The four young sons of Maria Lena stood on a pavement on the south side of Chicago, offering to wash cars for passing motorists. “We’ll be here tomorrow as well,” said Nathan Castaneda, 12, the eldest. They were trying to raise money for the funeral of Gustavo Garcia, a ten-year-old boy shot dead around the corner from their house.
A family friend had knocked on their door, asking for their father. “He was like, ‘Tavo’s been shot’,” said Nathan. “He was really close with us.”
Gustavo had been in a car with his stepfather last Friday night when a man in a grey Chevrolet pulled up and opened fire. His stepfather’s friend in the front passenger seat was shot in the face and chest. Gustavo was hit in the back and died at a local hospital.
Ten other people died that weekend and more than 40 suffered gunshot wounds, in violence that seemed almost ordinary by recent standards. The previous weekend, during the four-day holiday for Independence Day, more than 100 people were reported shot.
After years of falling crime, violent crime — and gun crime in particular — is on the rise in the big cities and Chicago has become the unhappy symbol of this, the country’s new gun crime capital. Last year 752 people were shot dead, a 50 per cent rise on the previous year. So far this year the figure is 388.
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“The busiest time is between 8pm and 4am,” said Dr Amir Vafa, a trauma surgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in the western suburbs. “On a given weekend, we might see seven to ten patients that have been shot per night.”
The hospital has metal detectors to screen visitors, and social workers who ensure that “two people that were trying to shoot each other don’t end up in the same room”, he said.
Police have blamed the violence on a small number of gang members, in a small number of neighbourhoods. They have also noted a rise in the use of assault rifles and high calibre weapons, which cause more serious injuries.
Dr Vafa sometimes sees the same patient more than once and “when we are doing x-rays, we see other bullets in their bodies and they say: ‘Oh, I was shot before. That’s an old bullet.’” As he would with a patient with high blood pressure, he suggests that they alter their lifestyle, though he accepts they may not listen. “I don’t know what it’s like to be in their shoes,” he said.
The social divisions are stark. “Chicago is the most segregated city in America,” said Father Michael Pfleger, a priest who has worked for more than 40 years on the south side of Chicago. “It’s like two different worlds.”
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In the city centre, gleaming skyscrapers line the shore of Lake Michigan and every other block you run into cranes and building work. Yet parts of the west and south sides of the city are pocked with boarded up rows of houses and you can drive for miles without seeing a shop. “I consistently say that the south and west side of Chicago is like a third world country,” he said.
He reels off a list of statistics: 11 largely black and Hispanic neighbourhoods, of the 77 in Chicago, suffer by far the most violence — 13 times greater, by one estimate, than better off white neighbourhoods. They have unemployment rates three or four times the national average, more adults returning from prison and children who are far more likely to attend a failing school.
“And in 41 years I have never seen worse relations between the police and the community,” Father Pfleger said. “Put it all together and it’s not surprising we have the violence we have.” He works at St Sabina’s on the south side, the largest African-American Catholic church in the city, which runs programmes that attempt to separate young men from gangs. “We have four former gang guys on staff,” he said.
At Build, a charity that runs sport and education programmes in the Austin neighbourhood, Terrence Smith, 33, talks of performing interventions in schools and on the street.
Chicago has a long history of organised crime, but the recent rise in violence has been blamed on successful operations to lock up the leaders of long established gangs in the 1990s. “Most of the gang chiefs were put away,” Mr Smith said. “That took away the order.” Smaller cliques sprang up. What were they fighting for? “You can’t say territory, because they don’t own anything,” Mr Smith said. “They say this is my block and this is where I’m from and you can’t come here.”
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Helping young men to leave these gangs was a delicate process, he said. Sometimes a member must submit to a beating before he can leave. “There are different rituals,” Mr Smith said. “We just try to reason with people. You are trying to make sure that no one loses face. So the kid can leave, and the organisation . . . won’t lose face either.”
Back at St Sabina’s, Father Pfleger, 68, has a blunter approach. “If someone is killed in our neighbourhood we put a $5,000 reward up, to catch the killer. We have given out nearly 30 of them.”
He has taken on local gang members from the pulpit and on the street. “I have had hits put on my life,” he said. “But I’m here talking to you.”
One threat came from a gang member known as Cartoon, whose real name was Phillip Dupree, during a turf war between two cliques named G-ville and Killa Ward. Father Pfleger had called out his name during an anti-violence march. “He put a $10,000 bounty on my head,” he said. But later Dupree came into church. “He wanted to turn his life around. I helped him.”
Not long after that, Dupree was in a car with his grandmother when someone opened fire on their vehicle. “She lived, thank God,” he said. But Dupree was killed.
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• The citizens of Baltimore hope to celebrate an entire weekend in which no one is murdered (Will Pavia writes). The murder rate has been a blight on the city in the past two years. In 2015 344 people were killed — including 43 in May alone — and 318 died last year. Now an alliance of local organisations has called for a weekend-long ceasefire. They said: “This ceasefire is the product of Baltimore residents not only being exhausted by homicides, but believing that Baltimore can have a murder-free weekend if everyone takes responsibility.”