Warriors... Come Out to Play: Why Chicago is the Perfect City for a re-make of "The Warriors"

The Warriors is movie in dire need of a re-make. Made in 1979, the movie is a tale of rival gangs in New York City and, well, isn't a good movie.

Yes, crime in Chicago does have a color: the same hue that Paramount said had no "commercial appeal" in The Warriors

Based on a book by Sol Yurick, the director and casting agents of The Warriors was forced to add white characters to the eponymous gang because Paramount (which would be distributing the film) didn't think an all-Black cast would have any "commercial appeal."

Yurick's book doesn't have a white character, and the re-make of The Warriors should try and be as true to the source material as possible.

With one exception: move the location of the gang-war to Chicago, a city already besieged by the type of violence Yurick wrote about. More to the point, the participants are already the correct racial hue.

The violence in Chicago has been documented here - and here, here, and here - on many occasions (and at VDare), but the night of August 23 and the morning of August 24 broke new ground. With most of the violence and mass shootings confined to the weekend, a ready-made cast of Black miscreants for The Warriors re-make decided to diversify the shootings and liberate Friday night/Saturday morning/Saturday night/Sunday morning from monopolizing the violence [19 People Shot in Overnight Shootings in Chicago, Chicago Tribune, by Peter Nickeas]:

Nineteen people were shot across the South and West sides from Thursday evening through early Friday morning -- 13 of them wounded over a 30-minute period, authorities say.

The overnight shootings peaked between 9:15 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. That's when eight people, many of them teens, were shot at 79th Street and Essex Avenue about 9:30 p.m.

The shooters and those being shot are almost all-Black. The Chicago Tribune noted in an article published on July 12 that virtually all of the homicide victims have been non-white (Black or Hispanic); virtually all of the offenders non-white; and a sizable majority of both victim and offender boasting police records:

Violent crime has long afflicted minorities in Chicago at a much higher rate than the rest of the population, and the spike in homicides in the first half of this year provides an especially stark measure: 201 of the 259 homicide victims were African-American.

While blacks make up about 33 percent of the city's population, they accounted for nearly 78 percent of the homicide victims through the first six months of 2012.

By comparison, just 11 homicide victims in the first six months of the year were white, and 44 were Hispanic, according to police data.

The pattern is a familiar one in Chicago, where most violent crime happens in impoverished, mostly black neighborhoods on the South and West sides. Annual Chicago police statistics show a majority of both homicide victims and offenders are young black men with criminal records. With one exception, African-Americans have made up more than 70 percent of homicide victims in Chicago every year for the last two decades.

 Writing in Crain's Chicago Business, Dr. Arthur Lurigio reminds us that most of the violence in Chicago is confined in just six districts, meaning that the area of the city needed for filming The Warriors re-make wouldn't pose a geographical burden, keeping shooting costs low:

Homicide rates in Chicago have been lower recently than those in other cities in the United States and in the world. Rates of homicide have declined steadily since the 1990s and recently have been as low as they were in the 1960s. Murders in the city are concentrated in six districts (the murder corridor), all of which are plagued by intergenerational poverty, gang infestation, single-parent households, social disorder and economic blight. In 2010, 52 percent of the city's murders were committed in these six police districts. The remaining 19 are relatively safe.

The breakdown of Chicago's communities by percentage of Blacks living in each zone

The condition of a community (or in the case of Chicago - those six districts) is nothing more than a reflection of the majority population that inhabits the area, an outward indicator of the type of morality - or immorality - that flourishes there.

That the "murder corridor" in Chicago also happens be an area of the city where Black people make up nearly 100 percent of the population is of course unmentionable in polite company, unless you are of the Disingenuous White Liberal (DWL) variety and wish to whine about 'segregation', 'economic apartheid', and 'racism'. Luckily, Mr. Steve Bogira of The Chicago Reader stepped up to fill that role [Separate, Unequal, and Ignored
Racial segregation remains Chicago's most fundamental problem. Why isn't it an issue in the mayor's race?, February 10, 2001]:

But most African-Americans are clustered in two areas, as they were in the 1960s: a massive one on the south side, and a smaller one on the far west side. The south-side section, between Western Avenue and the lake, stretches more than a hundred blocks north to south, from 35th Street to the city limits at 138th. This African-American subdivision of Chicago includes 18 contiguous community areas, each with black populations above 90 percent, most of them well above that. The west-side black section includes another three contiguous 90 percent-plus community areas. Fifty-five percent of Chicago's 964,000 African-Americans live in these 21 community areas, in which the aggregate population is 96 percent black. Two-thirds of the city's blacks live in community areas that are at least 80 percent black.

On the flip side are the 33 community areas, most of them on the north and southwest sides, with less than 10 percent African-Americans. In 26 of these community areas less than 5 percent of the residents are black.

 Bogira can't blame Black people for their problems or for the condition of the districts where they constitute the demographic majority -- knowing that to blame Black people for problems found in their communities that are noticeably absent from white communities would represent the iceberg for the titanic known as Black-Run America (BRA) to run smack into. Discussing Black violence in Chicago, Lawrence Auster of View from the Right made this point as to why Bill O'Reilly's guest on his Fox News show must harp upon the lack of caring by white people about the Second City's descent into Mogadishu-levels of violence:

He is only repeating a fundamental axiom of liberal society, which is that blacks are not responsible moral agents, and that everything blacks do is but a function of something that whites are doing to them, or something that whites are failing to do for them.

Bogira would go one-step further in repeating that axiom of liberal society that Mr. Auster refers to in this piece at the Chicago Reader [Concentrated Poverty and Homicide in Chicago, July 26, 2012]

Because concentrated poverty in Chicago is inextricably linked to being African-American, I've also included the percentage of African-Americans in these community areas, calculated from 2005-2009 Census Bureau estimates. If the homicide rates in the poor black areas were twice the rates in the better-off white areas, that would be significant. The differences above, averaging about 13 to one, are staggering. This is what apartheid looks like.

The only thing more reprehensible than homicide rates so grossly disparate, from poor black neighborhoods to middle-class white neighborhoods, is that we've tolerated them for decades.

Concentrated poverty? Try a concentration of Black people.That's the problem that Mr. Bogira can't come to terms, instead blaming "apartheid" (one of the most overused words by leftists now) for the problems that Black people cause in their communities.

What Bogira found was that the poorest community areas in Chicago also tend to be almost all-Black; oh, and they have astronomically high homicide rates:

Riverdale: 61 % poverty; 98 % Black; 37 Homicide rate (out of 100,000)
Fuller Park: 56% poverty, 97 % Black; 63 Homicide rate (out of 100,000)
Englewood: 42 % poverty, 99 % Black; 48 Homicide rate (out of 100,000)
West Garfield Park: 40 % poverty, 96 % Black; 36 Homicide rate (out of 100,000)
East Garfield Park: 40 % poverty, 93 % Black, 42 Homicide rate (out of 100,000)

And there is your setting for The Warriors re-make: a true gang-land film, with the perfect 21st-century American gang-land shooting location. Chicago is your city for a movie that showcases the reality of gangs and violence for all too see.

Then again, we probably don't need a movie. Black people come out to play in Chicago on a weekly basis, providing the nation a glimpse of why living in areas with few (if any) Black people is the surest indicator of high property value, quality schools, and low crime rates.