For too many decades, Chicago’s high homicide rate has been an unremarkable part of this city’s routine: flight delays at O’Hare, cooler near the lake, another double murder over drug turf.
Over the past year, though, a more self-aware Chicago has awakened to the perennial bloodbath in its midst. A new emphasis on this life-robbing and embarrassing homicide scourge–and on the crimson stain it has smeared across this city’s generally improved reputation–now suffuses Chicago. That emphasis reaches from the office of Mayor Richard Daley to some of the streets where gangbangers for too long have held law-abiding citizens hostage–too scared to let their youngsters play outdoors, too shrewd to stand near windows when bullets start to fly.
Chicago is a long way from solving its chronic homicide problem. When all the toe tags are counted, this city may finish with more killings in 2003 than any other metropolis in the nation. That probably will provoke a few headlines about Chicago as America’s “murder capital.”
But Chicago’s sorry leadership in this category is well documented: For eight of the last nine years, this city’s murder rate–killings per 100,000 residents–has topped those of all U.S. cities with populations of more than 1 million.
This may or may not be the year Chicago dips below 600 murders for the first time since 1967. Even if the total tops 600, this year could well yield the lowest homicide toll in that 36-year reach. As of Friday, Chicago’s murder toll for 2003 stood at 587, or 43 fewer slayings than on the same date in 2002. That is 43 fewer manhunts, 43 fewer funerals, 43 fewer families riven by a loss.
That reduction should satisfy no one. Six hundred murders is too much slaughter, too much misery. But the progress is cause for hope. That progress has been accelerating since early June, when the murder toll for 2003 actually exceeded the 2002 pace by 23 corpses.
It’s impossible to say with certainty why the number of murders here has declined this year. But on three fronts in particular, newly intensified attacks on Chicago’s pathology of homicide appear to be making a difference:
– Mayor Daley’s hiring of federal prosecutor Matthew Crowl as his de facto homicide czar, and his promotion of committed crime-fighter Philip Cline to police superintendent, signal a new City Hall determination to address the murder problem. One of Cline’s core strategies is to disrupt Chicago’s netherworld of gangs, guns and drugs by rapidly deploying more cops to murder-prone locales. That may be reducing the likelihood of retaliatory murders after the initial killings in gang disputes. City Hall’s approval of a permanent redeployment of more officers from Chicago’s quietest to its most troubled police districts would be another significant plus.
– The office of U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald continues to spearhead efforts against weapons trafficking and violent felons who emerge from prison to commit more gun crimes. One of Fitzgerald’s assistants, David Hoffman, has been instrumental in organizing Gang Strategy Teams in four of the city’s five police districts. Agents from a wide array of law enforcement agencies are sharing data about gang activities and leadership, keeping one another better informed about their respective investigations–and pinpointing gang operations that need to be addressed. Hoffman’s effort to spread knowledge about Chicago’s murderous gangs dovetails with Cline’s recent rejuvenation of gang intelligence efforts within the police department.
– Law enforcement can only do so much. The best weapon against homicide and other violent crimes is the determination of neighborhood residents to no longer tolerate shooting galleries in their midst. One intriguing story here: CeaseFire, an innovative program based at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health. CeaseFire attacks gun violence as a public health epidemic. Twenty-five outreach workers–some of them ex-cons and former gangbangers–operate in five areas of Chicago, attempting to quell gang tensions, spread the gospel that gunplay won’t be tolerated, and build resistance in local communities to Chicago’s culture of shooting. In neighborhoods where CeaseFire has been active–organizing its increasingly visible street marches against gun violence–shootings have declined by an average of 45 percent. Gary Slutkin, the former World Health Organization epidemiologist who heads CeaseFire, has visions of 300 workers blanketing more of the city’s free-fire zones.
These and other efforts to slash the homicide toll deserve support–from government officials, from private foundations, from citizens. There is some sense among those immersed in this life-saving cause that the city is turning a corner. If so, hundreds of families will be spared heartbreaks they would otherwise endure.
