Finished up Gang Leader for a Day this morning. A couple of highlights (or lowlights) stood out to me about life in urban poverty:

1) The story of Catrina:
Catrina had once told me that her father had sexually abused her when she was a teenager, so she ran away from home...

Catrina had a love of knowledge and would participate in discussion about nearly anything..."I will do something important one day," she liked to tell me, in her most serious voice..."I will make a difference for black people. Especially black women."

...over the July Fourth holiday, she decided to visit her siblings in Chicago's south suburbs...from what I was told, her father heard that she was visiting and tracked her down. A skirmish followed. Catrina got caught between her brother, who was protecting her, and her angry father. A gun went off, and the bullet hit Catrina, killing her instantly.

Words cannot express my heart for young ladies like Catrina, caught up in a web of violence, a cycle that they did not begin and cannot end, lives of potential ended before they could make a difference.

2) The lives of women tenants:
The most forceful stories were the tales of abuse. Every single woman had been beaten up by a boyfriend (who was usually drunk at the time), some almost fatally. Every one of them lived in fear for days or weeks, waiting for the same man to return...

When it became obvious that the housing authority supported a management system based on extortion and corruption, the women decided their best option was to shrug their shoulders and accept their fate...

Then there were all the resources to be procured in exchange for sex: groceries from the bodega owner, rent forgiveness from the CHA, assistance from a welfare bureaucrat, preferential treatment from a police officer for a jailed relative. The women's explanation for using sex as currency was consistent and pragmatic: If your child was in danger of going hungry, then you did whatever it took to fix the problem. The women looked pained when they discussed using their bodies to obtain these necessities; it was clear that this wasn't their first - or even their hundredth - preference...

"When these men start drinking, you can't talk to them. You just need to protect yourself - and don't forget, they beat up the kids, too."

I remember reading in a Time magazine article a while back about the survival tactics employed by the south Sudanese in order to get food and water. If the men left the village to get the resources necessary, they would be killed. The women had to go; they would just be raped and allowed to return to the village. I asked myself how I could let my wife leave every morning, knowing full well that she had a strong chance of being raped, but knowing no other options, she would have to go. It's the same here, the women don't want to sell their bodies, but they have no other options.

3) The corruption of the CPD:
Why, for instance, did he ("Officer Reggie") try to reduce gun violence by making sure that the gangs were the only ones who had guns?...

(After a group of cops raid a gang party...)"F---ing cops do this all the time...As soon as they find out we're having a party, they raid it."

"Why? And why don't they arrest you?...And how do you know they were cops?

"It's a game...We make all this f---ing money, and they want some."...

I had a hard time believing that the police would so brazenly rob a street gang. But it didn't seem like the kind of thing JT would lie about...

On a few occasions, I'd been riding in a car with some gang members when a cop stopped the car, made everyone get out, and summarily called for a tow truck. On a few other occasions, the cop let the driver keep the car but took everyone's jewelry and cash. To me the strangest thing was that the gang members barely protested. It was as if they were playing a life-size board game, the rules of which were well established and immutable, and on this occasion they'd simply gotten a bad roll of dice...

Once he left, I asked one of the pimps, Timothy, about "Officer Jerry." "He gets to come in the building whenever he wants and get a piece of the action," he said. Timothy told me that Sonny, the man that "Officer Jerry" had just beaten, stole cars for a living but had apparently neglected to pay his regular protection fee to "Officer Jerry." "We always joke that whenever "Officer Jerry" runs out of money, he comes in here and beats up a nigger...He got me once last year. Took two hundred bucks and then my girl had to suck his d---. A--hole.

This may have been the part of the book that floored me the most. In a way I knew this corruption and extortion happened with great frequency, but now Sudhir was experiencing it first-hand. In a way it seems fair, the cops don't have the manpower to shut down the drug trade (as long as the demand is high it will go on), so they extort money from the dealers and in many cases pump it back into positive causes in the community. Yet on the other hand, this is happening in the United States of America, the land of the free, the moral leader of the world, and the police administration turn a blind eye to it. It just doesn't seem right to me. But in reality, those with the authority have the power and the others are just players in the game. The world we live in...