The gap between Gakirah Barnes’s front teeth when she smiled, whether she was celebrating on the basketball court or messing around with friends, made her look even younger than the 17 years she spent in south Chicago before being shot to death last weekend.

“At least I don’t have to constantly worry about what’s going to happen to her out on the street no more,” said her mother, Shontell Brown, who wept as she inspected the cemetery plot where Gakirah will be buried on Monday. Her father, who was gunned down on her first Easter Sunday, lies nearby. Her twin brother, who saw his best friend murdered in 2011, will be at the funeral.

Though mourned as a victim by her family and her girlfriend, Gakirah – one of five Chicagoans killed and 36 wounded over the city’s warmest and bloodiest weekend of the year so far – was, according to police and neighbourhood sources, also part of the problem: a hip-hop-fuelled gang war that is raging even as Mayor Rahm Emanuel boasts that crime is at a record low.

Nicknamed K I, Gakirah is said to have run with the STL-EBT crew, a young branch of the notorious Gangster Disciples, who have bedevilled the south side since the 1960s. As allies of Lil Jay, a local up-and-coming rapper, they clashed with boys from the nearby Parkway Gardens projects who are loyal to the rival Black Disciples, and to Jay’s more established nemesis, Keith “Chief Keef” Cozart, who is signed to Interscope Records, the home of superstars Dr Dre and Eminem.

The bitter feud, in a city derided as “Chiraq”, has been linked to the deadly shootings of 18-year-old rapper Joseph "Lil JoJo" Coleman, a Lil Jay ally, in 2012; Mario “Blood Money” Hess, Keef’s 30-year-old cousin, who was murdered two days before Gakirah, after securing a record deal; and Odee Perry, 20, who was slain in 2011 after appearing in one of Keef’s videos.

Some at Parkway Gardens, which is nicknamed “O Block” in Perry’s memory, blame Gakirah for his death. “That’s false information,” said her mother. “Rip K I Da Shooter,” Lil Jay wrote under a picture of Gakirah pointing her hand like a gun that he posted to Instagram, after she was killed. The battle continued in the comments below. “This summer gone get real,” warned one user. As social media buzzed with accusations, Keno Glass, an aspiring rapper and cousin of Coleman, was shot dead in a drive-by at 2:40am on Tuesday. He was just 16.

'A more sophisticated gang structure than many American cities'

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gakirah Barnes was 17-years-old when she was shot to death last weekend in Chicago

Chicago’s yearly homicide total has in recent years been about half the 40-year high of 943 that was reached in 1992, thanks largely to a sharp drop in domestic murders. Yet the number of killings linked to gangs has consistently been higher than back then, according to figures compiled by Professor Wesley Skogan, a crime and policing expert at the city’s Northwestern University.



FBI director James Comey said during a visit this week that Chicago had a “more ingrained and sophisticated street gang structure than many American cities”, such as New York, which was once equally feared but now has a murder rate about a quarter as high. “They’re old, they’re embedded in a part of the culture in this city, and it’s an enormous challenge,” he said.

The drug trade remains part of the mix, but it does not hold the lucrative power it once did.

“Back when I was out on the street in the 1990s, I was making enough money to buy a car and nice things,” said Renaldo Hess, 43, who managed Blood Money before his murder last week. “Now I got little cousins supposed to be out there selling drugs, and they’re trying to borrow $20 off me.”

Instead, said Derrick Ord, who was with Gakirah last week on a porch in the dilapidated West Woodlawn neighbourhood when she was shot nine times, grievances are scarily mundane.

“They’re not trying to conquer nothing,” said Ord, a 42-year-old construction worker who fled from the grey-hooded gunman, down an alleyway. “It’s just: ‘We live over here, and you live over there.'” Threats about the next attack fly across Twitter, in song lyrics and on YouTube music videos.

In the 1990s, the aggressive jailing of gang leaders left behind a more fractured setup that is even more difficult to control.

“Back then, two of the heads could stand up and say ‘OK: enough, we gonna have a peace treaty,'” said Hess. “Now, it’s much more chaotic.”

'You can't hide a body ... but you can reclassify one'

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A hip-hop-fuelled gang war is raging as Emanuel boasts that crime is at a record low. Photograph: Bloomberg /Getty Images

Stung by a 16% spike in killings in 2012 that led Moody’s, the ratings agency, to downgrade the city’s debt due to its "unrelenting public safety demands", Emanuel promised a tough response. Amid spending cuts, the former White House chief of staff to Barack Obama has ploughed tens of millions more taxpayer dollars into policing. Sure enough, in January he proudly announced that 2013 had seen the city’s fewest homicides since 1965 and lowest crime rate since 1972.

Yet a startling 7,000-word investigation earlier this month by Chicago Magazine cast serious doubt over the crime-busting miracle of Emanuel and his superintendent, Garry McCarthy. It identified at least 18 apparent murders in 2013 that had either been quietly redefined as “non-criminal deaths” or shunted off the city’s books by other statistical sleights of hand.

Professor Eli Silverman of the City University of New York, an authority on the CompStat-style data systems used by police in Chicago, New York and other major cities, told the Guardian he had been contacted by several Chicago officers concerned about the determination among chiefs to drive down crime numbers at whatever cost.

“The pressure from the top is unrelenting,” he said one had told him. “The defenders of the system always say ‘You can’t hide a dead body’,” said Silverman. “But you can reclassify one.” City authorities deny any impropriety.

And while more money has been found to boost the number of cops on the street, city funding has been cut drastically for more innovative programmes aiming to tackle gun violence, which neighbourhood activists say were working. Ceasefire, a scheme in which pairs of ex-gang members walk the streets at night to “interrupt” violence and identify people at high-risk of “being shot or being a shooter” for mentoring, lost its public subsidy last year.

The programme’s organisers said that during the six months last year in which they were able to operate from offices nearby, there were no homicides in the neighbourhood where Gakirah was killed, compared to nine that took place during the same period in 2012.

Chicago rapper Keith 'Chief Keef' Cozart. Photograph: AP

Brown, Gakirah’s mother, accused rappers of keeping feuds alive by stoking violence among young followers.



“They have to bring the little people into it because they have money now, and they can’t come to the street,” she said. “And the little guy wants to make a name for himself.”

Andrew Holmes, an energetic community activist who swoops into the scene of the latest shooting to plead for calm and hand out flyers for an anonymous crime-tip hotline, agreed. He urged prominent hip-hop figures to call for an end to the cycle of retribution.

Neither Lil Jay nor Chief Keef’s manager responded to emails seeking comment about the shootings.

“If they could come together, they could make the music industry in south Chicago a great thing, rather than giving the area a black eye,” said Holmes, as his walkie-talkie began buzzing again.

Ten blocks away, an 18-year-old had been shot in the face while dropping his girlfriend at home.