In 1966, Richard Speck’s strangulation and stabbing of eight student nurses revived Chicago’s reputation from the Capone era as a murderous metropolis. John Wayne Gacy enhanced the legacy, even though most of his 33 known victims, killed between 1972 and 1980, were found at his house outside the city limits.
But drug-addled drifters and deviant contractors do not drive the high murder rate here. The nationally notorious case that best typifies Chicago’s affinity for murder is a modern gangland tale that revolves around an 11-year-old boy.
In August of 1994, Robert “Yummy” Sandifer–nicknamed for his love of cookies–fired a 9 mm pistol at a group of youths, killing a 14-year-old girl. Police searched Chicago for three days before finding the boy face-down in dirt and broken glass under a rail viaduct. He had been protected–and then, when he became too hot to handle, executed with two .25 caliber shots to the back of his skull–by members of the drug gang he’d sought to impress. A mug shot from one of Yummy’s arrests–his rap sheet listed 28 charges, 23 of them serious–resurrected the glare of his dark eyes on the cover of Time magazine. At his vigil, children craned to see stitches that poorly camouflaged the exit wounds on his face. “Take a good look,” the minister bluntly implored other young Chicagoans. “Cry if you will, but make up your mind that you will never let your life end like this.”
That is an admonition Chicago–its young people and the elders all around them–has ignored. In 1999, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 2,050 people under age 35 died in Chicago. The most frequent cause was homicide, which took 456 lives. In the 15-to-24 age group, nearly half of the 559 young people who died of all causes–270–were murdered.
What distinguishes Yummy Sandifer from many other young Chicagoans killed each year is that, prior to age 12, he managed to be both predator and prey. Even a hard city pauses when the coffin holds a child too small for his baggy tan funeral suit–a boy with a white pocket handkerchief puffed neatly over his heart, and smiling stuffed animals tucked around his thin shoulders.
Year upon year, mothers and fathers stare through tears at permutations of that scene. Year upon year, nothing much changes but the size of the corpses and the tailoring of the suits.
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No homicide rate is acceptable. Yet if a call to lower Chicago’s murder rate is to have credibility, it should suggest a realistic goal. That said, the goal offered here is not intended to imply that killings would be tolerable if only Chicago had fewer of them.
Exploring a goal for this city’s murder rate first requires a look at reasons why lowering the numbers won’t be simple.
– At the top of that list is Chicago’s inordinate abundance of violent narcotics gangs. Owing to the city’s history of segregated housing, sizeable expanses of Chicago are impoverished and vulnerable to crime. Gangs control extensive turf and the lucrative drug income it produces. Some customers live in those city neighborhoods; others drive in to buy dope and then slip back to their suburbs. Police surveillance tapes of retail drug stings usually show drug users whose faces project a rainbow of skin colors.
Many homicide experts and police officials estimate that if they could know the motives behind every slaying in Chicago, they’d find that half to two-thirds of all murders here trace to the gangs and the fresh generations of young Yummy Sandifers they recruit. That efficient process of renewal testifies to the failures–or at best the limited successes–of parents, schools, churches, local communities, civic groups and Chicago writ large to steer kids away from the gangs.
– Those failures are not new. But their effects have become more lethal as guns are abundantly available, especially to the young.
A gun takes the work out of murder–an otherwise more challenging enterprise, typically reliant on knives, fists or blunt objects. “We’ve armed the immature,” says criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University. “It doesn’t take much strength to pull a trigger.” The impact on violence rates is exponential: “A 14-year-old with a gun is more dangerous than a 44-year-old,” Fox says. “The latter may be a better aim but the former is more trigger-happy.”
Fox and researcher Maria Tcherni manage a proprietary database that includes virtually all of the roughly 528,000 U.S. murders of the last 26 years. Their computer analysis (done at the Tribune’s request) of Chicago murders over time confirms that younger killers cause extraordinary mayhem: They are more likely not only to use guns, but also to slay strangers rather than people they know. (Not that homicides often are entirely random; as a rule, murderers of each race kill others of their own race.)
One more chilling statistic: For every gun killing here, eight other people are shot but survive. Last year Chicago had 514 gun killings (of a total of 665 homicides), plus 4,179 firearms cases in which someone shot (and hit) someone else.
– A third challenge: the rising number of parolees, the majority of whom gravitate to poor and violent neighborhoods in Chicago. The Illinois Department of Corrections says the state’s number of parolees has been rising slowly, to today’s 33,000, but will jump to 39,000 by mid-2005. “Most went into prison without an education or a career,” says Philip Cline, the Chicago Police Department’s chief of detectives. “They’re coming out with the same credentials.”
Criminologists generally agree that rising prison populations nationwide are one reason the total number of homicides has fallen in recent years; whether the mass lockup is good or bad, it has taken some potential killers off the streets. As more parolees re-enter society, some no doubt will commit violent crimes. That applies to murderers, even though they tend to serve the longest sentences and emerge from prison middle-aged or older: IDOC’s database includes eight current inmates who were convicted of murders, did their time and walked free–only to commit subsequent murders, be convicted a second time and get sent back to prison.
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If these daunting factors make zero murders an unrealistic goal, what goal is realistic? Here is a calculation, achievable if several forces in and out of law enforcement work together:
Last year the nine U.S. cities with populations of more than 1 million had, together, 23.2 million residents and 3,077 homicides. That’s an aggregate murder rate of 13.3 per 100,000 residents. If Chicago’s murder rate could, within a few years, fall to that average from last year’s 22.9, the annual murder count here would be 387.
Chicago should select this outcome and strive hard to reach it. Only two factors make this sound ambitious or impossible: Chicago’s persistent homicide toll of more than 600 a year, and this self-satisfied city’s chronic tolerance for that level of killing.
What would it cost to cut the murder toll? Nobody has ever calculated the expense of cutting a city’s murder rate, which involves not only money for crime prevention and enforcement, but also for public awareness campaigns, youth instruction in conflict resolution, more help for domestic violence victims and so on.
But doing nothing new also has its costs, starting with the huge, if uncalculated, medical expense of transporting and treating Chicago victims of serious assaults by the thousands every year. In the ambulance or at the hospital, a severely wounded victim gets the same treatment whether he’s a gang member who started the fight or an innocent citizen felled in a drive-by shooting. And there are intangible costs, such as the trauma for children who have seen terrible sights and lost people they loved. In time, many of them, too, become magnets for the gunfire.
Murder tolls can fall just as they have fallen before. Narrow efforts already have reduced the body counts in some categories, such as child abuse deaths. With similar targeting on other categories, fewer lives might be stolen. Sunday’s final installment of this series will identify several tactics tailored to combat specific symptoms of the murder epidemic in Chicago.
As a city, we should realize that we are likely to have the murder rate we choose.
We choose our murder rate when we fund our schools, when we weigh gun control bills, when we leave the demand for narcotics untreated.
We choose our murder rate when we set Chicago’s policing priorities, when we let gangs invade our neighborhoods, when we determine for how long the people who scorn our laws should be incarcerated.
We choose our murder rate when we conclude that some lives matter less than others.
And we choose our murder rate when we forget that murder here isn’t just about the Capones and the Specks and the Gacys, but the frightening and frightened Yummy Sandifers as well.
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For the young, homicide leads all causes of death
In 1999, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 2,050 people under age 35 died in Chicago. The leading cause was homicide, a scourge more prevalent here than it is nationwide.
%%
LEADING CAUSES OF DEATH
For ages 0-34, in 1999
KEY
(000) Chicago deaths
Homicide (456)
Chicago percentage: 22%
National percentage: 9%
Accidents (all types) (333)
Chicago percentage: 16%
National percentage: 28%
Short gestation, low birthweight (135)
Chicago percentage: 7%
National percentage: 4%
Heart disease (122)
Chicago percentage: 6%
National percentage: 4%
Congenital anomalies (108)
Chicago percentage: 5%
National percentage: 7%
Suicide (94)
Chicago percentage: 5%
National percentage: 8%
Cancer (81)
Chicago percentage: 4%
National percentage: 6%
HIV/AIDS (59)
Chicago percentage: 3%
National percentage: 3%
All other causes (662)
%% Sources: Chicago Department of Public Health, National Center for Health Statistics
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Sunday: How to attack homicide.
