CHICAGO — Chicago’s reputation of murderous summers has defined the metropolis for quite some time. As the third largest city in the United States, Chicago holds the record for having the largest gang problem in the country, a problem Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy says is at the center of the city’s violence issue year-round.
After serving as the top cop in Newark and New York and a combined 32 years of service in law enforcement, McCarthy said the actual level of gang violence in Chicago is something he’s never seen before. “These are hierarchical generational gangs that have been around for 60 years. These are entrenched gangs.”
According to the Chicago Crime Commission’s Gang Book, an organization headed by former Chicago Police Superintendent Jody Weis, the city has between 68,000 and over 150,000 gang members in the metropolitan area among the estimated 70 to 100 gangs.
But while gangs are the biggest driver of Chicago’s violence problem, McCarthy says in the midst of him and his team implementing carefully thought-out sustainable solutions, the numbers are actually lopsided, presenting a “perception problem” to onlookers.
“We have an unacceptable level of gun violence in this city…The goal is zero murders, zero shootings,” McCarthy says. However, “while we have a double-digit reduction in the overall crime rate in the city, we’ve got an increase of about 90 shootings so far this year so that doesn’t match up.” McCarthy added, “ The number of people shot in the city has been going on for years and years, and years, and if you want to report the aggregate, whether or not you’re making progress on the issue, the perception gets worse.”
It will take time, he says, to reverse Chicago’s culture of entrenched crime.
The most recent statistics from the Chicago Police Department say that through June 10, overall crime in the city is down 10 percent from last year this time, with murder — of which 85 percent is typically shootings — up 36 percent from 2011. Overall shooting incidents are up 11 percent from 2011, but down six percent from the previous week. Week over week, overall crime is down 17 percent and murders declined by 47 percent.
“With an increase of 90 shootings, we have like 70 murders. That doesn’t match up, because usually, it’s about two out of 10 people that die when you have shootings. An increase in 90 shootings should result in about 18 more murders,” said McCarthy.
So McCarthy contends that although the city is getting so much attention for its unique violence problem, a “well-deserved perspective,” that “The real question is ‘Are we doing better, and is there incremental change happening?’ And the answer is ‘Yes.’”
Target the gangs, decrease the violence
To implement “incremental change,” McCarthy has come up with a plan to target gangs, and reduce shooting incidents, which will subsequently reduce overall crime, narcotics transactions and murders. Additionally, McCarthy says this strategy will require police and other city services to stay the course in the areas that murders happen, in order to rehabilitate the city of its crime problem.
“We realized that we didn’t have a comprehensive gang violence reduction strategy,” said McCarthy. While reiterating that gangs are the persistent problem that drives Chicago’s crime numbers, he said the proliferation of firearms is an ongoing issue, one that was illustrated in Chicago’s annual gun turn-in program over the weekend. More than 5500 guns were collected, “no questions asked,” Saturday. Officials gave those who turned in guns gift cards. “The weapon rate is astronomically, unbelievably off-the-charts. In my 32 years in police work, I have never seen an M-60 machine gun…It’s a belt-fed machine gun that the infantry used in Vietnam. That’s unbelievable,” McCarthy stated.
The combination of the increase in gangs, an overwhelming amount of firearms, drug sales and gang members protecting turfs make for a disastrous city riddled with murder.
Chicago’s plan of attack on murder
Back in March, McCarthy and his team started the comprehensive strategy by performing a gang audit, identifying every gang, district, members’ turf, and the conflicts that they’re in. Now when an officer arrives on a crime scene, they are instantly armed with the information of who’s in what gang and can think about where the retaliation will come from, McCarthy says.
“We didn’t have that before. We’ve created the technology for this so that the beat officer has it right on their computer in their car, so that if somebody gets shot, they can identify them as a gang member, they automatically know who his associates are, and who are the likely offenders for the retaliation, and we already know who they’re in conflict with, which means that we know where the area is and we deploy our resources there so that we can pick up those guns as they’re coming in, and we’re having great success with that,” said McCarthy. That’s when the department started to see a reduction in shootings, but the murder rate will catch up to that, he explained.
Another ground-breaking plan of attack that McCarthy explains will encompass all city services and eliminate individual narcotics markets, rather than just locking up drug dealers and seizing products. This method, he says, has not been practiced across the country and will involve officials staying the course in those communities.
We might actually be causing murders by the way we’re doing narcotics enforcement in this country,” McCarthy said. By only arresting drug dealers and seizing the drugs, but walking away without putting a better alternative in its place, McCarthy says police officials are actually crippling the neighborhoods. The demand is still there and eventually, because it’s a known spot to buy drugs, someone else will go there to sell drugs. Later on, the original seller may return from jail, then a conflict ensues, because someone encroached on his or her territory.
“Rather than just declaring victory and walking away, the city will infuse services to the locations that those drug markets existed so that the supply and demand for drugs in that particular location eventually goes away,” McCarthy said. The department will put police officers there so that when someone goes back to buy drugs, they encounter an officer there instead of a drug dealer, “which means that the supply will not come back,” said McCarthy.
On Friday, McCarthy said Chicago police locked up 48 narcotics dealers from three separate markets across the city. He and his team will now bring in city services to fix broken windows, clean up the location, and organize the community through community groups and pastors to help fill that void and prevent that place from going back to what it was.
“This is entirely different from the way narcotics enforcement is done across the country. Because all we’ve doing is locking up drug dealers and declaring victory and going back and doing it again and again and again. And when those guys get out (of jail), they’re going to go somewhere else,” McCarthy said.
According to McCarthy, the crime-fighting strategy has been in place since the end of March and has proven to work well. “Since that time, we’ve had a reduction in shootings in the month of April and May, and now, we’re almost on the verge of winning June,” he said. With just a few more days left in June, Chicago is “flat on shootings.” He added, “If we could push that number down, we’ll have a reduction in shootings in the second quarter, which is not the perception that’s being translated out into the public.”
“So all of that comes together and people expect us to throw on a light switch and say ‘OK, we’re done with the violence.’ That’s just not going to happen,” McCarthy stated. “It’s going to be incremental change.”
Renita Young is a multimedia journalist based in Chicago. Follow Renita on Twitter at @RenitaDYoung