BUT WHAT ABOUT CRIME IN CHICAGO?

(and why Vallas isn't going to fix it)

Reader, you likely wouldn’t even be reading this if you and I didn’t already agree on lots of things. That’s how it is now. But maybe what we discuss here can give you something to think about or share in conversations with fellow Chicagoans about the upcoming mayoral runoff between Brandon Johnson and Paul Vallas.

I’m not sure about that, though, based on the kinds of interactions I see and participate in on social media. Anyone who is for Vallas on social media is not what I’d call persuadable—they’re people who sling around the word “communist” with the great ease of one who does not know the definition, and they pepper their observations with words like “thug” and “animal” when they’re talking about THOSE people. The criminals in THOSE neighborhoods who’ve made our city worse than the most dangerous places in the whole world.

Because that’s what it is, right? That’s what the media says. That’s what Vallas says. It’s plain as day on his campaign website. You don’t have to go past the menu bar at the top to get the idea. Right next to “About Paul” and “Public Safety” is “Share Your Crime Story.”

Really. The one thing Paul Vallas wants from you, is not for you to volunteer. It’s not your contact info. (Well he’d take your donation, tbh.) It’s Your Crime Story. Because we all have them, don’t we? In this hell hole, isn’t crime what unites us? What we all share? Nay, what makes us Chicagoans?

Or something?

But hang on. I’ve been reading about this topic—crime rates in Chicago and in comparison with other cities in the U.S.

And guess what.

Just guess.

Do you think our murder rate is the highest in the country? The fifth highest? The tenth highest? Aren’t we the most dangerous city in the country, or maybe top three? And what about car theft—surely we’re on top for that? Let’s check the reality against what we all hear, all day, every day, from all our media and all our politicians and Paul Vallas especially.

Murder rate
Chicago doesn’t make the top 5 American cities in this category. Not the top 10. I bet you don’t believe that. But you can let major news sources Forbes, CBS News, Fox News, US News & World Report tell you, or if you’d prefer, statistical websites, international traveler’s websites, insurance websites, or safety websites. Even the overtly political right wing Wirepoints (“it’s Kim Foxx’s fault”) can’t place Chicago any higher than 13th in the list of cities with the highest murder rate. And if you’re on the north side, the murder rate is an astonishingly low 3.2%—“as safe as it’s been in a generation,” according to Crain’s. Their October 2022 analysis does a great job of examining the differences in murder rates by region in Chicago.

What are the cities with the highest murder rates? St. Louis tops most lists, with Jackson MS nipping at its heels. Their rates are both in the 80s per 100K. They’re followed by New Orleans (74.3 per 100K), Birmingham AL (72.9), Baltimore (57.9), Baton Rouge LA (51.8), Detroit (48.5), Cleveland (46.5), Memphis (46), and Milwaukee (37.5). (Is it unfair to point out that two cities in which Vallas worked his “fix-its” are in the top ten—New Orleans and Philadelphia?)

Chicago? It clocks in at 24.5 per 100,000.

Car theft
Car theft and carjackings spiked in Chicago and all over the country during the pandemic and into the summer of 2022. Carjacking data, available only for 7 cities— Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Memphis, Norfolk, and San Francisco—shows that, though carjacking is the media darling, car theft numbers dwarf carjacking numbers by more than 20 times. Very little data is available on who is doing the carjackings, although victim reports from Chicago suggest it is often young offenders. Anyway Chicago is not the capital of car theft or carjackings in the US—we don’t even make the list on four auto insurance data sites or the Motley Fool, and we’re not on top in the Council on Criminal Justice’s deep dive either. You should really worry if you have to drive to Albuquerque NM, Bakersfield, San Francisco, or Modesto CA, Pueblo CO, or God forbid, Denver CO. Of Chicago’s car theft/carjacking rate, Monica Eng reports in Axios in 2021 that “we had 362 incidents per 100,000 residents—compared to 5,139 in list-leading Denver.”

Most dangerous overall
Chicago doesn’t make US News & World Report’s top 25. It doesn’t make Forbes’ list of 15 most dangerous cities. Nor the list of top 15 most dangerous cities provided by travel site Travellers Worldwide, nor the list from MoneyGeek, which focuses on crime’s cost per capita. It doesn’t make the top-10 list for Safewise, a general safety data website (don’t spend too long on this site if you’re prone to worry about your child’s odds of sustaining a brain injury on the playground). Chicago’s not on anyone’s most dangerous list.

Chicago’s reputation is, I think it’s safe to say, overrated as a crime capital, despite the constant media and political hollering. The question is, should we base all our urban policy on the notion that we are the crime capital?

The character of Chicago’s violent crime
Our homicide rate in Chicago is something that should bring sorrow to us all every day. As well as the rate of unsolved murders. But it’s not affecting all of us, as Alden Loury observed in a recent Sun-Times op-ed: White voters experience violent crime at far lower rates than non-white voters. The wards where Paul Vallas got the most votes? These are not wards struggling with crippling crime rates.

Interestingly, since 2019, there hasn’t been a murder in the majority-white Forest Glen, Jefferson Park and O’Hare communities on the Northwest Side and Mount Greenwood on the Southwest Side, according to an analysis of violent crime victimization data on the city’s data portal. In addition, there hasn’t been a nonfatal shooting in the majority-white Edison Park community on the Northwest Side.

Our city’s crime rate is characterized, as in so much else, by neighborhood and racial disparity. The number of unsolved murders in this city should fill us all with shame, but it also should tell us something about where police resources are directed. For Black homicide victims, the number of unsolved murders is more than double that for White victims. And that’s a lot of unsolved murders, as three out of every four homicide victims in Chicago are Black. Why is this? If you listen to Vallas, “city leadership has surrendered us all to a criminal element that acts with seeming impunity in treating unsuspecting, innocent people as prey.” Predators are roaming around looking for prey, and city leaders apparently want, like, and allow this. It’s as simple as that. Find Vallas supporters anywhere online and this is exactly what they aggressively repeat.

But there’s a lot that’s ignored in this narrative. Starting with the data. Violent crime in all cities is plateauing or decreasing after two tough pandemic years, attested to by the New York Times, Bloomberg, Media Matters, The Council on Criminal Justice, and The Marshall Project. This is also true in Chicago, which has seen a double-digit percentage decrease in homicides so far in 2023. No matter—the media and political pundits carry on shouting like Henny Penny about skyrocketing crime waves. This hysteria serves a political purpose, as it always has in the U.S., to reinforce fear and to increase incarceration rates.

Causality is also ignored. You won’t hear Vallas discussing the role of the mass closure of 50 schools in poor and resource-starved neighborhoods. (Reader, remember with sad irony that this action was ostensibly for the purpose of “freeing children from traps” and “giving them better options” and “raising academic performance.” None of these things happened for those children. None of it. But as always, don’t trust me, trust the research.) These disinvested neighborhoods lost jobs in the 1970s and 80s with the closures of factories and mills, lost dozens of schools even before the 2013 school closing catastrophe, lost shops, hospitals, grocery stores, and mental health care, and never had the level of investment that their White north side neighbors had. Banks have refused to loan money for homes and businesses in Black neighborhoods in eye-popping disproportion and disparity. This WBEZ study, with its stark graphics, is well worth your time if you missed it when it came out. Though the study concerns present day loan rates, WBEZ found that “current lending in Chicago is so closely tied to the race of the neighborhood, it’s reminiscent of redlining maps from 80 years ago.” Where JPMorgan Chase, for just one example, lent more than $79B in White neighborhoods from 2012 to 2018, they lent $1.93B in Black neighborhoods in the same period.

Look, White people couldn’t even handle their kids missing prom during the pandemic. I struggle to imagine what they would do if their communities were starved of resources in this way for decades. The results in these underinvested neighborhoods are predictable. These communities lack anchors, retail, banking, food access, and health care, and suffer from imbalanced mass incarceration (which I haven’t even touched on, but this is a good place to start if you care to read about this issue), severing families and shrinking the work force. Do bear in mind that policing and charging differences in different Chicago neighborhoods are the main reason that Black incarceration rates are more than 17 times higher than for Whites, as shown in this must-read study from the Better Government Association.

David Stovall, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said violent crime tends to happen in communities lacking access to quality health care, quality education, living wage employment, and food. The concentration of poverty and violence in these neighborhoods leads to more policing and more arrests, he said. “If you have stronger surveillance in those spaces, then you would also see stronger correlations in terms of people being arrested and charged for certain offenses in those areas that may be ancillary to gun violence or completely separate from it.”

It’s easy to be laser-focused on the present and wonder what to do. But it is probably a better strategy to take a long, historical look at crime rates over decades in Chicago. Because though the numbers fluctuate over decades, the neighborhoods where violence is the worst have not changed, with the historically underinvested west and south sides struggling the most. As Patrick Sharkey points out in “The Crime Spike is No Mystery” in The Atlantic in November 2022, “nearly six decades of data on violence in Chicago’s neighborhoods point to an unmistakable conclusion: Producing a sustained reduction in violence may not be possible without addressing extreme, persistent segregation by race, ethnicity, and income.”

Vallas thinks the best solution is more policing, more surveillance, and more arrests. But addressing violent crime in Chicago is going to take a lot more than increasing the police force by thousands of retired officers, adding more police on transit, “recalibrating” screeners that keep applicants out according to changes made with the Consent Decree, doubling police academy classes per year, shortening the training, poaching officers from other cities, and generally “taking the handcuffs off” police.

Growth in crime, for Vallas, stems from an unlikely source. He thinks the CTU has been a leading cause of destruction and “generations of damage” in Chicago.

Vallas says his legacy won’t be “more police.” He says he’ll deal with the city’s “underlying” problems. But “more police” is just about all you’ll find on this topic on his website. And in debates and news sources, what you’ll get is a lot of shouting along the lines of Don’t Lecture Me, You Don’t Know Anything About It, which is a teeny bit awkward given the fact that Vallas hasn’t lived in Chicago for decades, and he is shouting these words at Brandon Johnson, a man who is currently raising his family on the west side.

He may sound like he is concerned about redressing massive social and civic injustice in Chicago. And bravo to him for noticing. But the real Vallas pops out now and again—and it’s a little scary. The imperious shouting, the handcuffs-off-the-police, the thug rhetoric, the almost pathological distrust and hatred of public schooling, and the overall insistence on “radical privatization” as a civic good. These things should set off alarm bells, and they will not fix the crime and violence in Chicago. They do not address the persistent and real problems our beloved city faces.

With Vallas we’ll get more of the policing that has never addressed or solved violent crime in the south and west sides of the city. We’ll get a city that pits neighborhoods against each other, and “innocent people” versus “the criminal element.” We’ll get dehumanization and higher incarceration rates, although those have never yet done the job so far. And we’ll all definitely get a surveillance state. I’m not sure that’s what anyone really wants—not even the folks clamoring for Vallas to put away the thugs.