stacked against him.” Friends from Rec City pressed tightly into the large chapel, helping to pack it beyond its capacity of near- ly a thousand people. According to the general principles of social- network theory, they faced a greater risk of being gunshot victims them-

selves, simply by being part of that crowd.

The CPD’s predictive-analytics formula is being developed directly across Interstate 94 from U.S. Cellular Field, home of the White Sox. In a glassy and light-�lled research building at the Illinois Institute of Technology, you’ll �nd pharmaceutical logos in the lobby and offices with brain scans projected on high-de�nition screens. Everything inside feels clean and well- funded—a clinically pristine counter- point to the rowdy disarray of a met- ropolitan police station. Here, Miles Wernick is leading the team of engi- neers that builds the tools behind the police department’s “hot list.”

Wernick, the head of IIT’s Medical Imaging Research Center, also co-

founded a company that designs programs to help diagnose the existence and severity of cognitive diseases such as Alzheim- er’s. Criminology was for- eign territory to him be- fore he applied for a $3 million grant from the National Institute of Jus- tice (the R&D arm of the Justice Department) to partner with the Chicago police. But Wernick real- ized that the same tech- nology used to seek pat- terns within a person’s medical data could be ap- plied to crime data. In- stead of combing through the information embed- ded in brain scans and biochemical tests, he’s now mining the country’s rich- est metropolitan-crime database, sorting through years’ worth of incident maps and arrest logs.

As with the predictive model developed for the

Some of the more than 5,500 guns collected by the Chicago Police Department in its 2012 buyback

50 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2014

schools, one of his algorithms gener- ates a list of individuals ranked ac- cording to their likelihood of being involved in a particular crime, in this case homicide. The �rst list that Wer- nick’s model produced, in March 2013, included 17,207 names, all peo- ple who had appeared in Chicago’s criminal database during the preced- ing �ve years. Those near the top of the list were estimated to be at least 500 times as likely as the average Chicagoan to be either the victim or the perpetrator of a homicide. Those near the bottom were judged about 17  percent likelier than average to murder or be murdered.

Unlike the school system’s model, the police’s version searches for evi- dence of social connections between the high-risk individuals themselves and factors those connections in as additional risk, along with other as- pects of a person’s criminal record. The city’s crime database can reveal interpersonal relationships in a few different ways. Known gang af�lia- tions cited in police reports can es- tablish direct links. Additionally, about one third of all arrests involve more than one alleged offender, and those co-arrests reveal connections between thousands of people. Using such infor mation, the computer model can calculate indirect contacts to four degrees of separation. When a person is linked by co-arrests to lots of high-risk people, his or her own risk increases.

If there’s anything that’s guaran- teed to annoy a beat cop, it’s being told by someone who is not a beat cop how to police his domain. When the CPD’s district commanders were handed the names generated by the computer model, eyes rolled. “We got some resistance from the �eld,” said Steve Caluris, the Chicago police commander tasked with applying the data analysis on a practical level. “They’re looking at Joe, Steve, and Tom as guys who are out there, guys that they know and want to target. And all of a sudden we’re giving them a couple different names. And they’re like, ‘These aren’t the guys that we do.’ ”

A lot of rank-and-�le cops believe that �guring out who’s likely to be involved in a homicide isn’t too dif�-

cult. What’s tricky is stopping the crime. “I’ve yet to see a computer make an arrest,” says Pat Camden, who became a Chicago cop in 1970 and is now spokesman for the union that represents the city’s of�cers and detectives. Camden notes that Mayor Rahm Emanuel, shortly after taking office in 2011, cut about 1,400 un- �lled police-of�cer positions from the city budget. The kind of proactive legwork that a hot list demands is impossible, he says, when the city tries to cut costs by investing in com- puters instead of personnel. “If I know you’re a bad guy and I don’t have time to look for you,” Camden says, “it doesn’t do me any good.”

During the �rst half of 2013, mur- ders in Chicago dropped almost 35  percent compared with 2012, but the police would not, or could not, provide a speci�c example of how the probability scale had been applied to deter crime during that time. In July, the department announced that one of its district commanders had begun dropping off letters at the residences of the individuals on their hot lists, letting them know that they had been singled out. The police depart- ment and its technical partners speak of the predictive model as a modest �rst step, emphasizing that it might eventually be paired with counseling or job-hunting assistance. Wernick would also like to see the police’s tools used in ways that are more simi- lar to the schools’. “There’s a social- services side to this,” he told me.

But the schools’ strategy of assign- ing mentors to high-risk students cost about $15,000 annually per student—an untenable expense for a cash-strapped police department. Even if such a direct prevention strategy were affordable, the schools’ experience still hasn’t provided much evidence that it would be worth it. Backers of the program make the reasonable point that Flennoy might have been shot even sooner had he not participated in the program, and that during the years he was men- tored he turned his academic trajec- tory around. That’s a significant achievement in itself, but the goal of the program was to save lives.

“When you look at a geographic map and it says, ‘Here’s a hot spot on

the corner of 63rd and Knox,’ you know what to do,” Papachristos ex- plained. “You send police cars to that area to deter crime or cool things down. But when you say, ‘This is a group of people who are in a really high-risk social network,’ it’s not clear exactly how to interpret that for polic- ing.” Putting someone on a hot list, Papachristos pointed out, is far simpler than getting someone off of one. “That this kid came back from Atlanta after his friend was shot is really, really tell-

ing about how strong that social network was.”

About six months after I �rst met with Dimonte Pryor and Bran- don Harris about their friend’s mur- der, I picked up Pryor outside a con- venience store on 63rd Street to talk about what he’d been doing to avoid sharing Flennoy’s fate. The neigh- borhood crawled with police cars; we passed three spaced about a block apart along 63rd Street. Each car was angled to the curb, and each had a young man with his hands on the hood, assuming the position. As I drove, Pr yor placed a call to a friend, and together they strategized about a drug test Pryor was sched- uled to take the next day as part of a court appearance. A few weeks earli- er, police had found heroin on him. It wa s t he second time in four months he’d been arrested for pos- session with intent.

I’d spent a lot of time listening to Pryor tell me how important he be- lieves it is to maintain self-control and focus when trying to survive on the South Side, and I’d often won- dered why he keeps getting picked up. W hen I asked him what he thought about the fact that drug dealing increased his risk of getting shot, he let out a long breath. “That’s how I make money,” he said, almost whispering. “It’s how I live.” Com- pared with the old corporate-style gangs, Rec City’s dealing is small- time and provisional. But it keeps Pryor in trouble with the law. The district cops, he said, know him well: “Basically, I’m a guy whose name is just ringing.” The more I pressed him about his choices, the more fatalistic he got. “Whatever’s gonna happen to you’s gonna happen to you,” he said.

REPORT 51

“Whether they catch up with you now, whether they catch up with you later, whether they catch up with you ten years from now.”

Pryor’s brother Harris sees things dif ferently. He told me t hat he didn’t tolerate that sort of resigna- tion. At twenty-two, he is a year older than Pryor, and if anyone can be considered the founder of Rec City, it’s him. We met each other for the �rst time in a downtown diner for breakfast. About an hour into the conversation, I asked whether he feared his past in Rec City might catch up with him. He wasn’t con- cerned, he said; he knew how to carry himself on the streets, how to avoid danger when things got hot, and he’d recently distanced himself from Rec City, moving out of the old neighborhood into an apartment a couple miles away. He was the fa- ther of a one-year-old girl, and he now considered himself a “neutron”: someone who’d left the core of the clique and wasn’t involved in the con�ict with Hit Squad. “It’s easy to walk away,” he told me. “I walked away a lot of times after I did stuff. Like the other day, I thought about my daughter. Every action now, I think about my daughter.”

About ten minutes later, however, after the conversation moved on to new topics, he began to look uncom- fortable, physically uneasy. Harris is a big g uy, a linebacker in high school, whose nickname, “Six-Four,” was given to him before he’d stopped growing. I thought maybe he felt cramped in the tight booth, but, as he explained, that wasn’t why he’d shifted his bulk uncomfortably on the bench. Just weeks before, he’d been shot.

Harris had been visiting his aunt, who lives within Hit Squad’s territo- ry. He knew showing his face outside at night would be asking for trouble, so he waited until the next morning to go home. At about seven a.m., he walked out the door and down 67th Street. A couple of blocks later, he heard someone shout, “That’s Six- Four!” He was near an alley when he saw someone running at him. “In their mentality,” he told me, “they think I’m still on that—think I’m probably still a gangbanger.”

He darted toward an iron fence separating the alley from the back yard of one of the neighborhood bungalows, hoping to run through the gate and cut between two proper- ties. The gate was locked. As he climbed the fence and prepared to vault himself over the sharp points of the decorative �nials, a bullet tore into his thigh, just under his but- tocks. Before he hit the ground on the other side, a second bullet hit his inner thigh.

Over the next few months, that close call seemed to motivate him to distance himself even further from life in the clique. He’d worked in mainte- nance for the city’s parks departments the previous summer, and he was de- termined to get a full-time job. He took a test to get licensed as a security guard, and he passed. No security jobs came his way, but he continued to ap- ply for any openings he could find, particularly those that might take him out of his neighborhood. Eventually he found work at a Walmart on the North Side.

In late December, on the day Da- vonte Flennoy would have turned twenty-one, Harris told me that Rec City was throwing a party. “It’s gon- na be packed,” he predicted. “Proba- bly like eighty people.” It was more like 200, crowded into a cleared-out beauty salon. Many wore T-shirts silk-screened with pictures of Flen- noy. Others wore photos of a friend they called Delorean, whose life was also being celebrated in remem- brance of his “death day.” Harris ar- rived at about ten p.m. He and Pryor mixed with the crowd, sipping Hen- nes sy, F len noy’s favor ite d r i n k. Within a couple of hours, the police arrived and broke up the party, but it moved to a house and lasted almost until dawn. Harris rekindled his friendship with some of the guys who had come up with him in the clique. Some had recently become fathers. Others had been in and out of jail. “When we had to leave,” Harris told me later, “we tell every- one we loved them. I ain’t never said that before. But I want to see them all again.” He left wearing one of the T-shirts with Flennoy’s picture on it. Printed on the front were the words rec city for life. n

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Manuel Antonio Park; Keel-billed Toucan; Jungle Rainforest Hike

Costa Rica Natural Paradise 9 Days $1095

Welcome to a great vacation at an affordable price . With Caravan, you see exotic birds and wildlife, hike in jungle rainforests, view volcanoes, soak in hot springs, cruise through biological reserves and relax on tropical ocean beaches.

Your Costa Rica vacation includes all meals, all hotels, a great itinerary, all activities, all airport transfers, tour transportation by luxury coach and the service of professional tour directors. Join the smart shoppers and experienced travelers who rely on Caravan to handle all the details while you and your family enjoy a well-earned, worry-free vacation.

Caravan’s strong buying power gives you great vacations at prices much lower than you can find anywhere. Call now for choice dates!

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1-800-Caravan Caravan•com Affordable Guided Vacations. LATIN AMERICA Guatemala, Tikal, Antigua 10 days $1195 Costa Rica 9 days $1095 Panama, Panama Canal 8 days $1195

CANADA Nova Scotia, P.E.I. 10 days $1395 Canada Rockies, Glacier 9 days $1595

UNITED STATES Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion 8 days $1395 Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone 8 days $1295 California Coast, Yosemite 8 days $1295 New England, Fall Foliage 8 days $1295

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