CHICAGO—After claiming victory by falling crime numbers in a city that has been heralded the “murder capital,” Chicago officials and residents were confronted with another rash of shootings, yet again highlighting violence that plagues the nation’s third most populous city.
The national spotlight shone back on Chicago after 13 people were wounded in a late-night attack at a South Side park Thursday. Between Friday and Sunday, at least 24 people had been shot; five of them died as a result.
City officials and agencies close to the matter have become adamant about finding the causes and tracking the true solutions to Chicago’s crime epidemic, and agree that it’s a critical time to get the problem under control. While it’s impossible to point the finger at every possible cause, Roseanna Ander, founding executive director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, suggests that along with a host of social issues, the rash of guns and the justice system play a large part in Chicago’s crime issue.
“The other pieces of the system also need to be similarly aligned so that when people are arrested for guns, it is considered a serious crime, and it’s not clear that there is this sense across the rest of the system that carrying a gun illegally in Chicago is a ‘real crime’ and really needs to be a priority in terms of sentencing and the way the justice system works,” she told theGrio.
Chicago police have already seized more than 5,100 illegal guns thus far in 2013, and according to Ander, they seize more than any two other police departments combined annually.
Data collected on people arrested for carrying an illegal firearm, and those arrested multiple times for the same offence, indicate that it’s very common to get probation, Ander noted. “It seems like it’s sending a message perhaps that it’s not a big deal to carry a gun illegally, and yet, when you look at in Chicago, 85 percent of the homicides are with guns, over 80 percent of the homicides occur outdoors in a public place, its that decision to leave out their house and carry a gun illegally in the first place that’s putting the rest of the community at huge risk.”
Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy has consistently pushed for additional gun control measures and says the lack of “common-sense” gun laws has made Chicago’s violence issue spiral out of control.
“What is needed in Chicago is real action on reasonable gun laws on the state and federal level. We need to keep illegal guns and military-type weapons out of our communities. Illegal guns, Illegal guns, Illegal guns drive violence,” he said at a press conference Friday, updating on Thursday’s shooting at Cornell Square Park. “Military-type weapons, like the ones we believe [were] used in this shooting, belong in the battlefield, not in parks, playgrounds. etc. It’s common sense. It’s a miracle there have been no fatalities.”
McCarthy, who was the police chief of the New York Police Department before Chicago added, “We should require background checks for all gun sales. At the state level, we need law that requires reporting of transfer of a weapon. Those illegal weapons end up on streets of our communities.”
Another large known contributor to Chicago’s violence epidemic comes from socioeconomic conditions and behavior, and exists in the streets, institutions and homes of residents.
“We need to be focused more on what’s putting young people at risk to becoming engaged in serious violence, and so really putting resources into prevention or programs that seem promising,” Ander described.
Over the last year, McCarthy and Mayor Rahm Emanuel have implemented a “comprehensive crime reduction strategy,” that commenced with a gang audit, identifying every gang member, their turf and who they’re in conflict with. Since the majority of shootings happening in Chicago tend to be gang-related, police are equipped with that information whenever an incident happens.
Most recently, McCarthy and Emanuel added extra police reinforcement in 20 high-crime areas in the city.
Since Emanuel became Mayor in 2011, he’s vowed to bring the city’s violence issue down. “For a city to have its sense of civility, its sense of community, it must live by a moral code, not a code of silence,” he said at a prayer vigil for the 13 victims of the Cornell Square Park shooting. “We cannot allow children in the city of Chicago and we will not allow children in the city of Chicago to have their youthfulness, their optimism, their hope taken from them. That’s what gun violence does.”
Although the thousands of gang factions make Chicago’s crime epidemic unique, experts and city officials agree that crime is not a unique issue to Chicago.
“We have the largest single number of homicides, but that’s not really comparing apples to apples, because you have to adjust for population. When you adjust for city size, we’re in the middle of the pack. Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis and Philadelphia, lots of other big cities have a higher homicide rate, but we tend to be the focus of the violence problem,” Ander said.
In 2012, there were 506 murders in Chicago, which equates to about 18.7 murders for every 100,00 citizens. A few hours away in Detroit, there were 386 homicides, or 54.6 murders for every 100,000 people last year, a 10 percent increase from 2011. Similarly, although there was a slight decline in homicides in New Orleans in 2012, there were 193 murders, 53.5 homicides for every 100,000 residents.
Yet Chicago continues to be the poster child for homicides. “So many times in our community when violent things happen, they think we’re savages, they think we’re animals, they think that we’re anything but human,” said Pastor Corey Brooks, who held a prayer vigil for the 13 victims of Thursday’s park shooting. “But it’s things like this to show that we’re just as American as everybody else. When our kids get shot, it hurts us. It pains us. When our community has to endure violence it hurts us and it pains us as well.”
“Let us not forget that we should not come together only in times of pain. We should come together in times of joy, and remember this sense of family and community in this room is really the true Chicago, the face of Chicago, the reality of Chicago,” Emanuel said at the vigil.
In recent years, the city has become more strategic about identifying prevention programs that have an impact on youth. The University of Chicago Crime Lab has been tasked with finding such programs and tracking their progress since 2008.
The University of Chicago Crime Lab identified the Becoming A Man youth program in 2009 as a promising success. “We raised some money to scale it up and do a really rigorous study of the program akin to a clinical trial,” Ander said. According to her, the study showed that the kids in the program showed a 44 percent decrease in violent crime arrests. As a result, the city put an additional $2 million into the program.
Chicago has amped up its summer jobs programs. Although Ander said there hadn’t been much evidence detailing whether or not similar programs actually work, the city of Chicago took the leap. As a result, “The kids who got the jobs saw a 51 percent decrease in their violent crime arrests,” she said. “So what the city is doing is starting to accumulate the evidence around the kinds of programs that can work, for which kids do they work and then trying to put money behind those programs and scale them up.”
The Crime Lab is working on studies that identify mathematics tutoring as one of the main ways to keep children in school. Ander says studies show that since Algebra is a high school requirement and has been difficult for many students, it’s often a reason children drop out and consequently become more at risk of being both perpetrators and victims of violence.
It’s the combination of a crime reduction strategy, extra reinforcements and prevention programs that have helped to drive Chicago’s crime rate down this year.
As of Sept. 21, murders were down 21 percent, while shooting incidents declined 23 percent, according to Chicago Police Department spokesman Adam Collins. Overall crime is down 15 percent. “This information equates to 500 fewer shooting victims this year compared to last year, and 113 fewer juvenile shooting victims,” Collins added.
Although Chicago has made a significant decline in crime, McCarthy says the hard work is not done yet.
“Every time somebody is a shot it’s a setback… even if it’s gang-related, even if it’s the most hard individual that individual is the father, brother, sister, sometimes parent of someone else.”
“The fact is, we’re doing better. The fact is, we have a long way to go,” McCarthy said.
Renita D. Young is a multimedia journalist based in Chicago. Follow her on Twitter @RenitaDYoung.