Urban killings rise in clusters, even as cities grow safer
INDIANAPOLIS » When she started an urban farm in one of Indianapolis’ roughest neighborhoods, retired chemist Aster Bekele wanted to teach at-risk kids how to garden, and maybe sneak in a little science.
Then the city’s homicide rate started soaring, with most of the killings happening around the community center where Bekele and the teens tended their vegetables, chickens and compost piles. After her own son was killed last summer, she found herself teaching a different lesson: how to deal with death.
A few miles away, another rough neighborhood was experiencing a change — equally dramatic but just the opposite. The Fountain Square section near downtown, which once saw nearly as many killings as Bekele’s area, was transforming into one of the city’s safer spots thanks to an influx of affluent people drawn to its hip restaurants, bicycle trails and art festivals.
The contrast illustrates an Associated Press analysis of homicide data that showed some large cities seem to be getting safer and more dangerous at the same time. Slayings in Chicago, St. Louis and Indianapolis are becoming concentrated into small areas where people are dying at a pace not seen in years, if ever. Around them, much of the rest of the city is growing more peaceful, even as the total number of homicides rises.
“There’s two different worlds,” said Anthony Beverly, who grew up in Indianapolis and now runs an organization called Stop The Violence. “Downtown is just popping. ... We struggle.”
The AP collected 10 years of homicide data from the cities that had the highest homicide rates in 2016. Reporters used spatial analysis to identify clusters of killings and track the changing geographic patterns over time. The neighborhoods enduring the most violence were largely poor and African-American, as were the killers and the victims.
Researchers say the disparity may be linked to increased joblessness, segregation and the growth of the so-called wealth gap. Over the past three decades, the wealthiest Americans have grown markedly richer while low earners lost jobs and struggled and some turned to violence.
The trend goes beyond the problem neighborhoods and trendy, lowcrime enclaves that are found in almost every city. The inequality between the two realities deepened in recent years, allowing people in the same metropolis to live in one realm with little sense of the other and creating districts of despair where everyone has seen or had someone close to them shot or killed.
Daniel Hertz, a Chicago-based policy analyst, has argued for years that citywide homicide statistics are “basically meaningless” because of the big differences. Looking at smaller geographic areas, he said, gives a far more accurate picture.
“The conversation we are used to hearing is ‘Is a city safe?’” Hertz said. “But there’s no citywide statistic that tells you the story of a city.”
The Rev. Marshall Hatch, whose church is in a West Side Chicago neighborhood that has seen a disproportionate number of homicides, said the findings reinforce the need to deal with the root causes of violence in what he calls “pockets of intense desperation.”
“We know these problems tend to compound when they’re not addressed,” he said. “It’s going to be very problematic for cities, because people are not going to just stay in their neighborhoods and commit crimes.”
Adding to the dilemma over what’s going on and what to do about it is that the narrowing homicide pattern isn’t happening everywhere.
“What we have is an epidemic, and epidemics often happen in ways that are unpredictable,” said Charles Ransford, director of science and policy for Cure Violence, a Chicagobased group that works to stop the spread of violence by treating it as a public health issue.
The concentration of violence extends to Chicago, which ended 2016 with 762 homicides, the highest in two decades. The city has been described by President Donald Trump as resembling “a war zone.” But in almost a third of ZIP codes that have reported a homicide in the last decade, the trend has been fewer killings. Now 60 percent of the killings were in only 10 of the city’s roughly 58 ZIP codes.
Chicago’s violence is fueled by gang factions that splintered from the major gangs of years ago. More factions mean more rivalries and more potential for violence. Police estimate the city has some 80,000 gang members, up from about 68,000 five years ago.
They also point to gang competition to meet the growing demand for heroin and opioids. One ZIP code on Chicago’s “Heroin Highway,” so called because suburbanites use the expressway to drive into the city for drugs, had 54 homicides in 2016, up from 24 just a year earlier.
Similar forces are at work in St. Louis, which had a record number of homicides in 2015, a spike that contributed to the overall U.S. homicide rate increasing more than 10 percent. But most of that increase came from just two ZIP codes, and in seven of the city’s 17 ZIP codes, homicides fell.
The danger of the more concentrated violence, Hertz said, is that it can become easy for most people to ignore it, and that can intensify the problem.
“It can create this sense of ‘Let’s wall it off,’” he said. People who can leave start to move out if they don’t feel safe, reducing a city’s tax base and the number of students in its schools and increasing the number of vacant properties in a particular neighborhood. It becomes a vicious cycle. businesses and rent-to-own stores. When he put ads in The Indianapolis Star advertising apartments to rent in the house, no one would even come take a look.
But things started to change when nearby Fletcher Place, one of the city’s earliest neighborhoods, was designated a historic district and preservation buffs began moving in. A local couple bought the long-vacant Fountain Square Theatre, hoping to capitalize on the nostalgia of an old vaudeville showplace. They reopened the duckpin bowling lanes, and soon hipsters and old-timers started coming to knock over pins and drink craft beers. Galleries and independent businesses followed.
In 2011, the Cultural Trail, an 8-mile bike and walking path that links downtown to cultural districts and entertainment hot spots, made its way to Fountain Square, and more college-educated young people with higher incomes streamed in. Bon Appetit magazine came to write about the restaurants.
There’s still crime, but it’s not the same. In the Fountain Square ZIP code, homicides fell from nine in 2011 to four last year.
The home Richard Campi bought for $23,000 is now worth about $500,000.