Angry Planet - The War In America's Backyard

Episode Date: March 22, 2019

America is at war across the world, but it’s also at war at home. For decades, violent crime has been at record lows across the country—but that’s slowly changing as cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, and St. Louis see terrifying amounts of murders and gang violence. To make things worse, the way cops do their job in some of these cities looks more like counterinsurgency than it does community policing.Here to help us unpack what’s going on is Patrick Burke, Burke is a freelance journalist who covered the war at home for War Is Boring, Al Jazeera and the Huffington Post  He’s also a former researcher at the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The gang itself is there to make more money. In order to make more money and expand, you have to use violence. And in order to use violence, you have to be organized. You know, one of the big things that people have to remember is, you know, a lot of these, a lot of the guys have never been approached by a report. ever. The Chicago media generally gets most of their crime reporting from the police. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Derek Cannon. America is at war across the world, but it's also at war at home. For decades, violent crime has been at record lows across the country, but that's slowly changing as

cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, and St. Louis see terrifying amounts of murders and gang violence. To make things worse, the way cops do their job in some of these cities looks more like counterinsurgency than it does community policing. Here to help us unpack what's going on is Patrick Burke. Burke is a freelance journalist who covered the war at home for Wars Boring, Al Jazeera, and the Huffington Post. He's also a former researcher at the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism. Pat, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having you. So, Pat, what are the hotspots for organized violence in America? Well, the ones I'm most familiar with are Chicago and Baltimore.

I know that there's some organized violence in New York and L.A. as well, but those are the ones that I'm most familiar with and have the highest per capita rates of violence, meaning for 100,000 people to include some smaller places like Clinton, Michigan, and other places, actually in Michigan, too. All right, so what are the differences between Baltimore and Chicago? And what are those differences tell us about what's going on? That's a really interesting question. So one of the big differences between Baltimore and Chicago is size.

So a lot of the gangs are really geographically focused in Baltimore. While in Chicago, there are a lot more, there's like really two sections, the left side and the south side. So they're like a little more spread out. And then on the south side, you see gangs even more spread out because they no longer have the projects to kind of keep them together. A lot of the variation that you see in the levels of violence do have to do with geographic density. But then also most importantly, especially for Chicago, it has a lot to do with drugs. So there's kind of this Factually incorrect view

Especially in Chicago That gangs are all small clicks And aren't really organized And most of the violence is just personal Kids Facebook stuff And that's what I reported when I first got here Because that's what everyone tells you But once I've

You know, spent almost three years on this What I realized is that's actually not true at all. So when you look at the south side, they're mostly black gangs, so they don't really have the same connects to the heroin and fentanyl pipeline that comes into Mexico. And WBZ, a local NPR affiliate, did essentially they mapped out where all the big drug seizures were. And you can see they're mostly on the west side, and mostly along the heroin highway along 290, which brings in a lot of more wealthy people from the suburbs to buy drugs. And you can also see along that heroin highway, that's where most of the violence is happening in the Austin, West Garfield and East Garfield neighborhood.

And so, I mean, this is really not a story of irrational kids shooting each other. Yes, that happens, but that happened. a lot in the 90s when they were more organized. When you look geographically at where these wars are being had, these are over territory. And the most severe conflicts

in terms of death and shootings happen in the places that have the highest overdoses. And I've mapped that out. And then when you talk to the people that are involved in these things, that's what they say are the most deadly, as long as lasting, and most severe.

And then research backs this up. There's a famous article about, it essentially showed that there's a correlation between organization of gangs and a number of shootings and deaths that they actually produce. And that's because the gang itself is there to make more money. In order to make more money and expand, you have to use violence. And in order to use violence, you have to be organized. Right, because the only way to settle a decision,

dispute in a black market is with violence or one of the only ways. Right, exactly. It's one of the only ways and it's the most consistent way of doing things. It's really, as I've seen a lot in Chicago, these wars almost always end when the conflicts become very severe and there's one side that's revealed through fighting. information is revealed as the most powerful side. And then the other side will concede and they'll have some type of terms. And a lot of times that does involve some type of outside mediation of some people they

respect or an NGO that they respect, but those power dynamics kind of have to come into play because obviously as Jeff Sessions and everyone else really, that looks at this as said, like, you know, there's no legal mediation for these things. All right, but it's not all cut and dry drug violence, I guess I'll call it. Can you tell us about the black gorilla family, like who they are and how they kind of complicate this narrative? Well, yeah, so the BGF essentially, so they're one of the biggest prison gangs, prison-based gangs in the U.S. And they came into Baltimore and took over by force from the bloods and to the lesser extent, the Crips. What I reported on two years ago when I was there is essentially I showed that even

though they took over, they took over in a really quick way and it just led to a massive fracturing of BGF itself. So even though a lot of people changed their name to Black Gorilla family on the streets and they started, you know, enjoying the supply of drugs, that is given to gangs when they change names. That's how and why gangs are able to take over an area is some person has a connect to a large drug supplier. That group of people change their name. So yeah, that's how it happens.

But at the same time, there is leadership decapitation in the prison itself. The guy that was leading this kind of malamation of BGF. on the streets was sent to federal prison, and he actually became a police informant, which created even more leadership fractures. And so it kind of turned to complete and total chaos

when Baltimore, after the Freddie Gray tragedy, the Baltimore police pulled back on policing massively, just like the Chicago police did. And with that fracturing, they were unable to keep that, you know, single party rule essentially. And when the fracturing, or when the police pulled back, the group started fighting between each other. What I don't know, and something that I'm curious about looking back to later, two years later,

is was the cause of that violence really because they were so fractured, or was this over more like drug disputes? I'm not sure anymore. I think with the way that I've found that out in Chicago, I would have to go back to Baltimore and see if this was, if what happened there is actually a little more similar to Chicago or if it really was kind of just fracturing. Okay, but what I kind of want to know is there's an ideological agenda to the BGF as well, right?

Yeah. And what is that ideological agenda? Well, it's really unclear. So, yes, the guy that started it in Baltimore anyways, pulled from the guy from California that started it, which is this like essentially a cessationist movement like you would see in an insurgency. So they had this idea essentially of black autonomy in Baltimore where BGF would start out using, you know, tactics like drugs. selling and stuff like that in order to gain enough resources to contest the state, the state being the United States government and the Baltimore municipality,

and eventually gain autonomy just like the Palestinians want or the Uyghurs, and then that they would kind of be their own state within a state. Which is interesting because literally zero of the black people, black gangs I've ever, or Hispanic gangs really in Chicago, that I've come into contact with a spouse similar things. And so, you know, if we're looking at this through the lens of insurgency, a lot of times ideology helps to make a group more cohesive and run better, sometimes, sometimes. So, you know, like, on its face, that should have helped a lot. But what one of the guys that was like really involved in all of this who was one of my informants

said like you know it just really never it never took off because the indoctrination never really took place the the decapitation of the leadership happened so quickly after there was just a few years after he wrote this black book where all of this kind of stuff is espoused that the troops essentially quote unquote never really were able to get indoctrinated before he got taken down and exposed the total hypocrite of the now you keep calling this an insurgency and i'm kind of interested in that word you know a lot of a lot of these words been throwing around counterinsurgency insurgency when it comes to you america's gun and gang violence do you think that's a militarization an over militarization of what's what's what's

the issue is, specifically in, let's say, Chicago or Baltimore? Well, I don't, I know way more about Chicago's policing than Baltimore. So I'll speak more to that. I've heard, so I've never heard cops refer to it as counterinsurgency or even polling from that ideal. I've pointed it out to some cops and like, oh, yeah, it is kind of similar. But I've never really heard the leadership that way. I know some departments have, and I know a lot of the.

a lot of the visuals that go on with, you know, police with literally tanks, looking, you know, like up-armored zombies and stuff like that. I know that that makes it look like it's coined, but essentially kind of the link that I've made to counterinsurgency and what the police, especially in Chicago, have been doing, essentially what I should have made more clear is I'm scoping out like assaults right so there's no like offensive on Fallujah that goes on in Chicago it's just the the gangs don't hold a monopoly of violence on any areas where the police literally can't go into you know even like Brazil where you know in Rio the cops have to have uparmored humvees in order to or used to, anyways, in order to go into the favelas. It's not like that here.

So scoping all of that out, a lot of the lessons from specifically friendly-centric counterinsurgency seem to be playing out in Chicago, which, backing up for a second, is not that surprising that there's a similarity between the two, because counterinsurgency comes from imperial policing, which in the 20s was, like, coined. essentially by the British in their empires where, you know, it was more combative, per se, in the colonies, but they still wanted to have a police force. So fast-forwarding to today, essentially, the friendly center counterinsurgency essentially says, like, troops get out of their trucks, get on the ground, talk to the people, you know, make friends. You know, Jason Lal in his article,

more against the machines showed the professor Jason Wellh that you know on like troops that were on the ground tended to do better in war outcomes than troops that were mechanized. So what the Chicago Police Department is doing now, I just got this from Akava I just talked to from the 25th District, which is one of the most violent, is sorry, is the most violent district besides 15th. is they're starting a program where they have the police, where they have patrol units that are in their cars, just kind of going back and forth to 911 calls from shots fired and domestics and blah, blah, blah. And then they're going to have, on the same exact beat, they're going to have walking cops.

So they're going to be the ones that kind of get to know the neighbors. They'll respond to 911 calls where they can respond on foot. They'll contradict the fight that they see in progress and stuff like that. But essentially what it does is creates that connection between the community and the beat cop. And so they know that guy. They can trust that guy if they feel like they need to inform. And that's really where this whole counterinsurgency similarity is, right, or comes from. Friendly-centric counterinsurgency is essentially the whole aim of it is to make the

community feel that they're protected and that they would want to give information to the people that are protecting them in order to go after the quote-unquote bad guys. And so that's really the similarity. And you see it all the time with the cops. They have the Caps program, which is the community policing things. A lot of cops, like the one of the guys I've spoken to the most, will, you know, do stuff like go to the funerals, the fallen gang members, he'll help them find jobs, he'll talk to their parents about what's going on with them. He'll give them like 20 bucks if they need it in order to get to school or work or something like that.

So, yeah, I mean, counter-insurgency does happen in the United States and specifically in Chicago, but what I've seen from CPD is less of militarization and more of a move-turgency. and more of a move towards friendly-centric counterinsurgency. Now, this is a relatively new program. Is the Chicago Police Department, are they adopting beat cops and integrating law enforcement in with the neighborhoods due to, you know, their past of being heavy-handed, you know, the sheepdog mentality, us versus them, because I've spoken to a lot of, you know,

veterans in special operations and even in the military, who they've told me is like, yeah, Baltimore and Chicago, it's a war zone. So are they getting social pressure due to, you know, racial tensions and issues? Is this program going to work? Is the program going to work? So what the CPD had prior to this, so they first of all, they adopt, they're adopting this from New York. And it did show, it was shown that it worked in New York. or it was one of the things that helped really bring down the violence in New York.

Yes, it's brand new. They're going to expand it to all the districts in the next few years. But, yeah, why did it happen? Well, yeah, obviously, so what happened, so after LaQuan McDonald was killed, which is the famous, infamous shooting of a 16-year-old young black man by a white police officer, Jason Van Dyke. So after that, the DOJ, Department of Justice, came in and they did a massive, incredibly, incredibly well done, I got to say, incredibly well done report on the Chicago Police Department.

And what they found was to get more to your central question is, yeah, a lot of their policing style was more abrasive. There was a varied version of essentially hotspot policing where they would have guys from other districts come in, like more specialized guys, come in and just essentially saturate an area that had seen a lot of shooting. Essentially, what that does is it makes it hard to really get informants from those guys because these guys, that just come in and arrest and don't, like, really know any of the gangs or anything, they're not, they're not the ones that really know very much, right? They don't sit there and, like, work to gain a relationship with these guys. And so, and it seems like to the community, like, what the hell is going on? You got, like, a ton of cop saturating my area.

This looks more like we're being occupied. Some of the, I got to underline that. some of the residents believe that. A lot of them are happy to see that. So I don't know what the distribution is between the ones that are happy to see it and not happy to see it, but it seems pretty varied. And from one survey I saw of a housing project,

most of the people in the housing project like to have your police presence. But anyways, to answer your question about will it work? I don't really think that we're going to get that much more information, the CPD, from residents or who they call normal people, the people that are not in the gangs. Just because, to quote, one of the gang investigation sergeants I talk to a lot, the normal people don't really know the dirty stuff.

So, you know, if somebody gets shot, yeah, a lot of the times the neighbors can guess who did it, and they might even kind of know who did it, but did they see it happen? probably not. Do they know who is bringing in drugs, who the head of the gang in their area is? Yeah. Do they really have any factual evidence of it? No.

Do the cops, especially the gang investigations cops, generally know why someone got shot and probably who did it? Yeah, they do. I was having a conversation with a cop that was like describing in detail what, happened with this one gang war in North Austin and it yeah it tracked exactly to what was going on in the street um so yeah no the problem really isn't that the normal people quote unquote

they don't really know enough they know enough to where an in a counterinsurgency could like you know a soft team gets word that uh of this al-Qaeda leader is here and they get that from the community. Yeah, the community might know that and then they can just go kill that guy. The thing is about what makes policing so in some ways more difficult is they need prosecutable evidence. They actually need like hard evidence in order to arrest these guys. And especially in Cook County, if you are going to send someone to prison for a long time, you have to have really good evidence. So yeah, the quote unquote normal people might be able to help at the margins. And I think at the margins, this will be helpful for going after gangs, but will it really be kind of like the

magic bullet? No. In order to do that, we have to better train the police department, as the DOJ said. We need to have them, the beat cops have the mentality of gaining their own informants, whether formal or informal, in order to actually go after this problem. But I definitely support this approach because you don't want to feel like you're occupied. You want to know the cop on your block, especially when there's such heavy policing. Like, it really, it feels occupied. I'm there so often, like, and then I'm in my own neighborhood so often. So I'm able to really feel the contrast, and, like, it's not a good feeling.

So, yeah, just on a more human ethical level, that'll probably, probably help in that sense. The way you report on, let's talk specifically about Chicago and the residents. I mean, I just kind of push away from the law enforcement for a second. The way you actually report this, you integrate yourself into the neighborhoods, correct? Yeah, I try. Okay. Do you see a lot of battle fatigue?

Because it's kind of sounding like there is. I want to call it battle fatigue because it sounds like there's both law enforcement and the residents. Let's specifically let's talk about Austin, Chicago. What is the city's unspoken? You wrote about this unspoken segregation that Chicago had, specifically with the West Side. Can you kind of explain that? Like, how deep is that?

Oh, man. Well, I mean, Austin's 98% black. I was just like that census on it. And, yeah, I mean, it's so, you can look at, like, one of those demographic maps that show, and you'll see, like, it just gets so pulled into one area. where the blacks and the whites and the Hispanics live, it's very segregated.

Like, you can just see it on, like, if a map shows the colors of the different races. So, yeah, I mean, it's incredible. There are some diverse neighborhoods, like Albany Park is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in D.U.S. And it's on the north side of Chicago. But, yeah, it's incredibly segregated. But what was more of your question?

More my question was, how is, How is the city of Chicago and Chicago's law enforcement, how are they going to break down the decades of kind of the segregation portion of Chicago? Like, you know, you just said Austin, Chicago, this small town, this small part of West Side Chicago, it's completely segregated, correct? I mean, there's obviously, there's no gentrification going on there. So are they trying to thwart that with, you know, kind of beat cops on the ground, more integrating into the neighborhoods and being more involved?

Are they trying to break those barriers down? Or is there still an old guard within the Chicago Police Department? Yeah, there's definitely an old guard in the police department. I mean, growing up, so I grew up in Jeff Park, which is like totally, like there's literally eight cops on my block, two firemen, firemen being my father. Yeah, no, the attitude for the older guys, generally, though not all, is like, just coordinate off.

Who cares what happens? And we see that's kind of what happened in, you know, the 89, 90, 91, 92, 93 era when it was so bad. It really wasn't until Bill Clinton started pressuring daily that they actually put together a crack team of APF, D,A, and federal prosecutors, and went after those guys, and it worked. But in Chicago, there's hope, I think, because the old guard has a lot of, has a number, not a lot, but a number of older guys that are, that always hated this coordinate off and who cares mentality. The main guy I talked to is an older guy.

He's a little higher ranking now. he's always been completely disgusted by this mentality of coordinate off he always said like you know you have you have to make friends with these with the gang members if not to go after them you know just like to help them a lot of times you know because a lot of them just need to like need a little bit of help to get out of this um but my biggest hope that I see is the younger cops. It's becoming more diverse, so you got that, which is great. But I think really, honestly, the biggest thing is the military dudes,

the guys who actually went out and deployed and had a big dose of counterinsurgency, especially the friendly centric stuff after Petraeus came in. Man, those guys totally buy into it big time. They love it. They want to, they want to be that guy that can, that can get informants. I mean, it's really incredible to see. And the guys that were in the more elite units are even more likely to have that attitude. So, yeah, I mean, I think there is, there's a lot of hope that it'll work because,

and this is the main thing I think people really need to realize, especially in Chicago. the cultural sense of humor and just a lot of the cultural stuff between the white kind of blue collar guys from my area of the city who make up 90% of the police department and the black community on the west and south side are so similar. Like after integrating in there, I feel way more comfortable in Austin and Englewood than I do in Wilmette, which is like, this white, rich, North Shore place. I just, I culturally more identify with them. And I know from the police that I know that have bought into the counterinsurgency mentality, have made fast friends with the community and really integrated well because of those cultural similarities.

So, yeah, there's a lot of hope that this is going to get better, at least from me. Now, on top of that, I'm kind of fascinated. I was reading your article The Strange Realities with Chicago's Gang Wars and I was absolutely amazed at how deep you got specifically with the West Side

Vice Lords and I know Mark is not his real name how did you get about how did you go about getting with or communicating with them so where they trusted you enough to kind of let you hang out with them on their day to day

you know their operations how'd that happen how did you do that? Huh. Let me think if that would reel too much. What I can say is, so originally, you know, one of the big things that people have to remember is, you know, a lot of these, a lot of the guys have never been approached by a reporter ever. The Chicago media generally gets most of their crime reporting from the police or from, like, the victims in the community,

which is fine, that's their choice. But essentially, just I contacted this guy, but I contacted this guy online and through social media, and, like, he was all about talking to me. A lot of these guys do, like, you know, like some of them are rappers, and so they, like, kind of like the idea of fame. And so, you know, originally it was kind of kind of be,

and on the record conversation that had more to do with, like, his interactions with police and stuff like that. But I think what happened with him was we got along with each other really well, again, because of our kind of shared sense of humor. And I just think that the way that I asked him questions, I think he was really engaged and interested in. kind of thinking through this stuff with me. And I think that the fact that, you know, the one time he's threatened to kill me and if I, like, were to reveal

is whatever, and I still came back the next day to, like, talk to him again, I think that kind of showed him, well, A, that I wasn't a cop, because he would have been arrested for that, but B, that, like, I care enough about this, especially

like the number of times that he thought he was about to get shot and drive by when I was with him, that, like, I care enough about this to, like, take those risks. But then I respected him enough to, like, to really pose difficult questions to him. I didn't really just assume that he doesn't know these kind of more complicated things about, you know, how cost-benefit works in a drug war. because I think if gang members I talk to, it's about, you know, police abuse. And nobody really likes to just talk about, you know, how they're victimized.

It makes them feel weak. But when you ask somebody who's involved in this highly competitive market that's so volatile, both in, you know, income in terms of income and also in terms of being shot and killed, you know, when you pose it that way, which is how they look at it, by the way, it's acknowledging that they're intelligent, that they are a part of this complex system, as horrible of an impact as it has on their community. It's just showing that respect to them and that you care.

What do you think Americans fundamentally misunderstand about gangs? You know, it's like it was perfect. summed up in a university of Illinois, Chicago, they published this article that came from there's an institute there where they study gangs and other criminal issues. And this guy John Haggardor, and I've interviewed before, he was one of the kind of the guy driving it. Essentially, what it said was, gangs are the, these fractured or rational organizations that are just killing each other for no reason other than these personal beefs, and we can just pick them off one by one through offering them jobs

and resources and like all that, blah, blah, blah. No, no. That's not, no. You can't, you can't bring in massive amounts of drugs, right? You can't bring in a kilo of, of, you can't bring in a kilo of, heroin or cocaine without being sophisticated. You can't. You have to show the cartel member bringing it to you that you have a complex market network that you are a part of, that you know what you're doing, that you're not going to inform on him, and that, you know, you are less likely than other people who get caught. And everyone down the chain wants to know that from you. This is not the story on the south side of Chicago. A lot, most of them are selling, you know, negligence amounts of weed and, and heroin and stuff like that.

They're not that organized. But in a lot of places, they are. And it's more complicated than let's throw money at this thing. These guys will say no to a job. I've seen it before. I've been in this, where in this, in this, where they will say no to these things. Amazon will hire former felons, even with, like, carrying weight and stuff like that.

And there's factories all over the west side of Chicago that would hire these guys in literally a minute for $12 to $15 an hour jobs. They don't want to leave the gangs a lot of times because they don't want to work at McDonald's. It's boring. They're running the street organization. this complex market that is so much more difficult to run than a Fortune 500 company. Because Fortune 500 companies, your CEO is not going to get shot. Your workers aren't going to get shot for having to go to a meeting.

It's not going to happen. So they don't want to do that. It's boring. It's not fun. It's below their intelligence, like both in reality and their own perception. to go work at McDonald's or work in a factory, packaging, you know, stuff for Amazon. So essentially, by acknowledging that, which programs like Ready Chicago through Heartland Alliance have acknowledged, you have to realize, in order to get these guys off the streets,

you have to give them real job training. You have to actually show them where they can get good work and how that they can, you know, move up from working in the factory level to, like, getting an associate's degree to like working in the business world, something like that. But by saying that they're so disorganized, they're so irrational, blah, blah, blah, you cut out that context. You're not acknowledging the fact that these are complicated organization that these guys don't want to leave in part because they're complicated and interesting. And secondly, there's some talk of do we need gang units in Chicago.

I know the Inspector General is looking into this. And WBZ is doing a report on the gun seizures and the gun program and ATF. And, you know, they've already kind of previewed the fact that they're going to say, no, I shouldn't do that. No, so you do need enforcement. Like, they are not these completely just, untethered random groups of people just shooting each other over nothing.

There's logic to it. And we need to acknowledge that and really deal with it if we're going to have any type of impact on this. Because throwing money at it and reducing enforcement isn't going to do it. Now, in Atlanta, what you described as corporate gangs, which are more organized. In Atlanta, these gangs have been going high tech. They've been starting to learn how to do credit card skills. and kind of low-level hacking sort of where like ransomware or things like that. Do you see what you coined the term corporate gangs?

Do you see these, is this like the evolution of their hustle? And do you see that in Chicago as well, leaning more towards the high-tech kind of non-violent crime, if you will? Yeah, I tried to get an article published on this. Yeah, to some extent. So I foyer the CPD to find out the arrests for what's called on the street, card cracking. And it's essentially where they'll do it one of two ways,

but one of the easiest ways to do them to do it is to use the dark web in order to get, to buy credit card information. And then they get it, put it on like a credit card that you can just buy from a store, like blank credit card they emboss it on there and then they can use it a couple times and um i talked to a detective who is on in the financial division about this like at blank it was so interesting essentially like the the credit card companies don't want to prosecute because it's too it's too resource intensive for them to like go after these like you know five hundred dollar at time crimes um and so it's like incredibly easy to get away but

this. So I foiled to see, like, how many arrests went on from, like, 2014 to 20, I think it was 17 for credit card fraud that was related to gangs, somebody that was, you know, either in a gang or suspected to be in a gang that was arrested for credit card fraud. And I found that it was, like, spiking, or not spiking, but it was like, it continues to go up ever since. Actually, it was 2012 to 2016. It was on the rise between those years. I can't remember what the exact numbers are. It wasn't huge

because it's so hard to arrest these guys for this stuff, but the fact that it was going up is a proxy showing like, yeah, they're learning it more. This tends to be something that I don't want to say they're getting more

sophisticated because you can pull in, there's one gang in the west side near the heroin highway that can pull in 20,000 a day from heroin, or fentanyl, actually. Yeah, you can't do that with card cracking. So I think that's about as much, like, technological sophistication as they're getting. And that's more of a south side story where they suck at drug dealing, to be honest, and don't have the same connects to large, you know, like large-scale drug suppliers. So, yeah, it's,

definitely on the rise. I haven't foiled in the past to see what 2017 and 2018 looked like. But maybe we should do that be kind of interesting. But yeah, it's definitely, it's becoming a thing, especially on the south side where they're not making as much from drugs. Your friend Mark, I don't know if he's your friend, Mark, the guy that you hung out with, he kind of described how to get out of jail for free. And it dealt with guns. Like they keep guns almost like currency. It's like, oh, he said he got pinched by having some weed. It didn't want to go back to county, so he told the police officer, hey, I've got guns. So he described being let literally out the back door of the jail. The cop called him later. They showed up. He throws a couple pistols

and guns into a plastic bag. The cop says thanks. And they're both about their business. It just seems like a very broken program to me. Like, can you explain what I kind of coined the burner gun exchange program for zero jail time? I don't understand that. Yeah, that's funny. So I think maybe his faction, I don't, I can't speak for for other, I need to ask more factions about that. I know, it's funny. So I know that his faction, which is, they're pretty profitable, to be honest, and they're pretty big. So they, yeah, they do that. They intentionally buy shitty guns that, you know, don't work most of the time, nobody wants to use.

Like he said he was like, yeah, nobody uses a fucking shotgun. Yeah, so yeah, they do intentionally buy really cheap burner guns in order to do those guns for freedom thing. And it is allowed. So for some units. So gang investigations and some tack units are legally allowed. Like they got the blessing from the DPD in order to do this program. And essentially what it is is for low-level stuff that nobody really cares about like gambling or selling weed or not too much weed, but, you know, selling weed nobody really cares about.

As long as they, that, you know, their friend or somebody hands in a gun to the police or them or they hand in a gun to the police, or they hand in a gun to the police, they'll let them go. they'll basically drop the charges and expunge the arrest and you know you can go on your merry way patrol officers are not supposed to do that and so from mark's story I don't know exactly what that all was about I know that there was some abuse of the program for a while and it's kind of like gone away from the patrol side and has gone towards the more appropriate like elite team side is there a broken system it would depend on how intelligent the groups are because his group is sophisticated enough to like think a couple steps ahead and just kind of like get those burner guns but i think probably sometimes the guys get caught off their guard and are like oh shit we have

to give up something like we all right we we have you know block like that's that's a nice gun, but that's all we got. So let's go give it up. And whether or not the cops have gotten smart to it in terms of, you know, they look in the bag and there's like, like it's missing its upper receiver. Like what? Yeah. And then they don't accept that. I don't know. That actually, that gave me a story idea, though. So thank you for that. You're welcome. We live to serve here on War College. Pat, uh, Pat, thank you so. much for coming on the show and walking us through all of this. Yeah, thanks for having me.

That's it for this week. Listeners, War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Derek Gannon and Kevin Odell. It was created by me and Jason Fields, who, it's rumored, will return to us one day. If you like the show, please drop us a rating and a comment on iTunes. It helps other people find the show. You can follow us on Twitter at War underscore College. We've got some exciting episodes coming up, including one about white nationalism,

with a guest I've wanted to talk to for a very very very very. long time. Until then, stay safe out there.