Commentary: Sound Policies, Not Misleading Labels, are Best Tools to Address Gun Violence
In a new gun report, Chicago officials continue to use highly misleading terms, painting “gun offenders” with a racialized, punitive brush
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel issued a press release on October 29 promoting the City’s second Gun Trace Report, stating in part: “For the past four years, CPD recovered close to 7,000 crime guns, or guns used or suspected of being used in a crime, each year.” Local and national coverage of the report has drawn logical inferences from this phrasing, as well as the report’s maps showing clusters of recovered weapons in the City’s West and South Sides, describing the characteristics of guns “recovered at crime scenes.”
But not included in the City’s press releases is the report’s clarification: “If charges were brought against the criminal possessor, in 91 percent of cases the offender was charged for illegally possessing a firearm.” (An unlabeled chart may indicate that either 9.6% or 2.7% of arrests involved a crime against a person, but this is not explained. The Trace Report is also silent about the status of the roughly 1,000 guns that the City seized in 2016 but did not submit to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ gun tracing center, and about the guns — seemingly over 10,000 — submitted that could not be traced via ATF’s antiquated, paper-based system.)
In the sense that police could also seize, say, psychedelic mushrooms in any physical space ranging from a street corner to a nightclub, the phrase “crime scenes” could apply to anywhere an arrest is made. However technically defensible this phrasing, it is highly misleading. To the average person, of course, “crime guns” connote instruments used in committing a person or property crime, and “crime scenes” are indicative primarily of violence — not of a police pat-down revealing contraband.
The City has become accustomed to blurring the line between violent and public order offenses in furtherance of its punishment goals. In a speech last year demanding (as he has consistently done) that Illinois raise its existing mandatory minimum penalties for gun possession, Mayor Emanuel referred to “violent offenders” several times. Media reporting about the penalty enhancement bill parroted this advocacy language, uncritically referring to “repeat gun offenders” and “violent gun offenders,” often without specifying that the targeted behavior was unlawful possession. And when the bill was passed this spring, many members of the public still did not understand its target or effect.
Emanuel’s speech clarified that his true policy target was possession only once, when he mentioned “gangbangers” three times in three sentences. Likewise, the Gun Trace Report indicates that police consider most gun arrests to be “gang-involved.” While that conveys the impression that gangs are implicated in the majority of gun cases, the Chicago Police Department has refused to disclose the size of its overly-inclusive gang database. What we do know is that its 400,000-person-and-growing “Strategic Subject List” database assigns risk scores over 250 (out of 500) to as many as 85% of the city’s total population of male African-Americans aged 15–29.
Chicago has also admitted that its gang database is actually not good at predicting any involvement in shootings (as either gunman or victim). Still, Chicagoans accustomed to racist dogwhistle politics can reasonably expect focus on “gangbangers” and the trace report’s high number of “gang-related” arrests to continue until this becomes politically damaging.
No longer content with passing the gun penalty bill this spring, the City now demands tougher penalties for failure to report stolen guns to police (it’s already illegal). Criminalizing victims for choosing not to involve the police is an inherently problematic and racially unjust policy. But in the context of a humiliating video of one (very famous) man’s attempt to report a violent crime and the City’s slow progress on federal police accountability recommendations, the demand is outrageous on its face.
To be sure, the flow of guns into illegal markets and transfers is an important matter, and traces that include unlawful gun possession, as the report does, are useful data in addressing that problem. However, we are left to speculate as to whether there may be any difference in the sources of guns recovered in relation to a violent crime, versus a licensing offense.
While it’s harder to pass legislation regulating business than it is to pass legislation depriving people of their freedom, the City should finally focus its immense political power exclusively behind the push for state gun dealer licensing. Indeed, this proposal is a key feature of the Gun Trace Report and accompanying press release. But despite being a formal plank in the mayor’s 2016 speech, this proposal was so sidelined during the City’s push for more prison time last spring, Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson indicated he was completely unfamiliar with the bill during his committee testimony in support of increased penalties.
Reducing illegal handgun availability, including through gun shop regulations, is supported by the dozens of groups who support a broad, public-health-based approach to reducing gun violence in Chicago. But this important cause, informed by research indicating that people unlawfully carry guns primarily for self-defense, is best supported by building the conditions for achieving true public safety — not by endless criminal enhancements passed by painting “gun offenders” with a racialized, punitive brush that fails to distinguish between crimes against people and crimes against the state.
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Stephanie Kollmann is the Policy Director at the Children and Family Justice Center, Bluhm Legal Clinic, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and a contributor to the 2016 report Building a Safe Chicago: Calling for a Comprehensive Plan. The views expressed in this Commentary are those of the Ms. Kollmann and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Fair Punishment Project.
