An extraordinary piece of investigative work that has identified and tracked every criminal gang and crew in Chicago and put them on a dedicated Google Map, where you can scale back and forth, search by area, and click on the symbols to get descriptions of each gang, such as:

Oak Town is four Insane Gangster Satan Disciple sets that include 18th and Oakley, 19th and Oakley, 21st and Oakley, and 23rd and Oakley. Their main rivalries include the Almighty Bishops, Almighty Ambrose, Almighty Insane Latin Counts, La Raza, Gangster Party People, Insane Deuces, Insane Two-Twos and Little Village Almighty Latin Kings.

Most of these gangs are small and they come and go, but the Gangster Disciples and their various sections are the one I was most familiar with and they are tagged as “nations”. Smaller outfits that are independent of these bigger ones are known as “crews”. There are over 100 gangs and Chicago is the most gang infested city in the USA.

I was pleased to see that our old home, where my MIL still lives, is basically free of the worst gangs, the main ones being The Adidas Boyz, plus further East the GBA, SK4200, Bogus City and a handful of others which are not affiliated even with crews and seem to be into nothing more than petty crime.

My wife’s first day on the job as Chicago Public School Teacher involved attending an “awareness session” where all of these were described, together with their signals, such as LH pant cuffs rolled up.