What’s Causing Chicago’s Spike in Shootings?

Parallax News presents big issues broken down into multiple perspectives. This brief looks at 3 different perspectives on Chicago’s shooting epidemic.

Chicago‘s notorious violence has only gotten worse this year. Nearly 2,300 people have been shot in 2016, an increase of more than 740 from the same point last year. Last weekend alone, 47 people were shot. The epidemic of shootings raises larger questions about how to address policing, race relations, and the criminal justice system.

I. Heather Mac Donald

In response to record-high violence in Chicago, Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather Mac Donald points to the Ferguson Effect as “destroying” the city. The Ferguson Effect is the alleged correlation between anti-police sentiment and increasing crime rates.

Mac Donald, an early proponent of the Ferguson Effect idea, told Parallax that viral videos showing police killing African-American men — including the Laquan McDonald shooting video in Chicago — have created a false image of police as violent racists. She thinks the deadly instances that catch the most attention are often “an aberration, not the norm.” This misconception has been worsened by official statements, she believes, coming “from the White House on down.” Mac Donald tells Parallax that the idea of police as racist runs counter to actual research. She cites, among other evidence, a recent Harvard report that found no signs of racial bias in a sample of 1000 police-related shootings.

According to Mac Donald, this hostile environment for police leads officers to shy away from proactive policing. In 2015, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel expressed a similar sentiment, saying police were going “fetal” in response to the negative media attention they’d been receiving.

Mac Donald notes that Chicago street stops, a primary form of proactive policing, are down by 90% this year, due to the hostility officers face on the streets. She defines “proactive policing” as “purely discretionary.” It is a practice by which an officer makes pedestrian and traffic stops and engages with his or her community. This is opposed to “reactive policing,” where an officer responds to a 911 call. Proactive policing is geared toward stopping crimes before they happen and increasing urban safety overall. Mac Donald says that of course when officers face “hostile, jeering crowds” and “cell phones being stuck in their faces,” they will avoid engaging with people in the street and criminals will become “emboldened” in the resulting vacuum.

She says “most of the victims, in this poisonous era spawned by Black Lives Matter, have been black,” and that politicians like Hilary Clinton who are denouncing the police’s racism as “systematic” “ought to take a look at Chicago.” She cites that police-related shootings only account for .5% of all shootings in the city.

II. Eddie Johnson

Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson took over in March after the scandal surrounding the police shooting of Laquan McDonald. The “larger issue” causing Chicago’s violence, Johnson says, is the city’s “broken” criminal justice system, which he says suffers from “years of neglect.”

Johnson believes that poverty itself creates hopelessness which in turn leads to crime. For example, the Austin District on the West Side of Chicago has seen a 142% increase in shooting incidents and roughly one family in three lives in poverty. “If you show me people without hope, I’ll show you people that’s willing to pick up a gun and do something with it,” says Johnson.

Johnson has noted that a growing mistrust between both law enforcement and civilians has led to an increase in crime, what criminologist Richard Rosenfeld calls a version of the Ferguson Effect. However, Johnson believes a key to reestablishing trust is promoting diversity in the Chicago Police Department. “One thing I’ve heard time and time again in the minority communities, ‘We will feel more comfortable giving information to people who look more like us,’” the Police Superintendent said.

Johnson also believes that stronger gun laws are lacking to punish those who increasingly provide the tools for shootings in Chicago streets. The Chicago Tribune reports that police have recovered 4,300 handguns across the city, up 30% from this time last year, and that “gun pipelines are plentiful for gang members.” “Straw purchases” allow legal buyers to purchase guns on behalf of gang members at suburban Cook County and downstate gun shops. Additionally, northwest Indiana, known for its “less stringent” gun laws, is just a short drive away.

Johnson thinks the 90% decrease in street stops, which Heather Mac Donald references as evidence of a Ferguson Effect, is actually due to police officers’ “simple confusion” surrounding new paperwork put into effect by the ACLU this January. The American Civil Liberties Union changed street stop forms from “brief contact cards” to longer two-page forms to aid in monitoring stop-and-frisk practices and their impact on minorities. Some police call this shift the “ACLU Effect.” Because of this change, police became less likely to enact street stops, Johnson thinks, and “savvy criminals” take advantage in their absence.

III. Bella Bahhs

Bella Bahhs is an artist and activist who grew up in Austin, on Chicago’s West Side. She is co-director of the #LetUsBreatheCollective, which first organized around donating supplies to protestors in Ferguson.

In a city where blacks are 18 times more likely to be killed than whites, Bahhs says that “Ferguson Effect” rhetoric aims to discredit groups like Black Lives Matter, whose primary goal is to protest the oppression that their communities encounter on a daily basis. She says it’s a classic example of “villainizing the victim.” The victims being represented by “unarmed, black, queer women” that started the movement — which “was always rooted in peace and love, not in violence” — who decided to stand up against a system that was never set up for their success.

Instead, Bahhs believes that growing violence in Chicago stems from a lack of resources in minority communities. She tells Parallax that “chaos exists wherever people are scrambling for resources” and explains the ways in which Chicago’s structural violence continues to perpetuate intra-community violence.

Bahhs says the primary resource that minority communities are being stripped of is quality public schools, a sentiment expressed by 71% of African-American residents on the South Side. In 2013, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration oversaw the largest mass school closing in history, of nearly 50 public schools, many in black and Latino communities. Bahhs explains the dangers of forcing children to bus to neighborhoods that are not their own: that children are sure to encounter rival gangs and, consequently, more violence. This displacement explains why a New York Times poll found that merely three in ten residents on the West Side think graduating from high school a possibility.

Bahhs says that she has noticed the police presence in Chicago triple since Ferguson, and that any claim that the Chicago Police Department is not racist is unfounded. Indeed, a Police Accountability Task Force appointed by the Mayor found systemic racism in Chicago Police Department.

Another lacking resource in Chicago is its dearth of jobs in black communities, Bahhs explains. A University of Illinois report found that 47% of 20 to 24-year-old black men in Chicago, and 44% in Illinois, were out of school and out of work, compared with 10% of white men in the same age group. Another young activist, Charlene Carruthers, national director of Black Youth Project 100, cites this “lack of options” as a reason why young black people enter “survival economies like the drug economies and sex work” — because there simply aren’t any alternatives.

According to Bahhs, nearly 40% of the city’s budget goes to the Chicago Police Department. Bahhs argues that this massive spending would be better used funding mental health programming for people suffering from “Post-Traumatic Slave Disorder,” reopening schools and colleges in predominantly black neighborhoods, and funding healthy grocery stores in the city’s poorer areas which she calls “food deserts.”

***

This piece was written by Nastasya Popov.

To get more perspectives subscribe to the Parallax News brief.