After over 500 murders in Chicago in 2012, the Windy City’s violence epidemic continues – 2013 saw the deadliest January in over a decade – and continues to make national news. The New York Times, for example, ran a recent piece noting how Chicago’s strict gun laws can’t stem the tide of violence.
The NYT piece predictably spurred much debate over gun policy, but that distracts from the real question: why exactly does Chicago have so many murders? Chicago had 512 murders in 2012. New York City – with three times Chicago’s population – had only 418 murders, the lowest since record keeping began in the 1960s. Los Angeles, with over a million more people than Chicago, had only 298 murders. These other cities can’t be accused of lax gun laws or somehow being immune to guns being brought in illegally from more lenient jurisdictions. So what’s different about Chicago?
It’s impossible to say for certain what is causing Chicago’s unique murder problem, but a few possibilities suggest themselves.
- The number of police officers. Depending on the report, Chicago’s police department is about 1,000 officers short of authorized strength and is facing a large number of looming retirements while few new recruits are brought in due to budget constraints. This clearly has had an impact. However, NYPD has also seen a decline in the number of officers without this effect.
- Police tactics. New York has made headlines with controversial, but apparently effective, tactics like the so-called “stop and frisk” policy. The city hasn’t hesitated to defend these, even in the face of enormous negative press and lawsuits. Los Angeles has made huge strides in moving past its Detective Mark Furhman era reputation to build bridges to minority communities while Chicago has spent years and millions of dollars ignoring and defending officers who used torture to extract confessions. New York and Los Angeles also have more experience with statistically driven policing than Chicago.
- Politically controlled policing. Mayor Daley hired Jody Weis from the FBI as police superintendent, but neutered his ability to run the department by assigning a political operative as Weis’ chief of staff. Similarly, Rahm Emanuel, a fan of centralized control, has been heavily involved in driving major decisions like disbanding the anti-gang strike forces. It’s not clear whether police decisions have been driven by purely professional crime fighting concerns or, as in likely given the city’s culture, political considerations.
- William Bratton. Both New York and Los Angeles saw the start of their major successes against crime under the leadership of William Bratton. Los Angeles in particular was extremely smart to go hire him after his success in New York. While other cities have experienced murder declines, often with similar strategies, they are not places of the same scale, demographic diversity and political complexity of New York and LA. Perhaps Chicago should have spent whatever it took to get Bratton as police superintendent, though whether Bratton would have been willing to come into a place with such a history of political meddling with the police is uncertain.
- Gang fragmentation. Local and federal officials had great success taking out the leadership of many of the city’s gangs. The result has been significant gang fragmentation and a lack of hierarchical control over the rank and file that some have blamed for contributing to the violence epidemic.
- Depopulation. Few analyses of Chicago’s murder problem focus on the city’s very poor demographic performance. New York City and Los Angeles are at all time population highs. Other urban areas like Boston and Washington, DC have started rebounding from population losses. However, Chicago lost a stunning 200,000 people in the 2000s and now has a population rolled back to levels not seen since 1910. Loss of population in many neighborhoods has had many pernicious effects, including a loss of social capital (notably middle class families), loss of businesses due to loss of customers, and a diminished tax base. It’s hard to maintain social cohesion in the face of both extreme poverty and population decline. Similarly, the Chicago region had the worst jobs performance of any large metro in the US during the 2000s, which couldn’t have helped.
- Public housing demolitions. Chicago’s high rise projects like Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes were yesterday’s national shame as hotbeds of crime and the killing of youths. Chicago was one of the most aggressive demolishers of these, with all of the high rises effectively destroyed. While this perhaps reduced localized crime, it destroyed the only homes many people had ever known, and, like depopulation, destroyed significant social capital and possibly simply redistributed and dispersed crime, as some research in other cities has suggested. New York’s public housing is hardly problem free, but NYC took a very different approach, investing in the high-rises rather than destroying them. It’s hard not to speculate on what this has meant to the trajectory of crime in those two cities.
Whatever the actual answer may be, Chicago’s murder epidemic continues to ravage families and neighborhoods. Given the results in January, it would appear the city is no nearer to getting a handle on it than it was a year ago. A reconsideration of the differences between Chicago and other large cities, and a resulting adjustment in strategy, would seem to be long overdue.
Aaron M. Renn is an independent writer on urban affairs and the founder of Telestrian, a data analysis and mapping tool. He writes at The Urbanophile.
Chicago photo by Bigstock.
Email this Story
What disaster the liberal "long marchers" have wrought
As Thomas Sowell points out, it is remarkable how impervious liberals are to actual statistical data, such as the rate of improvement in negro outcomes BEFORE Kennedy and Johnson, versus AFTER. Liberal "help" actually turned around a successful "self help" paradigm, and ushered in the new era of "the long slide backwards". Booker T. Washington would be turning in his grave. So would MLK, in fact.
There is a particular problem with urban ghettoes, in that "white flight" has been accompanied by "upwardly mobile negro flight" as well. The relative proportion of upwardly mobile to immobile people has therefore fallen, eventually anyone who might have been a good role model or source of legitimate inbound flow of money into the community has long since gone. Those who did not - or could not - get out, are trapped.
Actually, whites who lack upward social mobility remain trapped in ghettoes too. The problem is a "social mobility" one rather than a "race" one. But the "flight of the socially mobile" might not have happened if law and order were maintained, family structure kept intact, moral belief systems maintained, and schools standards maintained. What disaster the liberal "long marchers" have wrought!
Racaille needs to learn how to argue; should take some practice
..at a range before spouting off here. Very unhelpful and disrespecting comments.
His first spout ("lazy journalism"), claiming the author had pointed to Illinois gun laws, was the first clue. The author's only mention of gun laws in his piece was "These other cities can’t be accused of lax gun laws or somehow being immune to guns being brought in illegally from more lenient jurisdictions. So what’s different about Chicago?"
I don't see the word 'Illinois' in there. Does anyone else?
More Reasons for Chicago Murders
There is a lurking elephant in the room that people don't want to discuss. But, my intent is to be honest and truthful and not necessarily politically correct.
The problem of Chicago Murders is the destruction of the family and the expansion of the welfare state. One could add in a bad education system but I believe that is more the result of the other two items indicated. Let's face facts, in many cases, the people who commit these crimes are young people in gangs. Where are the fathers of these people?
The causes of this are 50+ years of Left Wing social engineering which has made fatherhood optional. No father; no big deal because a government program is there to pick up the slack. In fact, there are incentives to NOT having the father around. Because of the destruction of the family, roughly 70% (maybe even higher) of inner city children have dysfunctional families where the father is either dead or in jail or just plain missing from the child's life.
The cycle is now repeating itself over and over again. Oftentimes, young people in poor areas have no role model of successful male figures.
Personally, I believe a lot of these problems were started and caused by The Great Society programs of the 1960s. Whether they were well intentioned or not, the results have been very bad. There are some people who are 4th and 5th generation of welfare recipients who don't have any job skills.
Critics of my argument will say "Los Angeles and New York have the same problems but have less murders". Sure, that's true, but they sure have a lot more crime that they should have. And, quite frankly, the previous mayor and the current mayor have politicized the police department (as Aaron mentions in the article quite nicely) and have made it a difficult job at best.
How to fix these problems is another issue. But the first step is the diagnose the problem and accurately figure out why the problem exists. But until we address the issue of the destruction of the family, we are kidding ourselves at ever having a handle of the problem.
Exactly so
I was born in Chicago (Maywood to be exact) in 1960 and I can tell you from personal observation, that your thesis is exactly correct. The Negro family in the '60s was strong and children were 8taught pride and discipline - a different flavor than Poles, Germans, and Irish, but still a work ethic, a code of behavior enforced by elder males, and self-pride and a desire to compete - if principally as means of developing self-worth and racial pride. Once AFDC (now TANF) came along, the incentives were for families to be single-mother to maximize income and benefits so the father's income was not included in the base calculation of aid eligibility. I saw this in Maywood as Negro families moved in and soon had the fathers move out so social workers would score the household as fatherless and not count the paternal income into the base household income number. Once the father was gone, the family - over generations - descended into a pattern where work was only an abstract concept and dependency and entitlement/permanent victimhood mentality took over. Further, without a working,prideful father as a role model and teacher/enforcer of social codes, the stigma of jail, criminality, and violence was lost. This has culminated in the utter destruction of the Negro social fabric and the Left continues to deny this fact without any rational rebuttal. Instead they look for superficial things like "Seven Reasons". The Left is constitutionally incapable of an honest critical analysis of the results of their ideology, because they cannot abide that their ideology is wrong. The Left defended the USSR right up until the collapse. The Left is unwilling to apply rational and objective analysis to the effects of their ideology, and this is further manifest in the speech repression (and media repression in Leftist regimes) that denies access to those who would force a debate or critical review upon the recalcitrant Left.
Why are there so many violent crimes in America?
Please note that Chicago isn't even in the top 25.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-25-most-dangerous-cities-in-america.ht...
"The New York Times, for example, ran a recent piece noting how Chicago’s strict gun laws can’t stem the tide of violence."
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/01/29/us/where-50000-guns-in-chi...
When you have neighboring crazies like Indiana, Chicago cannot be an island.
Furthermore, the state of Illinois DOES NOT have strict gun laws. Do your research. This is nothing more than lazy journalism.
On a side note, every other post in Urbanphile is about Chicago. You might need to explore the rest of the US for a better understanding and the ability to compare and contrast without regurgitating decades old trope.
You sound like you are from
You sound like you are from Gerry McCarthy's press office.
We are talking murders here, not necessarily "violent crimes" generically. As research I cited a while back indicates, murders have a particularly negative effect and are heavily correlated with population loss. (Did population loss cause the murders or murders cause the population loss? The relationship deserves more study).
What's more, no one denies that there are other cities with worse crime rates. But do you really want to claim that Chicago's peer group is Flint, Detroit, and St. Louis? We're talking a place that constantly brags about being a "global city" and wants to be seen as a top 10 global metropolis. If that's the case, the right peer group is indeed places like LA and New York.
If you really think that Chicago should be judged versus other Midwest rust belt cities, however, just say so.
Also, Illinois is the only state in America that totally bans concealed carry, so it's tough to argue gun laws are lax. To even touch guns or ammo in a gun store, you need a state issues Firearms Owner ID Card. Chicago and its suburbs have basically America's strictest gun laws.
Blaming neighboring state guns laws is the refuge of the incompetent.
Your comment seems to display an inherent bias against Chicago
Mr. Renn, your comment seems to display an inherent bias against Chicago.
How else can one explain this statement: " We're talking a place that constantly brags about being a "global city" and wants to be seen as a top 10 global metropolis."
I haven't heard anyone officially connected to the City of Chicago "constantly bragging" about Chicago being a global city.
However, I must now tell you that over the last three years or so I have see about a half dozen surveys ranking the world's cities. Each survey has used somewhat different criteria and metrics and in just about all of them Chicago has been ranked somewhere among the top ten cities of the world.
Your comment gives the impression that you somehow resent the fact that these surveys have ranked Chicago among the top ten cities of the world.
"We're talking a place that
"We're talking a place that constantly brags about being a "global city" and wants to be seen as a top 10 global metropolis. If that's the case, the right peer group is indeed places like LA and New York."
That because it is, and just like NYC and Los Angeles, murder rates ebb and flow. Please review past murder rates in both cities.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/03/recent-killings-has-marred...
"Also, Illinois is the only state in America that totally bans concealed carry, so it's tough to argue gun laws are lax. To even touch guns or ammo in a gun store, you need a state issues Firearms Owner ID Card. Chicago and its suburbs have basically America's strictest gun laws."
90% of all guns associated with crime are illegal and originate from states with lax gun laws. Furthermore, if you want to see strict gun laws please review New York state as they seem to be working there.
"Blaming neighboring state guns laws is the refuge of the incompetent."
Only because it doesn't fit your narrative. You are sounding more like a Tea Party member by the day.
Liberal logic
".....90% of all guns associated with crime are illegal and originate from states with lax gun laws....."
AH, so you are claiming that if no States at all had "lax gun laws", there would be no gun crime, because somehow the USA's international borders could be trusted to be imporous to guns, even if they are notoriously porous to everything else right now, including the illegal immigrants who are a pet constituency of "liberals".
RIIIIGHT. Logic and credibility are not the liberals strong points.
Not to mention the large number of guns already in the USA.
That's right...
"The classic NRA response. We already have too many guns. There isn't any way to control it other than have MORE guns"
Oh and btw, let me throw in illegal immigration for good measure.
Absolutely creepy.