Big-city homicides
Chicago killings fall in ’17; Baltimore’s reach record rate.
CHICAGO — Chicago ended 2017 with fewer homicides than the year before, but gang violence in the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods kept the total number of killings above the 600 mark for the second time in more than a decade.
The Chicago Police Department released statistics Monday that show the number of homicides fell from 771 in 2016 to 650 last year. The number of shootings dropped from 3,550 to 2,785 during the same period.
Although the drops were significant, the homicide total eclipsed the number of killings in New York City and Los Angeles combined for the second year in a row.
“Six hundred people dead in Chicago is a hell of a lot of people to be dead in one year,” said the Rev. Marshall Hatch, whose church is in one of the most violent neighborhoods on the city’s West Side.
Both New York City and Los Angeles ended 2017 with fewer than 300 killings. Baltimore, however, reported 343 killings in 2017, setting the city’s per-capita homicide record as gunmen killed for drugs, cash, payback — or for no apparent reason at all.
“Not only is it disheartening, it’s painful,” Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh said during the final days of 2017, her first year in office.
Baltimore is easily Maryland’s largest city, with more residents than the state’s 15 next-largest cities combined. Still, it has shrunk over the decades, and it now has about 615,000 inhabitants. That means its 343 killings work out to about 56 per 100,000 people, its highest rate ever. Chicago, with a population of more than 2.7 million, had a homicide rate in 2017 of about 24 killings per 100,000 people.
Some blame the violence in Baltimore on more illegal guns, the fallout of the opioid epidemic, or systemic failures like unequal justice and a scarcity of decent opportunities for many residents. Others blame police, accusing them of taking a hands-off approach to fighting crime after six officers were charged in connection with the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, a black man whose fatal spinal cord injury in police custody triggered protests and the city’s worst riots in decades.
“The conventional wisdom, or widely agreed-upon speculation, suggests that the great increase in murders is happening partly because the police have withdrawn from aggressively addressing crime in the city’s many poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods,” said Donald Norris, professor emeritus of public policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Even as arrests have declined to their lowest level in years, police say their officers are working hard in a tough environment. They say the overwhelming majority of Baltimore’s crime has long been linked to gangs, drugs and illegal guns.
“The vast majority of our kids and residents of this city aren’t into criminal activity like this. It’s that same revolving group of bad guys that are wreaking havoc for people’s families,” said T.J. Smith, the chief police spokesman, whose younger brother was the city’s 173rd homicide victim in 2017.
Chicago, meanwhile, is confident that its police can continue to reduce the city’s homicide rate. Police there are expanding high-tech strategies and equipment to fight crime, including devices that pinpoint where gunshots are fired.
“I am proud of the progress our officers made in reducing gun violence all across the city in 2017,” Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said in a statement. “In 2018, we are going to work to build on the progress we made last year — to reduce gun violence to save lives and to find justice for victims.”
Police have been particularly encouraged by the results of setting up Strategic Decision Support Centers in six of the city’s 22 police districts, including those in the most violent pockets of the city. The centers are equipped with sound-detection technology that enables the department to instantly know where the sound of gunfire is coming from and to alert officers through computer screens in their squad cars and smartphones.
One of the first districts where a center was set up was in Englewood, a neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side that has long been known as one of the city’s most violent.
Englewood had seen 48 homicides as of late December, compared with 86 during the same period in 2016. Police hope the trend continues in the neighborhood. They plan to roll out centers in six more police districts this year.
“It does seem like the timing of when we see Englewood turn the corner was in February just as the Strategic Decision Support Center was opened,” said Max Kapustin, research director at the University of Chicago’s Crime Laboratory.
Johnson said that “It’s no coincidence that Englewood is leading the city on shooting reductions.”
Hatch, the West Side minister, hopes Chicago’s homicide numbers continue to fall, but he worries this will bring complacency and a feeling that more officers and technology are all the city needs.
“My concern is that if we put too much emphasis … on policing and technology and not enough on the investments in social services, those numbers will go up again because we have not addressed the social conditions that are driving all the violence,” he said.