This is horribly sad. NBC is reporting that Chicago has just recorded its 500th murder in the year 2012. Rahm Emanuel, the mayor, says this is “an unfortunate and tragic milestone.” That, I submit, is an understatement. Why is the country not in an uproar? Why is Chicago not in an uproar? Have we become inured to the violence in Chicago and other cities with appallingly high murder rates? Have we stopped asking why so many people hold human life in such contempt? The country was rightly shocked and outraged by the killing of school children in Sandy Hook. That was unpseakably evil. But where is the outrage about what happens virtually every day and night in Chicago and places like it? Many of the victims of these atrocities are children, too. What I am asking for is not lip service from politicians, or cheap, gimmicky, feel good, faux solutions. We need a serious national conversation about the deep sources of the problem. Perhaps this “unfortunate, tragic milestone” will be the occasion for such a conversation. I certainly hope so. It is long overdue.
Saturday, December 29, 2012, 12:03 AM
December 29th, 2012 | 1:12 am
I did read quite a bit of criticism of Chicago’s high murder rate in the wake of the Connecticut school shooting. It had a defensive tone and was in reaction to calls for gun control—the point (I gather) is that Chicago has a gun ban and it has not worked, so naner naner. There were rhetorical potshots at Jesse Jackson and Rahm Emanuel among others.
This subject was immediately politicized, and not just by politicians. The second amendment is a lightning rod.
December 29th, 2012 | 1:13 am
Unfortunately, the people who identified with and mourned for the children of Sandy Hook do not have the same empathy for the victims of Chicago’s gangland slayings. No one considers south Chicago a place of innocence violated by the intrusion of evil and madness. Rather, they see it as a spawning ground of evil and madness, from which it is better to keep one’s distance. Which attitude is a sad surrender, itself.
There is a very poignant documentary about Philadelphia’s very similar ordeal, called Mothers Of No Tomorrow.
December 29th, 2012 | 6:36 am
Maybe it’s the lack of fathers that should be the lightning rod.
December 29th, 2012 | 7:44 am
A country which kills its babies by the millions for convenience can hardly be expected to have a decent moral compass, or to have a proper value to human life.
A country which countenances the ideas of a Peter Singer (cf On the Square) cannot be expected to teach its children not to murder. Singer’s ideas are at least consistent with the encouragement (we’ve gone beyond tolerance) of abortion. There’s no fundamental moral difference between abortion and infanticide.
A culture which persecutes those who defend the moral law (Christians, and particularly Catholics) cannot but decline.
December 29th, 2012 | 9:16 am
Dr. George:
Is there some rational explanation why Chicago is murder city while NYC murders are at an all time low. Gangs? Stop-and-frisk? Is there a criminologist in the house?
December 29th, 2012 | 11:29 am
I tried posting and posing a question earlier, but may have done it incorrectly.
I am genuinely flummoxed about the differences between Chicago and New York City, whose murder rate is atn all time low. Similar ethnic makeup, same fatherlessness, tough anti gun laws.
Guiliani’s legacy? Lack of gangs? Stop and frisk policing? Truly a mystery worth studying.
December 29th, 2012 | 1:00 pm
Paul I know nothing of your politics so I am reluctant to make this suggestion, but over on Steve Sailer’s blog they are discussing exactly that question. A lot of the posters seem to be crediting stop and frisk, while also observing that stop and frisk probably wouldn’t work in Chicago.
December 29th, 2012 | 3:18 pm
Is there some rational explanation why Chicago is murder city
Errr Chicago had 513 murders in 2008. Ten years before it had just under 1000 murders a year and the violent crime rate has continued to fall in Chicago.
December 29th, 2012 | 3:33 pm
Thanks, Sam, I used to read Sailer frequently – his sports observations are interesting and provocative, to say the least.
December 29th, 2012 | 6:24 pm
It’s only slightly an exaggeration to call NYC a police state. Some of its practices are probably unconstitutional but carried out by tacit agreement.
December 30th, 2012 | 11:44 am
The problem with anyone trying to explain Chicago’s ‘crime spike’ is the fact that they don’t know what they are talking about….
By absolute measures and as # per 100,000 people crime has been falling for the last ten years in Chicago with violent crimes (murders, rapes, assalts) falling faster than less violent ones (robberies). The question isn’t how do you explain Chicago’s ‘spike’ but how do you explain its decline. If you think you have a spike to explain, then you’ve just demonstrated you aren’t really looking at Chicago.
The fretting over 500 murders in 2012 indicates the decline. Murders in 2008, just 4 years ago, were 513. From 1990 to 2003 murders were never less than 601 per year with the ‘norm’ of the early 90′s being between 800-900.
The fretting over a relatively minor swing in the # of murders illustrates a culture that is less used to violent crime, not descending into a crime spike. It’s a little analgous to smoking. Back when smoking was the norm everywhere and anywhere, people didn’t notice that cigarettes stunk. Now if someone smoked a cigarette in your car last week with the windows open and you’ve left your windows down ever since, there’s still a good chance non-smokers will ask you “was someone smoking in here?” When very few people get murdered, murder becomes the exception rather than the norm and generates a lot more buzz.
December 30th, 2012 | 2:14 pm
The fretting over a relatively minor swing in the # of murders illustrates a culture that is less used to violent crime, not descending into a crime spike.
Boonton,
It is obvious that at least part of the motivation for the original post was to get in a gibe at Rahm Emanuel:
Rahm Emanuel’s full statement was, “Chicago has reached an unfortunate and tragic milestone, which not only marks a needless loss of life but serves as a reminder of the damage that illegal guns and conflicts between gangs cause in our neighborhoods.” Whether or not that was an understatement is debatable, and really—in the overall scheme of things—not worth mentioning.
December 30th, 2012 | 3:12 pm
“really—in the overall scheme of things—not worth mentioning”
Nickol locutus est. Causa finita est.
December 30th, 2012 | 3:28 pm
In June of this year, the NYT reported that the rate of homicides had risen 38 percent for 2012. Proximate causation was discussed, too:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/us/rate-of-killings-rises-38-percent-in-chicago-in-12.html
“…a majority of the killings have been tied to Chicago’s increasingly complicated gang warfare, police statistics suggest, and to the gritty neighborhoods where gangs have long thrived.
There is no evidence of a broader crime wave; in fact, measures of crime apart from homicides, including rapes, robberies, burglaries and auto thefts, have actually improved by about 10 percent since a year ago.
‘We’ve got a gang issue, specific to parts of the city, and we have a responsibility to bring a quality of life to those residents, and we are going to do it,’ Mayor Emanuel, visibly vexed, said in an interview on Friday.
‘My bigger issue is not only the homicides and shootings,’ he added. ‘It’s what it does to all the legitimate citizens in that community and the kids.’
Gangs in this city have changed over the decades, splintering from a small set of well-established bands into hundreds of tinier groups with alliances so disparate and shifting that even a former Gangster Disciple member from the West Side, who refused to be named but revealed bullet scars during an interview as proof of his rougher days, said he could not begin to keep them all straight. In just the last two years, the police say, 500 monitored gang factions have fractured into more than 600, many of them with stunningly ready access to guns.”
*************
I’m not sure what George’s questions and comments would add to a nation-wide conversation on gang violence, drug use, and poverty (all of which can be found in rural areas, too — or so I’ve heard tell). One almost suspects that he desires a conversation about a completely different matter.
December 30th, 2012 | 7:49 pm
In June of this year, the NYT reported that the rate of homicides had risen 38 percent for 2012
1. This is not the ‘rate’ of homicides but instead the number of homicides. But these are not the same thing, the rate would be expressed in terms of something like ‘homicides per 100,000′ while the # of murders is, well the raw # which is not quite the same thing.
2. The article was from June, in 2011 there were 433 homicides and 500 this year. That’s a 15% increase, which means 2012 began with a surge in homicides for the first half of the year (the 38% article) which then fell off in the 2nd half of the year. In fact, it’s likely the 2nd half of the year was actually a net decrease in murders.
3. Look at homicides per year from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago#Homicides_in_Chicago_1990-2012. The mean absolute deviation is about 160. In other words, the data ‘bounces around’ by about 160 up or down year to year. This means a jump from 433 to 500 is not all that dramatic. Back in 2007 murders were only 448 but then jumped to 513 in 2008 only to fall down to 459 and 436 in ’09 and ’10. Before digging too deeply into a ’cause’ it’s valid to ask is there anything that’s been caused to explain? Or is 2012 no different than 2011?
December 30th, 2012 | 9:17 pm
Boonton writes:
“This is not the ‘rate’ of homicides but instead the number of homicides. ”
*************
You’re right. Monica Davey should have written something like “The total number of murders in Chicago between 1 January and 17 June 2012, when compared with a similar period from 2011, show an increase of 38 per cent.”
December 31st, 2012 | 1:44 am
Nickol locutus est. Causa finita est.
Anonymous,
Would that it were that simple! Rome doesn’t have to keep rewriting things to get them through moderation!
December 31st, 2012 | 6:35 am
Outrage? It’s all faux, if you ask me: the Puritan instinct for moral grandstanding in the service of political partisanship; a popular American pastime. Otherwise, where is the outrage for Obama’s drive-by drone -bombing campaign, which has cost the lives of many more children than died in Newtown?
December 31st, 2012 | 7:53 am
Thank You, and we have another problem….homicides ten years ago were around 900 a year, now they seem to hover between 400-500 a year. That’s a decrease of 400-500 homicides per year.
Fact is you can’t have negative homicides and it’s pretty implausible to imagine homicides going to zero in a huge city. So clearly the trend of rapidly falling homicides had to stop once the city reached the ‘new normal’. Even if homicides got cut in half again, that would entail a decrease of 250 instead of 500 so you would still see a slowdown in the trend of fewer absolute homicides per year.
So the bounce from 433 to 500 homicides could be any of the following:
1. The beginning of the trend reversing, with homicides going up to return to their 1990′s level…..that’s a valid concern/fear but given the rates of many types of violent and non-violent crime are down that doesn’t seem to be clearly the case.
2. Random variation in the data….which matches previous years where even though you saw a declining trend every now and then you’d get a bad year that was higher than the previous one. The downward trend will continue as it has in the past.
3. ‘New normal’, whatever caused the decrease that began in the 90′s has played itself out and Chicago has gone from a city that had 800-900 murders per year to one that has 400-500 and each year will be a random number within that range.
#2 and #3 seem like the more likely explanations with the fact that the downward trend can’t continue very long at the pace it has in the past unless we are going to see a city with zero murders per year in less than a decade. If nothing else the trend has to at least slow down.
Why crime has fallen remains a mystery. Steven Levitt famously proposed it was legalized abortion in the early 70′s which improved the lot of children born after that point leading to youth less likely to embrace crime. Malcom Gladwell in The Tipping Point speculated very minor factors (like NYC attacking ‘quality of life’ offenses and crack ceasing to grow in popularity) might have set off something like an epidemic where major demographic factors shift to different normals.
Whereever you want to go with that is one thing BUT anyone who is approaching Chicago as a story of rising murders is either misinformed or purposefully shading the truth in service of another agenda.
December 31st, 2012 | 8:35 am
However you slice it, pardon the expression, the murder “rate” in Chicago is now more than triple that of New York’s. And while murders have declined precipitously in NYC – from 2,000+ in the Dinkins years to 400 today – Chicago’s decline is not nearly as steep.
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