Devil in the Black City
BY GABE RUBIN
In any other year, Chicago’s 506 murders would have been treated as a passing, local travesty. But in the year of Newtown and Aurora, violent death in American urban warzones is finally trendy enough for the New York Times and CNN. President Barack Obama even stopped by his adopted hometown long enough to decry the surge in violence before jetting off to a golfing trip. These national actors–the media and politicians alike–have claimed gun violence as their new issue du jour, as if the epidemic were a new outbreak or an unexpected storm. Fights over immigration and deficit reduction will soon replace Chicago’s troubles on the front pages, no doubt after the passage of some new meaningless gun control measures. The question that has dogged American policymakers for decades will remain unanswered: how can the senseless loss of life on our streets be stopped?
Among the law and order crowd, the overwhelming answer to such a question lies in more policing. The more seasoned and astute of this contingent will modify that statement to read “more effective policing.” In 2002, following the much-publicized death of a 12-year-old boy named Rene Guillen, then-Mayor Richard M. Daley inaugurated Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN), an effort that coordinated federal, state, and municipal responses to violent crime. According to the Chicago Tribune, it was around this time that the Chicago Police Department (CPD) adopted “saturated” policing methods, where violent areas were swarmed with officers from other districts following crime outbreaks.
CPD, along with the State’s Attorney and U.S. Attorney, have been desperate to show that PSN has had positive results. Indeed, from 2002-2012 there was a 22% decline in the number of murders. But between 2000-2010 Chicago lost around 200,000 people from its population, among whom a whopping 175,000 were African Americans. With the murder rate sharply higher in majority black neighborhoods than other areas of the city, any data-based appraisal of PSN will show its lack of success.
Black neighborhoods on the west and south sides claim the dreaded top spots in the Chicago violent crime index compiled by the Tribune using CPD data. The three most violent neighborhoods–Fuller Park, Washington Park, and West Garfield Park–have virtually all African American populations. Poverty rates in these communities are predictably high: in Fuller Park, 56% live below the poverty line. By contrast, the majority white community of Edison Park on the northwest side has no murder rate to speak of, and only around 5% live below the poverty line.
Around the world, crime has long been associated with poverty, so these figures do not necessarily strike people as unusual. Rather they are seen as regrettable, but predictable. The most jarring feature of Chicago’s crime rates is their close association with the racial makeup of city neighborhoods. Chicago has been denounced for its racially segregated neighborhoods since the civil rights movement, but little has changed in their makeup. According to the U.S. Census, over two-thirds of Chicago’s black population lives in community areas that are over 80% black. 55% live in communities that are over 90% black and abut each other in a contiguous stretch of 18 such communities on the city’s sprawling south side.
As the 175,000-person drop in Chicago’s black population makes clear, the most popular way to break out of the cycle of poverty is to leave the city altogether. Who can blame the émigrés? Starting with public education, the famed American laboratory for rags to riches stories, Chicago has failed its African American citizens. The University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research reported in 2011 that the achievement gap between African American students and Caucasian students has continued to widen faster than national trends. Among African American 3rd to 8th graders, only one in nine exceeded state standards, the worst rate of any racial group. Chicago Public Schools overall have a dismal 57% high school graduation rate–still better than the 52% graduation rate of black students.
It has been widely observed that a high school diploma has become increasingly essential for financial wellbeing. That’s a pathetic understatement for African Americans on a national level: the New York Times wrote in February that black men in their 20s and 30s without high school diplomas have an incarceration rate of 40%: more than the percentage that is employed. Those astronomical rates mean that one in four African Americans in “the age of mass incarceration” (the past thirty or so years) have grown up with a parent in prison. More single parent homes mean more families unable to escape the cycle of poverty, meaning little changes in these communities.
Even single parenthood, long the target of right-leaning policymakers as the cause of many of the problems in black communities, has been shown by epidemiologists at the National Institutes of Health to actually be an effect of the large-scale incarceration of black men. The NIH study observed that monogamous relationships are bound to be less prevalent and a woman’s power to convince her partner to use contraceptives more limited when women outnumber men to such a degree in the general population.
High incarceration rates also mean high recidivism rates. Over half of Illinois inmates released in 2004 returned to prison by 2007, a rate more than 10% higher than the national average, according to a study on recidivism by the Pew Center on the States. The cycle of poverty goes hand in hand with a revolving prison door.
Prison populations boomed in the United States in the 1980s with the beginning of the War on Drugs. A report by the Sentencing Project, a prison reform advocacy group, maps out the rapid increase in incarceration rates: in 1980, U.S. prisons, both state and federal combined, housed fewer than 300,000 people. Three decades later, prisons are bursting at the seams with around 1.6 million people. Meanwhile, violent and property crime rates have seen only slight declines. In fact, the February New York Times report on incarceration referenced sociological research that showed that communities with high recidivism rates actually show increases in crime rates, the opposite of the desired effect.
Behind the data lurks the gnawing question of how the United States as a whole, as well as its individual municipalities, must deal with a race-based urban underclass that has not emerged from the shadows a half-century after Jim Crow ended. Steve Bogira, a former journalist for the alternative newspaper the Chicago Reader has used the word “apartheid” to describe Chicago’s confluence of race, poverty, and a murder rate 13 times higher in black neighborhoods than in some white neighborhoods. The fact that Bogira dared to use such a charged term at all indicates the systematic nature of Chicago’s bloody divide.
In the 1969 federal case Dorothy Gautreaux v. the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), Judge Richard B. Austin ruled Chicago’s segregation unlawful and warned that if future housing projects and urban development schemes did not explicitly address “patterns of racial segregation,” there would be little chance of “averting the desperately intensifying division of whites and Negroes in Chicago.” Although there have been many different CHA plans to diversify Chicago’s neighborhoods (including the destruction of many projects in favor of “mixed-income developments,”) the current demography speaks to their resounding failure.
There can be no single public policy solution to the problem of segregation, just as none exists for murder. However, in a time of tightening public budgets, prison reform is perhaps the most palatable because it saves the most money. A criminal justice system that focused on rehabilitating inmates and preparing them to be productive members of society would cut recidivism rates and allow for smoother re-entry into society. Of course, the improvement of inner-city schools would raise graduation rates and decrease the need for dropouts to seek work in illegal markets like the drug trade and prostitution. Even if integrating these communities remains both political controversial and nearly impossible tactically, internal community improvements are nonetheless achievable.
Murder does not begin and end with crime and punishment, nor with the revision of gun laws. Its roots are in the much more insidious and ignored systemic injustices of Chicago’s race and class divisions, and it cannot be combated with “saturated” policing or harsh prison sentences. Without political willpower to address the true causes of murder, we can expect more blood to flow in the streets of Chicago, this year and the next. Whose hands will bear the stain?