No-snitch mindset handcuffs Chicago
Residents in gang-plagued areas refuse to identify shooting suspects
CHICAGO – This year, Romell Young got into a fistfight on the street near his home on the city’s West Side, pummeling a man in a brawl that was spurred by an argument he can’t even remember.
Young has a scar to remind him what happened after he gave his rival a whupping: The man returned with a gun and shot him in the leg.
At the hospital, police asked Young, 23, to tell them who shot him, but he said he declined to name the assailant. Weeks after the incident in April, Young – who has a long arrest record and a felony conviction for drug possession – was charged with illegal possession of a firearm after police say they caught him on the street carrying a weapon.
“I believe karma is (vengeful), you feel me?” said Young, explaining to USA TODAY in a jailhouse interview in July why he didn’t name the man who shot him. “One day, you’re going to reap what you sow.”
Young’s no-snitching outlook sheds light on the dynamic in Chicago’s neighborhoods plagued by gun violence, one in which few residents are willing to help police and even fewer perpetrators are held accountable.
Last weekend, at least 72 people were shot in the city, including 12 fatally, but police did not record a single arrest in any of the incidents.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson called on residents to cooperate with police.
“You all know who these individuals are. They come into your homes every day, sleep with you every night,” Johnson said. “Grandparents, parents, siblings, significant others – you know who they are.”
Chicago recorded more than 1,400 homicides and 6,200 shooting incidents in 2016 and 2017. This year, the city has tallied more than 325 murders – 20 percent fewer killings than at the same point in 2017 – and the death toll puts Chicago again on pace to tally more homicides than any other American city.
The police department in the nation’s third-largest city has solved far fewer murders over the past several years compared with most other major departments around the country.
Chicago’s clearance rate – the calculation of cases that end with an arrest or identification of a suspect who can’t be apprehended – dipped to
26 percent in 2016 from 46 percent in
2013, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab. Most of the killings, largely fueled by gang violence, take place in a smattering of lowincome, predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods on the South and West Sides of the city.
Last year, as the city tallied 650 murders, the clearance rate plummeted to 17.5 percent, according to a Chicago Sun-Times analysis. The national homicide clearance rate stood at 59 percent in 2016, according to the FBI.
The numbers are even more dismal for nonfatal shootings. The department cleared 5 percent of shootings in
2016, according to the Crime Lab. The dip in Chicago’s homicide clearance rate coincided with a diminished view of the police department in the city’s African-American community after the release of a police video that showed a white police officer fire
16 shots at Laquan McDonald, 17, a black suspect wielding a small knife. The officer, Jason Van Dyke, is scheduled to go on trial next month, accused of first-degree murder.
A Justice Department review last year found Chicago officers used force nearly 10 times more in incidents involving black suspects than against white suspects.