Two murders a day push up Chicago’s grim body count
Every week, one heart-wrenching story after another flows from the streets of Chicago: The 15year-old grandson of a U.S. congressman, gunned down in a dispute over sneakers. Twin 17-year-old boys killed by a driveby shooter. The cousin of basketball star Dwyane Wade dying in a crossfire while pushing her baby in a stroller.
The nation has been moved, and appropriately so, by the tragedies half a world away in Aleppo, Syria. But there’s unremitting violence and mindless killing of young people right in America’s third largest city, where at least 738 murders have been committed this year, more than in Los Angeles and New York combined. Brutal cold typically drives down crime, but when it swept into the Windy City last weekend, 10 more people died.
The body count is up sharply from last year’s 473 murders to a level not seen in Chicago since the drug wars of the mid-1990s.
City officials blame gang activity, fecklessly enforced gun laws and firearms flowing in from outside Chicago. There’s crushing poverty and unemployment in the most violent neighborhoods on the city’s west and south sides. Social safety nets have frayed because of a state budget impasse.
But plentiful guns, family breakdown and other social pathologies aren’t unique to Chi- cago, which suggests that contributing factors in the murder spike are a lack of leadership from City Hall and a mismanaged police force alienated from the crime-plagued neighborhoods most in need of law enforcement service and protection.
This gaping chasm between police and the citizens they serve was described in a damning task force report issued last April that found systemic racism in the department’s use of force, little accountability for police misconduct and sorely lacking community engagement. “Police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color,” the task force report says.
Without cooperative buy-in from these troubled communities, police don’t get the assistance they need and killers go unpunished. It’s little wonder that the Chicago Police Department’s success at “clearing ” or solving murders dropped precipitously from well over half in the 1990s to about 30% now.
The task force was launched following an angry public backlash over the belated release, in November 2015, of videotapes showing police shooting unarmed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald the previous year. Trial for the former cop who pulled the trigger is still pending.
There’s a new police superintendent, and the city is expanding its police force by about 1,000 people to 13,500 by the end of 2018. Chicago already has more police officers per capita than New York and Los Angeles, however, and many experts say Chicago could use the existing force more efficiently, with greater data-driven focus on “hot spots” of crime activity.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the City Council, the police and civilian leaders have an urgent duty to curb the carnage in the neighborhoods where these young people are dying. Perhaps a soon-to-be-unemployed former community organizer from Chicago could be enlisted to make this scourge one of his post-presidential priorities.