Frustration all around with city’s gun violence
Police struggle with pace and cooperation, families hunger for justice
The detective scanned the empty street where just an hour ago a gathering of people had been sprayed with gunfire on an August evening.
Not much here. Minor details from a single witness. Even less from a reluctant victim.
“The offenders are probably watching us now,” he thought.
As he considered his next move, the detective focused on shell casings scattered nearby.
“Pick them up,” he told himself. “And let’s move onto the next one.”
Given the furious pace of shootings in Chicago and the struggle to solve them, moving on was all the detective felt he could do, he later told the Tribune. No matter how much it frustrates him.
Victims of Chicago’s violence have become just as resigned.
“There’s no justice,” lamented a mother who lost her son in another shooting on the same weekend. A friend with him wouldn’t tell police who fired the shots.
The two shootings were among 40 attacks over that first weekend in August, a punishing blast of violence that left 13 people dead and 62 wounded. So far charges have been brought in at least four cases.
That’s about average for Chicago police detectives, whose clearance rates have fallen to embarrassing lows, some 20 points below national averages and
far beneath other big cities such as New York and Los Angeles.
National experts call the numbers alarming and say it can’t be simply explained by poor detective work or lack of cooperation from victims and witnesses.
“I have not seen numbers this low in a large city for such an extended period of time,” said Charles Wellford, a professor of criminology at the University of Maryland, who said the city needs to examine “the role of leadership” in the tumbling clearance rates.
“What the top wants, the top gets,” he said. “Chiefs set priorities, and they have a whole mechanism to put those priorities in place. … It’s resources and pressure.”
A top Chicago police official agrees that the department needs to look within and says changes are coming.
“Internally we have to focus on what we can control” … make sure our detectives feel they have the necessary tools,” Deputy Chief of Detectives Brendan Deenihan told the Tribune. “We’ve got to control our own destiny.”
He mentioned more detectives to help manage caseloads and more technology. Other officials say the department also needs to restore trust in neighborhoods to encourage more victims and witnesses to cooperate.
These are all issues that came up time and again over the past five months as the Tribune analyzed that August weekend, examining the struggle to close cases and the tensions it creates in the department and the community.
The paper spoke to dozens of victims and witnesses left waiting for answers, their lives on hold while they wonder why a detective didn’t call or why a suspect couldn’t be found.
Detectives talked about victims too afraid or unwilling to speak up. But they also voiced frustration at a department they believe doesn’t support them.
One veteran detective says he has seen resources drain away and community relations worsen and is not optimistic about a quick fix. “I will be long gone off this job before this department is structured properly.”
None of the detectives interviewed by the Tribune wanted to be identified because they were not authorized to speak for the department. But their concerns are reflected in study after study.
‘It is not just clearance’
There are two ways to calculate a clearance rate, and no matter how you figure it, Chicago is struggling.
One calculation looks just at shootings and homicides cleared in the same year they happen. The second — standard among law enforcement, including the FBI — includes cases from previous years that are solved. This is called a “total clearance rate” and is typically higher.
Between 2011 and 2017, clearance rates for nonfatal shootings within a calendar year in Chicago dropped from 15 to 7 percent. Homicide clearances dropped from 29 percent to 17 percent.
Over the same time, the total clearance rate dropped for nonfatal shootings from 23 to 15 percent. Homicide clearances fell from 49 to 35 percent, a particularly troubling statistic when compared with the rest of the country. The national average for total homicide clearances is about 60 percent, according to the FBI’s 2017 report on crime in the United States. Available figures through this past summer for Chicago’s homicide and shooting clearances indicate not much of a change for 2018.
For about 10 years now, researchers have been studying both high- and low-performing departments to figure out what goes into a good clearance rate, according to Wellford, who has worked with about 15 agencies.
“In good departments, it is not just clearance. It is, we want to make sure every investigation is done well,” he said. “And to do well, we need a definition of well. We need strong policies and training so people understand what they are supposed to do and (we need) monitoring from supervisors to keep people on track.”
‘He was mine’
In the days after the August weekend, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and police Superintendent Eddie Johnson once again found themselves in the glare of a national spotlight.
They were angry and expressed frustration at people who lived on the blocks hit by the violence.
“Don’t think for a moment people don’t know in the neighborhoods who was responsible,” Emanuel told reporters. “If you say to yourself, ‘enough is enough,’ will that implore you to then do something, so this doesn’t happen again?
“The offender in almost every situation … is known by somebody,” he continued. “They have a moral responsibility to speak up, so there could be legal accountability for those actions.”
Out in those neighborhoods, the Tribune found people who acknowledged being reluctant to speak to police.
But they also talked about not trusting officers. One spoke about never hearing from detectives, even though her name was in a police report as being a witness. Another talked about disinterested and disrespectful officers.
A Danville mother who was shot and spent a month at a rehab center said, through tears, that she was insulted by a detective’s suggestion that she knew more than she was telling him about the shooting. She no longer cared whether an arrest was made.
A confused father stood in his North Lawndale apartment, months after his son was killed, holding a single sheet of paper. It was the police report about Donald Norris Jr.’s fatal shooting on Aug. 5 but it was heavily redacted. The only information not blacked out was his son’s name.
The name of a detective was scrawled on the paperwork, but the father said his calls went unanswered. “He wasn’t a saint,” Donald Norris Sr. said of his slain son. “But he was mine.”
‘The voice for these people’
National studies into clearance rates conclude that high-performing departments have good relations with the community.
Wellford said that means detectives must reach into the neighborhoods. In effective homicide investigations, detectives “are using the community in a specific way,” he explained, saying detectives should seek out faith leaders, neighborhood organizations and survivors.
Mothers of victims of Chicago’s violence have banded together for years to support each other. They are also advocates for their slain children, pushing for cases to be worked harder. Some have tried to forge closer relationships with the detective division. One group of mothers and fathers visits crime scenes with detectives to seek information.
But Chicago has a lot of damage to undo in neighborhoods most affected by violence.
A 2017 report by the U.S. Department of Justice found that Chicago police officers used unreasonable force most often in the black and Hispanic neighborhoods. This echoed findings of a 2015 study by the American Civil Liberties Union that concluded Chicago police stopped African-Americans at a disproportionately higher rate than whites and Hispanics.
“There’s always been a heavy hand in the black community,” one detective said. “How is the black community going to trust you when you’re one of the heavy hands coming after them?”
Detectives said the distrust is immediate and obvious on the street. Witnesses turning away, doors slammed in faces.
“They don’t trust the system,” a detective supervisor said. “There needs to be somebody who is the voice for these people who get killed.”
There is also fear. “The witnesses are afraid of the retaliation. Sometimes we have to sit back and wait until someone gets themselves in enough hot water where they have to cooperate,” a veteran detective said. “That is not how it is supposed to work.”
Some detectives said they sometimes compete with gang members who will toss $1,000 at a victim or a family to stay quiet. They questioned why the department or the Cook County state’s attorney’s office could not do more to encourage people to come forward, such as speeding up relocation of witnesses.
Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx acknowledged this problem earlier this month when speaking with the Tribune editorial board, saying her office’s relocation program was not “robust.” Her office later emailed a statement to the Tribune saying it does relocate victims and witnesses who have been threatened, on a case-by-case basis.
But this addresses only part of the problem, as Johnson pointed out while discussing the struggle to make arrests after the August weekend. He said his detective division needed to start building relationships in neighborhoods, and alluded to Chicago’s deep racial divide. While violent crime mostly affects African-Americans and Hispanics, about 65 percent of Chicago’s detectives are white, according to a Tribune analysis of 2017 department data.
“When they don’t come from those neighborhoods, they have to build those relationships,” Johnson said. “So for us as a department, we have to just be better at building relationships with people to make them more comfortable to talk to us.”
Several victims from August approached by the Tribune were reluctant to speak to a reporter. Many asked not to be named because of fears for their safety. One said he avoids contact with Chicago police at all costs — he fears getting into their databases, even as a victim, can bring hassles later. He said he felt fortunate to have survived a serious shooting and just wanted to move on.
“They asked me where I was at, what I was doing,” he said nonchalantly. “I don’t want to be part of none of that.”
What detectives say
While gaining witness and victim cooperation was the top concern for detectives, they also pointed to concerns about lengthy delays in getting physical evidence, such as DNA, tested by the Illinois State Police crime laboratory. They expressed confusion and frustration with the process of charging a case, saying getting approval from Cook County prosecutors can be difficult.
Many spoke about the internal failings of their department, from lack of training to inadequate technology to depletion of their ranks.
Citywide, the number of detectives, who investigate shootings and homicides and all other crime, fell from about 1,150 in January 2009 to about 860 in July 2016, according to data released by the Fraternal Order of Police.
During summer months, when violence historically spikes, it is not unusual for detectives to sometimes be assigned a shooting a day, department officials have said.
Homicide detectives can be assigned as many as six homicides a year, but that doesn’t include cases assigned to their partner or team. So the caseload of homicides could double. If a detective excels at a task — writing search warrants or interviewing witnesses or downloading computer programs — he or she could get pulled into more work.
“They don’t want you to solve a crime, they want you to document it,” one detective said. “It’s so f------ busy.”
When the department began replacing detectives, they promoted officers who had passed the detective test about 10 years ago. They are perhaps less motivated to work cases after having waited so long to be rewarded with a promotion, some detectives suggested.
“You have a department that didn’t promote detectives for (several) years,” a detective said. “What did you think you were going to get at the end of it?”
Detectives interviewed by the Tribune questioned the recent promise by department officials to add more sergeants, saying more people doesn’t mean better investigations if they don’t know how to build cases.
Still, the help is needed, acknowledged a detective supervisor, who said there are times when there is only one homicide supervisor on a shift, forced to manage all detectives, including those investigating other crimes.
“There could be 50 detectives on a given night,” the supervisor said. “There are times when a homicide sergeant could be left to supervise homicides, sex cases.”
Then there’s the department’s lack of training, which has been well-documented. The Laquan McDonald scandal, in which an on-duty officer fatally shot a black teenager who was carrying a knife as he walked away from officers, has led to some of the first mandatory classroom training in decades. It is mostly regarding use of force, however.
Given the potential role of technology in any investigation — including surveillance footage, police street cameras, cellphone data and social media — quick access to data and the ability to digest it are critical.
But some detectives said it is too often a struggle to find the right computer program to open up surveillance footage or cellphone data. Some detectives have used their own equipment to do the work, they said. One detective said he only recently learned how the city’s camera system was networked and could be used to track vehicles.
National studies have highlighted all of these issues — training, selection of detectives and quality of technology — as keys to improving clearance rates. They add supervision is key, in particular having written guidelines for detectives on how to work a case.
By the first week of December, Johnson announced there would be an evaluation of the department by experts from the Los Angeles Police Department, the Washington-D.C.-based Police Executive Research Forum and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Johnson also announced that each of the city’s three detective areas that handle shootings and homicides would have new technology centers, outfitted with the latest programs and staffed by officers who can do the work. And 50 sergeants would be added to “ensure proper case management.” That would bring the department’s total in the detective division to about 190.
“I have not seen numbers this low in a large city for such an extended period of time,” which means the city needs to examine “the role of leadership” in the clearance rates. — Charles Wellford, University of Maryland professor of criminology, speaking of Chicago police detectives solving gun violence cases
‘Know you did everything’
Deenihan, the deputy chief of detectives, sat in his office at police headquarters in the fall, a recently released national report on clearance rates stacked on a filing cabinet behind him. He talked about changes to come.
“We need to strengthen our policies,” he said. “We probably could use more resources, technology-wise.”
So far, the department has added 300 detectives, bringing the total to about 1,200 as of Dec. 15. Deenihan said officials were also exploring the possibility of issuing cellphones to detectives to make communication with potential witnesses faster and more private.
He agreed that while most detectives have an investigation checklist they follow, the guidelines should be uniform and routinely reviewed by supervisors. He noted that tech centers inside each detective area would mean there was not only equipment but officers with the right training to move more quickly on needed computer analysis.
Perhaps the department will start tracking individual clearance rates for detectives. Everything seemed to be on the table.
When asked what tool or resource he needed the most, Deenihan didn’t hesitate: witnesses.
How a department with a checkered history and recently documented record of civil rights abuses can work more closely with the community remains to be seen. He acknowledged the department had to train detectives to be “as professional as possible.” He spoke of looking at how other departments have improved their interviews with victims and witnesses.
Deenihan, who was promoted to detective after just three years on the force, defended his detectives, saying they are focused and committed. When asked about the single most important skill they can bring, Deenihan again responded with one word: effort.
He added, “Continually working these cases as hard as you can so at the end of the day you would know you did everything.”