Chicago est redevenue la capitale du crime: Wirepoints’ Matt Rosenberg quoted in France’s Le Figaro

France’s oldest newspaper, Le Figaro, sent a reporter to Chicago to look into its crime problem. Wirepoints’ Matt Rosenberg is quoted. The column is here and a translation follows:

By Cyrille Louis, LeFigaro – Nov. 4, 2022.

REPORTAGE – Gun violence and insecurity are exploding, here as in all major cities, to the point of being a subject of the mid-term campaign.

The shooting only lasted a few seconds. Just enough time for the two shooters to injure fourteen people before fleeing. Monday evening, while the rest of the neighborhood was celebrating Halloween, a small group of residents had gathered to pay tribute to a loved one who had disappeared a few days earlier. They had just released their white, red and black balloons towards the sky, when an SUV stopped at their level. “From there, it was a nightmare,” said Ms. Patterson, a victim. Eleven members of his family were affected, including several women and three children, aged 13, 11 and 3 years old. Miraculously, all of them survived. The scene took place in a neighborhood of red brick buildings listed as one of the most dangerous in Chicago, in the heart of the West Side.

Gun violence is certainly not a new problem for Chicagoans. After declining there in the 1990s, as in most major American cities, it has gradually started to rise again since 2016. But that was two years ago, under the influence of the multiple disruptions induced by the epidemic. of Covid, that it exploded out of control. According to official statistics, the number of homicides then jumped 55%. In 2021, 797 murders were recorded by the police – not counting a few dozen settling of scores on the expressways which cross the city but are not within its jurisdiction. Chicago, which has long been described as the capital of organized crime, had not seen so much bloodshed in a quarter of a century. Last year, more than 3,000 exchanges of gunfire were recorded – as well as 1,836 “carjackings”, an increase of 204% since 2019.

Seen from the Loop, the city center with a thousand and one restaurants and fashionable brands, which extends to the foot of skyscrapers with elegant architecture, these statistics can leave you wondering. For two years, it has happened that exchanges of gunfire, car thefts, and even raids by looters have sown fear in the beautiful neighborhoods. In August 2020, the bridges which make it possible to cross the river were even exceptionally raised when a crowd of rioters, who came to denounce police violence, began to ransack the signs of the Magnificent Mile (the commercial portion of Michigan Avenue) . But the risk of dying from a gunshot in this part of the city remains, despite these events, historically low.

A few subway stops away, by contrast, a handful of neighborhoods with an almost exclusively African-American population concentrate the bulk of gun violence. North Lawndale, Englewood, West Pullman… And also the neighborhood of West Garfield Park, a few blocks from where the Halloween shooting took place, which broke all records last year, with 38 murders for 17,000 inhabitants – seven times more than the average for the city and more than in Tijuana (in Mexico), yet ranked the most dangerous city in the world. “This explosion of gun violence is partly explained by the economic and psychic distress generated by the Covid epidemic, explains Pastor Corey Brooks, at the origin of the Hood prevention program, in the one of the most criminogenic neighborhoods on the South Side. But there are also deeper causes: the breakdown of families, with fathers often in prison, and mothers too young to face their responsibilities; the bursting of the old gangs into a multitude of cliques where neither values ​​nor discipline reign anymore. And then, it must be said, the erasure of the police, who, since the Black Lives Matter movement, no longer dare to intervene in our neighborhoods.

This argument comes up repeatedly in the Republican campaign. Because the resurgence of violence in large cities, where the number of homicides has increased by 30% on average since 2019 before starting a relative decline this year, has become a central theme of the mid-term elections. Democrats running in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and of course Chicago are accused of being too “soft” on offenders. In recent years, in the name of the fight against discrimination and prison overcrowding, their party has defended reform projects aimed at limiting pre-trial detention and the severity of sentences. Since the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, they have also sought to reduce the risk of violent interactions with the public.

In Chicago, since this summer, the police have been prohibited from launching a chase against an individual if he has only committed a minor offence. The rule was made after two suspects, aged 13 and 22, were fatally injured by police while trying to flee. Since 2016, the use of “stop and frisk”, a provision which allows an individual to be arrested on the simple basis of a “reasonable suspicion”, has also been strictly regulated. Finally, the Illinois legislature last year passed a controversial law under the acronym Safe-T (safety, accountability, justice, and fairness). This text plans to overhaul the training of police officers, their certification as well as the rules for the use of force. It requires officers to wear body cameras, extends the rights of defendants and ends the possibility of releasing a detainee on bail – so that the rich cannot use a blank check that the poor cannot claim.

In the aftermath of the Halloween killings, signs attacking the Democratic governor of Illinois bloomed in front of buildings in East Garfield Park. “Pritzker is lying to you, it reads, and black children are dying.”

“Chicago is falling apart,” worries Matt Rosenberg, a native of the city and author of a book (1) acid, but instructive, on the crisis that Chicago is going through. “Alas, the Democratic leadership lacks the political courage to address the root of the problem. Black teenagers are on their own, white people feel guilty, the police are scared, and criminals are getting bolder – mostly to the detriment of their own community.”

At the scene of the shooting, residents are struggling to raise their heads. “Our hearts are broken”, laments a man, his eyes hidden by dark glasses, who kneels and asks the crowd to do the same to “ask forgiveness”. “How long are we going to endure letting our children risk their lives by going to school?” Asks Cornelius Parks, pastor of the neighboring church, who invites parents to “take their responsibilities”. “Something has to change, urges Danny David, elected Democrat from Chicago to the House of Representatives. Our communities need money, but they also need to rebuild!”

Mobilization of repentant “big boys”

Since 2016, the Institute for Nonviolence in Chicago has been mobilizing repentant “big boys” to channel neighborhood youth, serve as an example and engage in mediation when conflict threatens. “We also try to teach them to channel their emotions, explains Tara Dabney, director of development within the NGO. This is essential, because many of them are armed, and even have accessories that allow them to transform a simple revolver into an automatic weapon capable of firing in bursts.

Edward Jonesbey, 46, is one of those “big brothers”. In another life, he sold heroin, held office in the Conservative Vice Lords gang, and served eighteen years in prison for murder. “Since my release, he says, I have changed my life and I take care of getting adrift kids or guys who have just been released back on their feet. But it’s not always easy, because today’s young people no longer have any rules, disciplines or ethics…”

Heidi Walker knows this better than anyone. After seeing one of her sons fall in a shooting in 2009, this South Side resident had sent another of her children, Victor, to attend school in Iowa. In July 2021, he returned to Chicago to celebrate his sister’s birthday. Shortly after arriving, he was ambushed with two of his buddies and was shot twice in the head. “It was my baby. He had just graduated,” murmurs Heidi, showing a photo of her son wearing a blue cap. She has since sent her other five children away from Chicago. And she hopes they won’t come back.

(1) What’s Next, Chicago? Notes of a Pissed-off Native Son, Bombardier Books, 2021 (untranslated).