> Where crime in Chicago is a real problem is in the south and west sides of the city, where white people don't live. Those areas are playing out a slow motion mechanistic tragedy set in motion a century ago when they were redlined, sliced in half by the Dan Ryan, evacuated by white people, and disinvested. A map of Chicago violent crime is, roughly, a map of redlining.
Let's grant these are the sole and entire reasons for crime. This historical analysis is entirely and fully correct.
What does it imply, going forward? What is the solution?
It strongly implies that being tougher on crime --- and I'm no defunder --- isn't the solution, most especially because that's been repeatedly tried and there's a plausible argument that it made things worse.
As an outsider, I suspect the lack of meaningful accountability for police allows them to be both excessively violent and not actually any good at preventing crime. It's a notoriously corrupt city: https://news.wttw.com/2022/05/11/three-peat-chicago-ranks-no... . Of course, the McDonald's CEO isn't going to call out this kind of crime, even though it's arguably responsible for allowing the other kind of crime.
I don't think I can offer any solutions other than the long grinding work of local politics. There are solutions available (e.g. Glasgow's long notorious gang problem was addressed by the Violence Reduction Unit, which offers a successful strategy), but probably not the will to use them. Like Russia, you can't win a war if the first priority of too many administrators is stealing from the system.
I think this maybe an example of an increasingly common scenario in life. We like to envision for any given problem that there are good solutions, and that there are bad solutions. And so if one solution is provably bad, then surely an alternative must be better. But in reality, there are often just bad solutions and worse solutions. The point I make with this is that attacking the failings of one solution doesn't really say anything about the alternative.
It's often interesting how much wisdom there is tucked away in simple, old, folky sayings that one only appreciates much later. "Out of the frying pan and into the fire."
Policing is only one part of the equation and I doubt that violent gangs can be broken up without resorting to tough measures. The trick is that this needs to be combined with social policies to disincentivize repeat offenders and to prevent youths from starting at all by having ample economic opportunities.And there are other measures like decriminalizing drugs which can reduce the economic profit of crime.
I worry that this is simply cover for people who don't want to pay for policing and incarceration any more. Essentially abandoning the many innocent victims of crime in those troubled areas.
Again: I'm no defunder. But we tried intensive policing and incarceration (and: if you catch someone with an illegal firearm, put them in prison!) and it didn't work. CPD broke the major gangs in the 80s and 90s, and now we've got dozens and dozens of tiny new gangs.
I feel like didn't work is a poor argument because you could just counter that it wasn't enough. Presumably at some limit of policing, crime would be largely eliminated (at potentially tremendous cost) but it seems unlikely to me that it wouldn't work.
It would seem that such a hypothetical level of policing is taking place inside actual prisons, and yet violence and contraband run rampant. If it isn't possible to eliminate crime amongst already incarcerated people, what suggests that an arbitrarily high level of policing would eliminate crime amongst the wider populous? Especially when such levels of policing would almost certainly approach something akin to imprisonment?
The US is already MASSIVELY winning the "percentage of your population in prison" contest. Then you look at the recidivism rates and realise why it doesn't work.
Tough on crime -> more people in prison -> criminals are treated like dogs -> significantly more likely to reoffend upon release, and thus we have a cycle.
It's still a necessary component, even if it's not sufficient. People are way too eager to be soft on crime without offering anything in the way of an actual solution. To me, it sounds like cover for less than altruistic motivations.
It’s stronger than that: you can’t say it didn’t work at all. Using the same rigor you can say they didn’t do enough! Unless you have extremely broad meta studies, and you don’t, saying it didn’t work is just personal skew.
The intensity of policing in Chicago has varied and hasn't solved the west and south side crime problems. I honestly don't care if Chicago decides to intensify policing. I'm not, like, morally opposed. I just think it's whistling past the graveyard if you can't fix the underlying economic problems. They're getting worse, not better, as all the families with economic mobility in the redlined neighborhoods flee to the south suburbs.
I agree it needs more than just police, but I suspect it needs a ton of law and order too.
Fwiw I’ve talked to some very in the know locals, one who owned a ton of liquor stores all around those parts, and the common knowledge is that the police basically don’t have any control and won’t engage on just about anything. It’s essentially run by gangs at this point.
I don't know what that's supposed to mean. I got CPD to track down a mugger whole my phone; they were arrested less than 15 minutes after I got mugged. The arrest happened at J&J Fish in Austin. The police clearly had control there.
At the same time, there are drug corners all over the west side; there's a gas station in Humboldt Park on my commute that is occasionally an open-air drug market, with dealers literally out in the street doing traffic control. I'm sure that's shocking and upsetting to very in-the-know west siders who own liquor stores. Will CPD really engage over small groups of people selling heroin on a corner? No, I doubt it: I see the same groups day after day on my drive into the office.
Those parts of the city are not safe to be in. It's not OK that there are parts of the city that are not safe to be in. I'm not making excuses. But that absolutely does not describe the area around the McDonalds HQ, or, for that matter, almost anywhere in Chicago that middle/upper-middle class white people live.
That sounds like an extremely exceptional success story out of CPD.
I was mugged about ten 8 years ago on a Friday night by three people after they cornered me and threatened to shoot me if I did anything stupid. After they stole my stuff, I went into the nearest Cheesies and called the cops. The group that mugged me told me they'd shoot me if I called them, but meh. They took took a police report, and that was that.
Even though they knew my phone was stolen, they didn't do anything like what they did for you, nor even attempt to. I ended up keeping the phone activated for about 48 hours so I could figure out who had my phone with the hopes that I could my stolen stuff back. The person who stole the phone called a lot of people in that time: their parole officer, an HIV specialist, family. Tried to pass that info onto the police and they wouldn't take it. Parole officer refused to even listen.
So I submitted some FOIAs for the camera footage of the area -- it was right off the red line at Sheffield and Belmont: no footage they said. When I called the investigator who told me that the investigation was suspended and they weren't looking into it anymore (not shocking). But I still persisted on the call to try to get some semblance of traction to get my stuff back and asked why there was no POD footage -- investigator said it moves randomly and didn't catch me getting mugged. Not sure I buy that, but whatever.
To get me off the call, the investigator asked if I had anything to drink the night I was mugged. I said I had a beer about four hours earlier. He used that as a means to say that anything I said about that night was unreliable and then ended the call.
All stats thus far show that countries generally deemed to be 'soft' on crime have lower crime rates, significantly lower portions of their population in prison, and have significantly reduced recidivism rates.
Not true in the least. In Asia the pattern is clear: tough on crime has lower crime (Japan, Singapore, Korea), but of course there's so many confounding things there.
Central and South America and Africa are notorious for having weak policing and high crime.
Meanwhile those famous Nordic and European countries that some like to think prove the softer on crime hypothesis happen to be completely homogenous, low population and high wealth areas. And of those same places that do have bigger cities with less wealth and homogeneity, there's big problems with crime.
Even within the US tougher on crime correlates with less crime once you control for a few things.
I'm on the side of less is more, too. Poverty alleviation is, while not a universally solved problem, is well enough understood that we know what does not work. Harsh, punitive measures such as long prison sentences without corresponding in-prison safety, nor sincere rehabilitation and redemption programs, are guaranteed to maintain cycles of poverty and resentment across generations.
I do think school voucher programs is a promising direction, but like anything that becomes a pawn in the culture war, it becomes difficult to discuss it without FUD.
Let's grant these are the sole and entire reasons for crime. This historical analysis is entirely and fully correct.
What does it imply, going forward? What is the solution?