Chicago tries to learn from New York crime fighting successes
Even before President Donald Trump tweeted a threat to send “in the Feds” to curb Chicago’s gun violence, he was saying on the campaign trail that there was a simple solution to the bloodshed: police should get tougher.
Chicago should follow the lead of New York City, Trump’s administration has said, and crack down on even the smallest offenses.
It turns out Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson visited the New York Police Department weeks before the Trump administration advice. But what he gleaned from a city that has achieved long term success in fighting crime was more nuanced than a Trump inspired police crackdown.
Johnson came home with ideas aimed at increasing community trust by using technology to get Chicago police officers out of their squad cars, and putting new cadets in neighborhoods to walk the streets and talk to locals.
“We are only as strong as the faith the community has in us,” Johnson said.
Gaining that community trust will be a tall order in a city suffering from a toxic brew of rising violent crime in some of its poorest neighborhoods along with anger at police after the release in 2015 of a video showing a white police officer shooting black teenager Laquan McDonald 16 times.
That lack of faith has had grave consequences in Chicago where many people living in high- crime neighborhoods are reluctant to help police solve them. While the number of homicides surged to the highest in nearly two decades last year at 762, the percentage of those murders solved by police fell ten points to 26 percent, according to a University of Chicago Crime Lab study. In New York, police solve about 70 percent of homicides.
“We need them ( witnesses) to come forward and give us the information so we can put these bad guys in jail,” Johnson said.
In one example of Chicago’s dilemma, the police department is struggling to draft a new policy on the use of force. An October proposal prompted concern from the police union that the restrictions were so tight officers would put themselves in danger to comply. A new draft released Tuesday would give police more latitude in deciding when to fire their weapons, which pleased the police union but prompted concern from community activists about excessive force.
All this is a sharp contrast with New York, where the NYPD during the 1990s turned to the “broken windows” policing strategy of cracking down on minor offenses championed by then- Mayor Rudy Giuliani. That policy helped drive the number of homicides down in one decade from more than 2,200 a year to fewer than 700.
Since then, the number of homicides in New York has continued to decline. In January the police department announced that there had been a near record low 335 homicide in 2016 — less than half the tally in Chicago, which has less than half the population. And New York has done this with a lighter policing touch.
Since his visit to New York, Johnson has begun applying what he learned about community policing with some encouraging results.