By: Matt Rosenberg
A string of killings, shootings, and teen mobs taking over Chicago streets worsened this weekend with the fatal shooting of a 16-year-old near “The Bean” sculpture off Michigan Avenue in Millennium Park. A suspect was charged with second-degree murder, but 33 were shot this weekend, five fatally. It’s the third such weekend within the last month. Weekdays have been bad, too. Many say the city’s coming apart. Why did they have to kill my Daddy,” asked one daughter last week after two were slain in Humboldt Park. A woman was murdered after trying to face down burglars in her Gresham home on the South Side. Six more armed robberies were committed in several hours by a prolific crew in Edgewater.
At the root of it all: consequences for criminals are rare. That’s shown by arrest rates we calculated from Chicago Police data for 2021 versus the baseline pre-Covid and pre-George Floyd year of 2019. It’s also shown by actual prosecution rates for murder in both years. The big take-away: until they get a tougher message, the bad actors won’t let up.
Chicago arrest rates are encouraging to criminals, and discouraging to the law-abiding. A recent four-year crime data summary report from CPD details how many major crimes have been committed in selected categories. Combined with corresponding arrest data in CPD’s 2019 Annual Report and from CPD’s response to our public records request about 2021 arrest totals, we were able to calculate arrest rates for 2019 and 2021 for several major crimes. We focused on categories devoid of statistical noise. The results are alarming.
The arrest rate for motor vehicle theft dropped from 27 percent in 2019 to 10 percent in 2021. For aggravated battery it dropped from 20 percent in 2019 to 11 percent in 2021. For robbery it declined from 16 percent in 2019 to 9 percent in 2021. Even those that dropped only slightly from 2019 to 2021 were alarmingly low last year. The arrest rate in 2021 for criminal sexual assault in Chicago was only 19 percent. For burglary it was 5 percent.
It’s not just that arrest rates are paltry. Murder prosecutions are rare, and many crime totals have climbed between 2019 and 2021.
Three-quarters of murderers in both 2021 and 2019 in Chicago won’t face justice. City data show 498 murders in 2019 and 797 in 2021. But actual murder prosecutions in those years were 129 and 219 respectively, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. A handful of alleged killers die themselves before they can be prosecuted, but a larger group that’s initially arrested, in the end aren’t prosecuted because the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office finds the evidence to be insufficient. So all told, Chicago had a murder prosecution rate of 26 percent in 2019; and 27 percent in 2021.
That’s worrisome because murders have risen sharply. Citywide in 2021 versus 2019, they were up 60 percent. Shooting incidents rose 66 percent over the same span, and motor vehicle thefts were up 19 percent. Burglaries were down 30 percent, while criminal sexual assault and robbery were virtually flat between 2019 and 2021. Another sore point: carjacking rose 207 percent last year versus 2019.
With an eye toward recent warm weather mayhem, Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot has now banned minors without adult accompaniment from Millenium Park at night on Thursdays through Sundays. It won’t do much. An 18-year-old friend also bent on trouble constitutes an accompanying adult. Additionally, wayward teens can go elsewhere. And they do. As residents of Old Town saw before the weekend. Lightfoot Monday also tightened the existing 11 p.m. citywide weekend curfew for minors to 10 p.m. The 11 p.m. curfew was rarely enforced, so it’s hard to see how setting it an hour earlier will help.
At least Lightfoot is starting to dial in the same channel everybody else has been watching in horror. She’d been badly off-point on crime in recent weeks. Channeling one-term Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, who in 2020 blithely predicted a “Summer of Love” after surrendering a police precinct headquarters to protestors, Lightfoot predicted for Chicago in 2022 “a summer of joy.” With the leaked Roe v. Wade Supreme Court draft opinion still in the headlines and Chicago’s joy already dissipated by mounting violence and disorder, she issued a “call to arms” for LGBT constituents, claiming “the Supreme Court is coming for us next.”
But Chicago communities are dealing with desperadoes on their doorsteps and in their streets. An abdication of authority is evident. One more sign of that: Cook County’s probation officer units doing curfew checks on released felony convicts have been disbanded. It all adds up. Five Chicago neighborhoods have hired or are planning to hire private security forces.
Chicagoans have substantial but fair expectations of their leaders and their police. Visitors too, expect a close semblance of law and order in Chicago. The city is still a draw and officials should be careful not to squander that. This past Saturday night and even as mayhem unfolded downtown and elsewhere, Chicago remained as vibrant as ever, as I witnessed first-hand.
In Cuneen’s on Devon Avenue, not far from Loyola University, the soundtrack was old reggae LPs. The bartender pulled drafts, patrons played pool, and the bar filled up. On Taylor Street a crowd of nearly 100 lined up at Mario’s Italian Lemonade. Teens, young adults and the middle-aged filled the stroll, and bantered and snacked. There was no violence, nor tension. Behind Ralph’s Cigar Shop on Taylor, at Racine, the owner and a circle of pals puffed stogies and told tall tales.
In a Szechuan restaurant just east of Ralph’s, a big bruiser of a guy with multiple tats tried out his Mandarin on a young Chinese couple at the next table. They hit it off like a house afire. One more Chicago moment, among millions. On Randolph just west of Halsted, the upscale young professionals who populate the neighborhood were out in force; restaurants were packed. Everywhere people were soaking up the city.
It would be a tragedy if city leaders – and none of them really deserve that name now – let the abundant good will and trust of Chicagoans, and the city’s remaining visitors, dwindle away to nothing this summer.
We’ll know in a few months if the city can pull its act together. Right now?
It’s not looking good.
Read more from Wirepoints:
- Violence prevention can’t be bought
- Chicago’s unserious marketing efforts
- Fresh CPD data: No, Chief Brown, carjackings are not down in Chicago. Not anymore.
- Chief Executive Magazine ranks Illinois third-worst state for doing business, yet Illinois politicians think businesses will move here because of…“equity!”
- Chicago car thefts spike sharply in 2022, up 100% along lakefront compared to 2019
- Close the revolving door for high-risk offenders in Cook County
Illinois is run by Democrats, Chicago is run by Democrats, Democrat unions are all over the state. They are the majority, they have a monopoly. The crime problem in Chicago will never get fixed because they don’t have a Republican to blame. If they had some MAGA KING Republicans to blame, they would and all of these problems wouldn’t be their fault. It’s all on the Democrats, they should be proud because they did this to all us without any help from anyone. This is what you get when you vote for a Democrat.
When I was in college, I took a course in national security policy. One of the readings struck me as profound. It said that deterrence is the mathematical product of severity of adverse consequences times the likelihood of the consequences taking place. If either is zero, deterrence fails. The statistics aptly demonstrate that the likelihood of getting caught is small. Combine that with the severity (or lack thereof) of consequences, and the result is what you see being played out on the streets of Chicago daily. Private security services are little more than a more civilized sounding return to the… Read more »
Colt 45’s work well as a deterrence in a civilized society, but doesn’t work at all in a culture that glories gang banging and death, and results only in more shootouts between gang bangers.
What if Chicago’s future is fewer cops? Not because of funding or social activists necessarily. What if the city simply can’t hire enough qualified people to fill the desired headcount? Is the city preparing for this possibility?
Chicago should be preparing for a future of less policing. Fewer cops, less OT so the police force isn’t completely burned out. Like it or lump it, it’s a definite possibility, and the city doesn’t seem prepared for it.
Is it true tourists are finding bullet holes now in the ‘bean’?
All the happy people in line for lemonade are blissfully unaware of the chaos out there and due to that lack of awareness they may re-elect LL.
Wirepoints readers are aware, but MSM consumers not affected by crime are not.
Im pretty sure if the city would just give millions more of tax payer money to Father Pfleger to form a kumbaya group to hold hands and sing about how racist the cops and all white people are, all crime would stop immediately,they just need more money!-simple fix,MORE MONEY from the racist white people!!
Foxx is a major problem, but it appears Pritzker and other influential Democrats are protecting her.
In days of yore, one would chalk up the lack of crime at Mario’s Italian Ice to the neighborhood boychiks watching the block. They had their own version of due process for malfeasance they would personally witness–immediate justice! Private security in 5 neighborhoods now? Not so different, is it? Except how punishment will be meted out.
Which is more of a deterrent?
Seems pretty clear this is how things are seen in a lot of black and Latino neighborhoods in big cities now including Chicago. Take care of it ourselves. Maybe it’s a (not so) oblique commentary on the “criminal justice” system.
Used to be the old people would keep the kids in check, report to the parents, who would then level a beat-down if their kids got outta line. That was a big part of neighborhood policing.
How many Chicago parents know their kids are heading downtown at night and are cool with it? How many Chicago parents want their kids heading downtown?
Interesting question Matt. Lori Lightfoot as failed as mayor as she has not supported law enforcement and has never embraced law and order in Chicago or C(r)ook County as a former federal prosecutor. Without more police presence with over 2000 officers lost since 2019, the city won’t heal. Crime and violence will continue to escalate unless the Chicago Police Department hire more officers. Because of the escalation in crime, what is needed is a larger police presence to deter these roaming gangs of criminals.
We’re digging into that very question, Tim. On the face of it, seems obvious Chicago needs more cops. Yet nearly all of the nine other largest U.S. cities have far fewer cops relative to population, than Chicago does. Not surprisingly, they’ve all got problems like CPD does with departures outpacing new recruits, and a hostile policing environment. Like CPD, they are trying to staff up too; but they’ll still end up with far few cops per capita than Chicago in the end. So it seems to beg the question of deployment strategies. An analogy might be: if your offensive line… Read more »
Foxx reportedly grew up in public housing. Occasionally I wonder if part of her motivation in being such an anti-crime prosecutor isn’t to give those who didn’t grow up in that environment a taste of what she went through. She can watch the unprotected privileged peons try to cope with safety while she is protected, both physically and politically.
Good article, Matt. I’m curious about the 9 comparable cities. Do they have the policies that Chicago does that tie the hands of the officers?
Thanks Donna, that’d be good to check and over time we’ll try to learn more about that. So many different ways that policy can keep cops from being reasonably pro-active. Actual field deployment levels as a percent of total sworn officers is another biggie we’re wrestling with. We’re hearing from Chicago cops there are actually no more than 900 sworn officers in the field at any one time despite more than 11K on the force; sounds shocking and raises certain questions. But what if the percentage is common elsewhere? Hoping to find out.
Chicago produces an outsized number of criminal gangbangers just as Portland and Seattle produce more antifa thugs than any other city. That’s why we tend to have more police officers relative to other major cities. Additionally, NYC Mayor Bloomberg himself said one time that stop and frisk worked because it discouraged gang bangers from carrying guns. And if they’re not out carrying guns, they can’t shoot people, and shootings and crime dropped, which allowed for major gentrification of areas that used to be crime ridden dumps. We of course could never try that here because stop and frisk and aggressive… Read more »
The social justice warriors have decided to try a human experiment. Why they would expect human nature to change is beyond me. It’s been this way since man walked out of the caves. Bottom line, some people just can’t behave. Some care only for themselves and have no trouble turning on those they supposedly care about. Liars, cheaters, abusers, thieves, murderers….whatever. When you place a greater value on those that simply can’t follow the laws of the land, you do so at your own risk. By every account, the progressive democrats are about to have their heads handed to them… Read more »