Illinois’ crime rate took another big drop in 2003, bringing the numbers close to what they were before crime took off in the 1970s.
The sweeping drop in 2003, twice as large as the previous year, was seen in Chicago, most suburbs and smaller cities across the state, according to new Illinois State Police data. Only the most sparsely settled counties saw a general increase, as violent crime rose there for the third straight year, according to data to be released Sunday.
Statewide, total serious crimes reported to police fell for the ninth year in a row to 497,693, which translates to a crime rate not seen since 1972–when Richard Nixon was in the White House and a different Daley ran Chicago City Hall.
Crime in Illinois took a sharp upturn in the early 1970s, climbing throughout the decade. The situation worsened in the 1980s as the crack cocaine epidemic plagued many urban areas. Crime in the state eventually peaked in 1991. But for the last decade, crime rates have rolled progressively downward.
The 2003 report shows declines in all eight offenses making up the state’s index of major crimes: murder, sexual assault, robbery, assault, burglary, theft, auto theft and arson. Reports of sexual assault, after unexpectedly jumping in 2002, dived below the average of the last five years.
It was the same across the nation as U.S. violent and property crimes declined 3.2 percent last year, according to a preliminary FBI analysis.
Theories offered to explain the trend include the overall aging of the population, the incarceration of more people, changes in policing strategies and flagging interest in heavy alcohol and illicit drug use, said Arthur Lurigio, chairman of the criminal justice department at Loyola University Chicago.
“Nationally, there has been a wave of decline,” Lurigio said. “It isn’t any one state or set of states that have benefited from the declines in the last decade.”
Illinois’ crime rate of 39 cases per 1,000 people–down 4.8 percent from the previous year–is comparable with recently reported rates in other industrial Great Lakes states, such as Michigan and Ohio, FBI statistics show.
Yet last year Chicago retook from Los Angeles the dubious title of the nation’s murder capital. Less than a quarter of Illinois residents live in Chicago, but two-thirds of the state’s 896 slayings last year took place there, the state data showed.
In the longer view, though, 2003 marked another point in the downward slope of crime trends in Chicago, with all eight classes of crimes lower than the year before. Last summer, the Police Department refocused on shootings, resulting in a 36-year low for homicides in 2003.
The drop in murders has continued this year, according to newly released figures from the Chicago Police Department. During the first six months of 2004, Chicago logged 215 homicides, down 25 percent from the same period last year. Overall violent crime in the city has fallen nearly 5 percent, while property crime also is down about 5 percent.
Children play outside again
Residents in the most crime-plagued neighborhoods have noticed.
“Before, you would step out the door, and a bullet would pass your head. All that has ceased,” said Beverly Moores, 50, president of the Neighbors in Bloom Block Club in the 5600 block of South Paulina Street in the West Englewood neighborhood. She also is the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy facilitator in the Englewood police district.
A combination of more responsive police and more vigilant and emboldened residents have made her block a place where her grandchildren can play on the sidewalk again, she said.
A block south, however, gang members have intimidated residents from reactivating their own dormant block club, Moores said. And she wouldn’t think of letting her grandson Ezekiel, 6, wander over to nearby Hermitage Park.
“What we’re hoping for is a ripple effect,” she said. “You start from the center and go out.”
Despite the drop in crime, some Illinois residents say the state in 2004 is still more dangerous than in years past–a place where random violence happens and doors should carry deadbolts.
“It’s bad, period,” said Rick Bukowski, 54, after clerks buzzed him into a jewelry shop in south suburban Hometown. “Every time you pick up the newspaper, what do you see? People killed.”
But last year, Hometown logged no murders, no rapes, two robberies and two assaults. The violent crime rate in the community of 4,400 is half the state’s median.
Barry Glassner, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California and the author of “The Culture of Fear,” said that despite encouraging crime trends, many people’s opinions are molded by the nightly mayhem on local TV news and by those who profit from fear, “from car- and home-alarm companies to politicians who run for election based on being tough on crime.”
“As long as these individuals and groups have a stake in keeping us afraid of crime, we are not likely to be calmed much by the objective data,” Glassner said.
Others have personal reasons for their fear. Watching from behind a locked case of gold rings as Bukowski spoke, saleswoman Belinda Alcantara, 33, is one of them.
Two years ago, her brother Javier was murdered in Chicago.
“He was walking home from his girlfriend’s house. Four guys got out of a car and shot him in the head,” Alcantara said.
Some towns defy trend
There were disturbing trends in the latest crime statistics. Murder and robberies rose in suburban Cook County, spurred in part by a doubling of homicides, from 10 to 20, in suburban Maywood. The western suburb’s murder rate was more than three times Chicago’s. In the collar county cities of Joliet and Waukegan, murders also climbed.
One theory is that as Chicago adopted a more aggressive posture toward drug gangs and the violence associated with them, the gangs picked up and moved to more hospitable areas.
“We are hearing anecdotally that it is getting tougher and tougher to buy dope on the streets of Chicago, so naturally gang members are going where the heat is less intense,” said David Bayless, a Chicago Police Department spokesman.
At the same time, Chicago police are now sharing their arrest database with nearby departments and alerting them when suburbanites are arrested in the city.
“Chicago’s drug buyer could be Maywood’s robber and car thief,” Bayless said.
Drug arrests climb
A quarter of the state’s prison population is incarcerated for drug crimes, but because such crimes don’t have obvious victims, they are rarely reported and not recorded in the annual statistics. But drug arrests were up last year by 3.6 percent.
The increase was powered by marijuana arrests, which rose by more than 4,000 last year.
Most of those new arrests took place in Chicago, though several other agencies also reported similar rises. As marijuana arrests rose 9.5 percent, arrests for other drugs fell slightly.
The figures to be released by the state police Sunday in the annual “Crime in Illinois” report are based on data from hundreds of law-enforcement agencies, ranging from a Chicago police force of 14,777 employees to sheriff’s offices with payrolls in the single digits.
With that kind of variety, some inaccuracy is to be expected, statisticians warn. The state police this year revised their 2002 tally of rapes to 101 more than originally reported.
But the long-term decline in the state’s crime rate is still significant, experts said.
“People don’t realize it is occurring because they read about violence every day. But it does have a significant effect. Certainly a decline in killings in Chicago–that is 300 people not killed,” said Richard Block, a sociology and criminal justice professor at Loyola.
Homicide in Chicago peaked in 1974 with 970 slayings. Last year, the city reported 598.
Steady rise in rural crime
In rural counties, however, violent crime has risen for the third straight year, according to the report.
Though the numbers are small–and the rural violent crime rate is still about a quarter of Chicago’s–they have grown steadily even as many rural populations shrink.
If they do signify a trend, it is one with no easy explanation, criminologists said. One possibility is methamphetamine’s blossoming popularity.
A 2003 survey by the National Drug Intelligence Center found that nearly a third of law-enforcement agencies surveyed ranked methamphetamine the drug that contributes most to violent crime.
Sheriff Ed Francis of Downstate Jasper County knows the threat well. In 1999, two of his deputies were shot at while serving a man in tiny Yale with an arrest warrant, he said. The man’s trailer housed a meth lab and was stockpiled with assault rifles, Francis said. The man was paralyzed in the shootout that followed, Francis said.
“It was triggered by his meth use,” the sheriff said. “He is believed to have been under the influence at the time of the incident.”
Firearms have never been uncommon in the rural county of 10,000, Francis said. But recently, police have recovered more handguns.
“They aren’t used for hunting,” he said. “We believe the reason for that is methamphetamine use, and people wanting to protect either themselves or their drugs from thieves.”
Others are not so sure. A forthcoming paper by Illinois State University criminologist Ralph Weisheit found no correlation between the seizure of meth labs and violent or property crimes, even as he acknowledged it “goes directly against conventional wisdom about methamphetamine users and producers.”
Another possible explanation for increased rural violence is the struggling economy in rural areas. “Part of what you would see is the strain from tight economies,” Weisheit said.
Estimates from the federal Labor Statistics and Census Bureaus indicate that the poverty rate in rural Illinois counties has surpassed urban areas for several years, but it hasn’t risen significantly. Crime statistics in your region.
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