Dressing to Kill Leads to Murder in Chicago
Being ‘dressed to kill’ is rapidly acquiring a macabre connotation in the streets of downtown Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles. With disturbing frequency, young people, usually teenagers, are being murdered for the shirt or jacket on their back or the shoes on their feet. The phenomenon has been called ‘clothing-related violence’, or ‘killing to be cool’ and the fatal fashion appears to be catching on. The most recent recorded incident occurred in Chicago and involved a 19-year-old man, Calvin Walsh. Mr Walsh was walking on the city’s West Side on Saturday wearing a brightly-coloured Cincinnati Bengals bomber jacket. Such jackets, and other featuring football team logos like those of the Washington Redskins and Chicago Bears, costing up to $200 (£130), are all the rage. And that’s the problem. Mr Walsh’s ‘offence’ was not that he was wearing the wrong team colours. It was merely that the stranger who accosted him wanted his jacket. When Mr Walsh tried to make a run for it he was shot in the back and killed.
The trend was first spotted last autumn after the murder of a 24-year-old Chicago man by four youths who liked his jacket. In November and December, Hawks jackets were the cause of two more killings. In Detroit last November, a school pupil was found dead and shoeless: his attacker had taken his $70 Nike sneakers. Police in Los Angeles and New York reported similar robberies. One mother whose son survived the theft of the $175 gym shoes he was wearing told a Chicago newspaper: ‘These children are out here stealing from one another to be cool. It’s a sad situation. Their parents can’t afford to buy the stuff, so they do whatever they can to get it.’ A Los Angeles policeman put it another way, ‘The individual wants to hang on to the jacket because he paid so much for it, so they just blow him away.’ In some cases, the murders do appear to have been related to gang or team loyalties. Wearing the ‘wrong’ colour shoes, or even shoelaces, is enough to get you killed in some Los Angeles neighbourhoods. But the clothes-related violence phenomenon also reflects the cheapness of human life in some of America’s inner city ghettos, the ready availability of guns to young people, and the poverty in which many of them live.
Ironically, perhaps, given the fashionable trend in the USA and Britain away from school uniform, the Detroit Board of Education has approved a schools dress code to be implemented this autumn in an attempt to control the problem of clothes-related violence.
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· Find a word or phrase in the text that in context has a similar meaning to:
1. a frightening meaning
2. deadly
3. becoming popular
4. symbols
5. very fashionable
6. went up to him threateningly
7. noticed
8. expressed it differently
9. keep
10. shoot him
11. connected with
12. put into practice
· Answer the following questions.
1. What does the phrase ‘dressed to kill’ mean in this context? What does it normally mean?
2. What is the reason for the murders?
3. What happened to Mr Walsh?
4. When did murders of this kind begin?
5. What is meant by the ‘wrong’ colour shoes?
6. What reasons are given for these crimes?
7. What steps are being taken to control this problem?
8. Do you agree with the statement that the ready availability of guns bring about an increase in the crime rate?
9. What should be done in order to reduce the crime rate among the children?
· Find English equivalents to the following words and word combinations.
- приобретать зловещий смысл
- пугающе / настораживающе часто
- смертельная мода, по-видимому, приживается
- жертвой инцидента стал
- куртки, изображающие эмблемы футбольных команд
- эти куртки - последний крик моды
- пристал к нему
- убежать
- впервые тенденция была выявлена
- оказался жертвой кражи
- выразил это по-другому
- не хочет отпускать / отдавать
- убийства, действительно, были связаны с
- командные пристрастия
- свободный доступ к оружию
- Summarize the text.
- Retell the text.
Why do young people begin to commit crimes?
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