Gang leaders for half a century
I finished Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day with an interesting insight: wherever government fails in its most basic functions — defense, controlling crime, settling disputes, dealing with natural disasters — gangs arise to fill the needs. As in countries which criminalize drugs or alcohol, the gangs make a killing trading black market goods. In this case, the goods are governance, and the payment in kind is that the community looks the other way while the gangs conduct their primary lines of business: the Black Kings selling crack in Chicago, the Taliban selling opium in Afghanistan, the LeT training jihadis or D-Company’s extortion racket in Bombay.
The book’s scope is not so broad, of course. What it does with Chicago alone is fascinating, ripping back the covers on widespread corruption. In the projects, writes Venkatesh, neither police nor ambulances came around. So the gangs took on the job of policing petty criminals, tamping down random violence (which is bad for crack sales), settling disputes with beatings, funding small community celebrations, and having women (unlikely to be stopped by hospital guards) take the infirm or injured to the hospital. As with the Taliban, because the host community was related to the gangs by blood, they were unlikely to turn them in.
As in slums like Dharavi, the weak government meant tenants had to step up, and they became tremendously entrepreneurial in both legitimate trade and petty scams. Women in the project Venkatesh studied would sell candy and dress hair from their apartments. Tenants became adept at charging rent to squatters, extracting money from the crack gang in exchange for storing guns, drugs and cash, and bartering favors. They learned to leave men’s names off leases and hide their day jobs to stay eligible for welfare. Women traded sex for food and diapers; young men slept with older women in exchange for a warm place to sleep at night. The gang took a cut from everyone ranging from squatters to parking lot mechanics; tenant leaders also collected vigs. Like a Bombay chawl, families would pool their money to pay bribes to ensure one stove, one shower and one toilet on a shared floor would always function.
The role of the police was even more interesting. They knew who the gang leaders are but on the whole preferred to leave them be, because organized crime is less violent than low-level anarchy. This, interestingly, is the same argument people make for why Bombay is safer after dark than Delhi: the dons enforce their sales territories and take out competitors.
The Chicago PD was also somewhat of a gang itself, raiding gang members for cars, jewelry and cash — off the books — whenever they became jealous of the money flowing in. A violent cop who disliked Venkatesh’s closeness with the gang he was researching broke into his car looking for his notes; the sociologist felt relatively safe in the projects but was afraid of the police.
The absence of basic local governance empowered petty empire builders, local tenant leaders in the projects who doled out favors and relied on the gang to mete out punishments. The most powerful leader promised to direct customers to a specific cornershop in exchange for cases of liquor. She then bartered the liquor for supplies she could hand out to women in need. She charged bribes to get basic maintenance done in the apartments. The same rogue cop who targeted Venkatesh’s car apparently roughed up a tenant whose only sin was to oppose the leader’s decree.
This, then, is what you get when government doesn’t function: alternate providers usurping the monopoly powers of the government to provide quick justice in exchange for their corrupt pursuits. If that describes crack gangs and jihadis, it also has resonance with the situation in India, where the justice system barely functions, gangsters plug the gaps, criminals man the Parliament, and the price for the privilege of receiving a passport in six months after paying a hefty bribe is to avert your gaze from large-scale political thievery.
Gang Leader for a Day is a quick, captivating read. The human race always finds new, innovative ways to disappoint me 
on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008, 11:48 am in Issues, Law, Literature, Politics › 
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An extension of your hypothesis: where the governnment is unable to provide public security or enforce justice on violaters the public wil step in to do that on their own which helps explain, to some extent at least, the recurrence and regularity of mob violence in India. A homework exercise is the choice of targets by the perpetrators…
Which leads to a prediction: if there’s no clear and satisfying (to the Indian public, that is) resolution of what transpired recently in Mumbai we ought to expect mob justice and nothing else. All the more important for the govts to resolve this….
Great Observation here Manish…this book was so fun to read and I’m grateful that the author took the time to not only write it but also spend such a long time in the hood, risking his life and career. There’s a reason why there isn’t more awareness of the inner workings of ghettos and that’s because they are just that…ghettos - that are disenfranchised and ignored until gentrification kicks in or impoverished urban elements begin to spillover into middle class districts.
The Wire was one of the best shows ever because of how they portrayed this relationship between gangs, cops, and government.
Do yourself a favor and the next time you are at the video store trying to decide to get either “The Love Guru” or “Hancock”, dont get any of those and try to rent “The Wire”.
OK - should this be on my Amazon non-fic list as part of the year end book splurge? I’ll take your word.
I have Dark Side and Forever War in there.
Was thinking of Bishop’s Daughter but i think the juiciest parts were in the New Yorker.
I thought it was an excellent book, and I appreciate your comparative point - in some ways, reading Gang Leader next to Maximum City is revealing and expands upon your point about slum life in India. I think the most tragic part of the book for me was the end, when the projects were torn down, the citizens displaced like refugees, the social networks they’d formed broken.
Chicago is so poorly governed, it’s beyond bizarre (well, one prominent example is in the news right now).
I think one of the problems is that the city’s elite thinks getting the olympics and having cloud-gate and Millineum Park are somehow all that matters - the crime rate, the horrible public schools, the pot-hole filled streets. Well, that’s actual governing and also, all that matters about actual governing is what graft the politician can get.
Sorry to thread jack, but, really, local politics is getting me down. Chicago is, and always has been, a governing embarrassment. It’s almost like it could use a politician of national stature to say something about the corruption…….
Obama could be an opportunity, and I don’t mean that in a vaguely hopey, all-will-be-will-in-Obamaland way, but based on historical precedent.The election of FDR (who had earlier been governor of New York) as president, combined with then-mayor LaGuardia’s reformist tendencies, cleared up the cesspool that was New York’s Tammany Hall because of their combined political will. If Obama actually chooses to expend political capital on this issue at some point in the future (he probably doesn’t want to touch it with a bargepole right now), and has at least a couple of capable local leaders on his side, things just might change.
On the upside, it is proof that paramilitary networks can be dismantled by the state. What we need now is an example of how the state can take a situation like that and actually fill the void in positive ways. Because that’s what’s needed in Pakistan’s border areas right now.