After an especially deadly weekend, Chicago exceeded 600 murders so far this year, a level unseen in more than a decade
Blame it on the Ferguson Effect. Police administrators say that cops have backed off from doing their jobs while academics say blacks have backed off from helping the police
By Shibani Mahtani | The Wall Street Journal | October 31, 2016
CHICAGO—After an especially deadly weekend, Chicago’s spiraling violence passed a grim
new milestone: more than 600 murders so far this year, up 45% from the same period last year
and a level that hasn’t been seen in more than a decade.
Eighteen people were murdered from Friday through Sunday, bringing total homicides this year
to 614, according to the official police tally. The last time annual murders topped 600 was in
2003.
The murders have far outstripped the totals in some other large cities this year, with more
homicides than in New York and Los Angeles combined despite Chicago’s much smaller
population. Along with cities such as Baltimore and Houston, Chicago is driving a surge in the
national murder rate, which is projected to rise 31.5% this year from 2014.
While both 2003 and this year were chaotic and trying for many in the Chicago neighborhoods
affected, community involvement in 2003 was relatively strong, helping police solve 51% of the
murders that year.
Tale of Two Cities
Chicago has experienced more than 600 murders so far this year, a tally that hasn't
been seen since 2003. While murders remain concentrated in the South and West
Sides, the number of cases solved in the same year has tumbled to 21% from 51% in
2003.
This year’s murder spree seems relatively random by contrast. With little help from the
community to explain why most of these people were killed only 21% of the murders have been
solved so far.
City leaders are scrambling to grapple with the problem. Mayor Rahm Emanuel acknowledged in
a September speech that the “hopeful trend” of declining violent crime since the 1990s when
more than 900 people were murdered annually “has been reversed.”
Chicago is hiring almost a thousand new officers in coming months. There are fewer officers in
the city today than in 2003, about 12,500 vs. more than 13,500 then.
Police officials and those who study policing cite a change in gang structure and a breakdown of
trust between police and the community as major factors in fueling violence and harming the
department’s ability to rein it in.
While Chicago’s gangs were once highly organized and structured around drug sales, a major
crackdown on the drug trade has left them fragmented, with more than 600 gangs and more than
100,000 members, authorities say.
“What is random now is the intent” of murders, said a Chicago police sergeant who spent almost
a decade at the detectives division in the 2000s, and whose name was withheld at the
department’s request. “You used to be able to root it in ongoing gang wars…[now] it is hard to
pinpoint what it is that is making them continue this forever war,” he said.
Criminologists say another factor may be the so-called Ferguson effect. After Michael Brown
was killed in a confrontation with a policeman in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014, sparking days of protests and accusations of police brutality, some officers began to hesitate in doing their jobs
leading to a jump in crime, some law-enforcement officials believe.
But increasingly, academics note another dimension of the Ferguson effect: a pullback by the
African-American community from helping police in the wake of other highly publicized cases
of police shootings of black residents. The Justice Department is undertaking a broad
investigation of Chicago’s department over the death two years ago of Laquan McDonald, a
black 17-year-old shot 16 times by a white officer.
“Chicago is facing something like a perfect storm—the police have withdrawn from
communities, and those communities have withdrawn even further from police,” saidRichard
Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis.
If communities don’t feel they can trust police, they are more likely to “take dispute settlement
into their own hands,” snowballing the violence, he said.
Detectives try to solve a homicide by canvassing neighborhoods, relying on the community,
witnesses or even a gunshot victim to help them pinpoint why the crime happened.
Research published last month drew a link between acts of police violence and a drop in
community involvement with law enforcement. The study, focused on Milwaukee, found that
911 calls to police dropped 17% after residents in 2005 learned that a biracial man had been
beaten at a party by off-duty white police officers.
“People experience very traumatic events [at the hands of police], and people aren’t calling the
police,” said Andrew Papachristos, a sociologist at Yale who co-wrote the Milwaukee research.
“These things are related.”
Chicago police acknowledge a lack of trust between officers and the African-American
community, noting that the department is undergoing reforms to restore public trust including
changes to their use of force policy and increased transparency for police officer-involved
shootings.
“There is no sense of participation, no sense of community now,” said Dean Angelo Sr., a white
officer who is president of the city’s largest police union. He believes that community-police
relations are at a low point in his four decade career.
“Police used to walk the street, they knew us. I used to tell my kids, policemen are your friends,”
said Dorothy Coleman, a 78-year-old who lives in the predominantly African-American West
Side, the location of many of the murders. “Now, when young people see a police car, they break
and run.”
In 2003, police would deploy a large number of officers after a shooting and use now-
controversial techniques like stop-and-frisk and safety-belt checks to look for lawbreakers in the
most violent neighborhoods.
“There was a lot of community support for what looked to residents like effective policing,” said
Matt Crowl, who served as deputy chief of staff for public safety from 2003 to 2006, in which he
helped craft policies to reduce homicides. “Some of those tactics will not be as welcome today.”
In an agreement the city reached earlier this year with the American Civil Liberties Union,
officers must fill out a contact card whenever they stop someone. Since then, the number of
police stops in Chicago has gone down by 70%, compared with the year before.
Frank Giancamilli, a police spokesman, said detectives—whose ranks have fallen by about 30%
in the past 10 years, according to the city’s largest police union—will get new resources and a
new plan to focus on violent crimes.
Detectives are working with community-based organizations to better understand dynamics in
specific neighborhoods and using tools such as portable gunshot residue testing kits to help solve
crimes in real time.
“The level of violence in some neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West Sides is absolutely
unacceptable and detectives work tirelessly to pursue leads and bring some level of closure to
families affected by gun violence,” Mr. Giancamilli said
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