SWAN-Elgin

ELGIN — Nearly twenty years ago, Chicago projects started shuttering their doors and the “gangs started coming to the northwest suburbs,” said Jim Vaughn, 62, of Elgin.

“There was a serious influx of gangs,” Charles Gore, 66, said, who’s lived on the 400 block of Hill Avenue for 35 years. “The house next door got shot in because some gang people lived there — that was in 1999.”

“The house on the corner, there were some young fellows that moved in and sold drugs on the corner — that lasted about a day,” Gore said explaining that an officer in the neighborhood ended it.

Vaughn, who’s Gore’s neighbor, chimed in saying “you wouldn’t go down Fremont Street because gangs lived there, and drug houses were everywhere.”

“It was an open-air drug market,” Gore said.

But the face of the neighborhood has changed for the better, they said.

Fremont Street, like other Elgin neighborhoods, has become a nice place to live as the city’s gang-motivated felonies have dropped dramatically over the last 15 years — nearly 50 percent, according to police crime statistics.

A combination of factors including the placement of residential officers in “stressed” neighborhoods, school liaison officers and a gang unit of 20 officers solely focused on Elgin gangs have contributed to this fall, Deputy Chief Jeff Swoboda, said.

Despite progress being made, “we don’t have it all figured out,” Swoboda said. “It’s a daily battle.”

“Gang crime can change with one family moving in,” he explained. “One apartment can change a whole neighborhood. I hear it all the time: ‘Everything was fine until they moved in.’

“Whether they’re gang members or a daughter who dates a gang member that moves in, the sale of drugs will follow,” Swoboda said. “Rival gangs will come through that neighborhood and everything changes.”

Fairly recent gang activity is indicative that Elgin is not a 10 on the safety scale.

In September 2007, shots were fired through an estimated 600 children and parents who had come out for the Elgin Youth Football League’s opening games at Drake Athletic Field at Hastings Street and Illinois Avenue next to Huff Elementary School. No injuries were reported. This was not the first gang-related incident in the area that happened that year. Gunfire near College and North streets on July 26, 2007, took the lives of Julian Mascote, 18, and Francisco Franco, 21, both of Elgin.

Regardless, “it’s a lot safer than it was 10 years ago,” Charles Gore said. “Drugs and gang-related houses are gone now.”

“They didn’t want to deal with the pressure by the neighborhood and the police,” he said.

His wife, LeJeune Gore, 65, said “I can sit on my front porch and wave my arm now, it’s a great place to live.”

However, Charles Gore said the gangs haven’t disappeared, they’ve gone “underground.”

“The structure of the gangs has changed,” Gore said, who worked with gangs for 20 years and juvenile probation with the Kane County courts. “They’re more organized, they’re becoming like the mob.”

“Random shootings, that’s died in this area,” he said. “You don’t seem them throwing gang signals at you on the corners or at the grocery stores anymore, it’s too high profile. If they’re going to do business and sell their drugs, they don’t need to bring the heat down on themselves.”

Vaughn echoed Gore’s thoughts and added that “gangs aren’t going away, they’re in the shadows, they’re there, you can feel them on the back of your neck.”

In any case, both police officers and residents agreed that measures can be taken to prevent more kids from joining gangs.

Swoboda said that they run a program called “Operation Homefront” in which police “go and talk to parents early on if they suspect their kids are hanging around with gang members.”

Gore and Vaughn said the Boys and Girls Club on Grove Avenue has significantly helped out Elgin by providing a place of refuge and support for low-income children.

But Vaughn, who’s president of the Summit Park Neighbors Association said he’s worried about what the summer could bring.

“My concern about this summer is the new faction, what I call the ‘tweeners, these kids between 11 and 16 — that’s the dangerous group right now,” he said.

Vaughn said what’s disturbing is that younger offenders quickly turn to deadly violence to settle disputes.

“Even the older gang bangers are very apprehensive with these kids,” he said. “They hesitate to do nothing — they don’t think about anything they do, they just do it.”

A possible solution, according to Vaughn, is the establishment of gang intervention in schools at an early age before they get wrapped up in gang life by the time they reach high school.

For the time being, “we need to be giving these kids positive role models,” Charles Gore said. “They need some alternative to that life, the gang life.”

Staff writer Steven Ross Johnson contributed to this report.

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