Curfews and time out won't stop killings in Chicago

"One shooting, one murder is one too many," said Jody Weis, the new superintendent of the Chicago Police Department.

Of course he is correct.

No one deserves to be murdered.

Can we all agree on that?

But the fact is that not all murders are created equal -- at least when it comes to how much attention the public gives to them.

If they were, then the public outrage would be the same, no matter who was the victim.

But not all murders are created equal.

You wouldn't know that by listening to Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. The mayor and his police department are trying to clear up a rash of murders that dot the city map like chickenpox on a toddler.

There were more than 40 gun attacks last week, keeping the morgue and hospital trauma centers very busy. Twelve people were shot and killed, including five in a single attack.

After the quintuple gunshot killing in a South Side home, one police commander said he hoped to "bring this to a successful conclusion." I think he was talking about successfully concluding the investigation with an arrest or two. There is really nothing successful to conclude when five people have been found inexplicably shot to death.

Mayor Daley's solution to the problem is this:

"What we're asking parents to do is know where your children are. It's going to be a long summer and parents better capture this responsibility."

He makes it sound as easy as a friendly game of capture the flag, one that would have to end a half-hour earlier under his new teen curfew plan.

Parental enforcement might actually be the answer to the horrible body count that we've seen so far this year … if we were talking about innocent adolescents doing the killing or being killed.

But in about the majority of the dreadful killings, that is simply not the case.

According to police records, about 80 percent of the murders in Chicago so far this year were part of street gang warfare. At least half of the most recent shootings are attributed to gang violence, according to police.

Chicago's current gush of gun murders is not the result of sandlot baseball arguments boiling over, random carjackings, tourist attacks or even domestic arguments.

Usually the victim was hunted down like a breed of urban prey. They were executed by someone who considered them an enemy in an ongoing gang drug war.

While there might have been a time in the lives of both the victims and the murderers that parents could have stopped the downward spiral, once the hunting starts it is a little late. Curfews, grounding and the bad-boy chair probably won't do much to change the behavior of a teenager with a 9 mm pistol and a demanding gang boss.

Last Friday Mayor Daley convened a violence summit at city hall, inviting police leaders and officials from the schools, social service agencies and religious groups.

"Why is it that younger people, at younger ages, are having difficulties or challenges and all of a sudden take a gun and fire a gun?" Daley asked at the event.

The mayor's answer to that question has always been to blame the easy availability of guns. But there are many more guns in Chicago than there are murderers. In other words, the majority of people who have guns in the city do not use them to kill other people.

The pot currently boiling over in Chicago is the same one that has boiled over in bloodshed at many other times: organized gang crimes, financed by illegal drug sales.

These are not "youth gangs."

According to the National Drug Intelligence Center, there are 125 gangs in Chicago with a total membership of 125,000. The leaders of those gangs, who are the actual individuals behind the murders, are well beyond their teenage years.

Most of the city's gang leaders are in their 40s and 50s, according the most recent intelligence report by the Chicago Crime Commission. A few top street gang bosses are in their 60s. The oldest gang leader in Chicago turns 70 next month.

It almost sounds like the situation in Iraq, doesn't it? Aging sectarian leaders deploy young people onto the streets to carry out their dirty work.

And just like Iraq, the city's response is to flood violence-prone neighborhoods with heavily armored patrols and tactical units intended to deter open warfare.

You could call it Mayor Daley's "surge."