Summer 2019: Violence was down and Homicides were at their lowest in five years
Now that October has come and the summer is decidedly over, policy makers and journalists alike are engaging in a yearly, grim calculus: How bad was the gun violence in Chicago this summer? Did it get worse? Is it getting better? And most importantly, why?
This summer, however, has been unusually plagued with alarmist rhetoric – both from inside Chicago and on the national stage – suggesting that crime in Chicago is getting worse every year. This proposition simply does not track with the facts.
Violence is down.
Homicides are at their lowest level in five years.
Any notion that the summer of 2019 experienced a “crime wave” is simply untrue. The average number of people locked up in Cook County Jail on any given day is 25% lower today than it was in 2016. Even so, the number of recorded shootings in Chicago from January to August of 2019 was down 35% compared to what it was during the same time period in 2016.
Sensationalizing the amount of gun violence in Chicago may serve political narratives, acting as a vehicle to propose tougher, more punitive (unproven) “solutions,” but it absolutely does not serve Chicago’s communities.
Every murder is a tragedy and our hearts ache for the families that have lost sons and daughters, friends, and relatives this summer. Interpersonal, community, and systemic violence have been impediments to human wellbeing in this city, and it is vital that politicians and policy makers continue to prioritize anti-violence work. We must interrogate what about the past few years has made this city safer and caused a drop back from the 2016 crime spike numbers (or, put differently, why the 2016 spike happened in the first place, since we are now back to pre-2016 crime rates).
Recently, huge amounts of money have been invested into jobs training and trade programs – specifically targeting the young adults in neighborhoods most impacted by gun violence. Cook County has elected a progressive State’s Attorney and a police officer was convicted of murdering Laquan McDonald. The successes of progressive policy have disproven the racist, “tough-on-crime” nonsense that has traumatized families intergenerationally.
Chicago Appleseed and the Chicago Council of Lawyers have long worked with other community advocates to reform inequitable and unjust practices, thereby liberalizing many of Chicago’s and Cook County’s criminal justice policies. Notably, since we formed the Coalition to End Money Bond in 2016, Chicago has arrested fewer people; let many more people be free after arrest and pretrial; and incarcerated fewer people for felonies. We need to continue the progressive changes toward reforming our criminal justice system that have strengthened our communities and tried to restore justice and humanity to a broken system.
Chicago as a whole is more successful when policy makers listen to the community, the people closest to the problem, about why homicides are down and how we can continue this trend. We should be investing in our communities, using tax money to revitalize Chicago’s existing but forgotten neighborhoods, instead of subsidizing the building of new ones.
We must prioritize trauma-informed, anti-racist policy change to address structural violence. By addressing the violence caused by guns, incarceration, and police brutality, we can help build up stronger, healthier young people with accessible opportunities to look forward to.
1 Shooting Data taken from Chicago Tribune catalog of shootings, available at https://www.chicagotribune.com/data/ct-shooting-victims-map-charts-htmlstory.html
2 Jail Population Data from Quarterly reports of the Office of the Chief Judge, available at http://www.cookcountycourt.org/HOME/ModelBondCourtInitiative.aspx
3 Cook County Jail daily population counts from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, available at https://www.cookcountysheriff.org/data/