Chicago is hardly alone in its gun-related misery. The FBI released its latest annual Uniform Crime Reporting statistics on Sept. 27. It showed a 29.4% nationwide rise in homicides from a year earlier to 21,570 killings in 2020 — the largest single-year jump since the bureau began recording crime statistics six decades ago.
The surge in killings drove an overall 5% increase in violent crime last year, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. That increase of 4,901 over the previous year was the largest annual increase since the FBI began keeping records.
So there is the national problem and, in Chicago, our severe localized one.
Some will maintain we’re not the homicide capital we are labeled as by the broader American public. There is a difference, they’ll argue, between the number of homicides and the “homicide rate.”
That’s true. Chicago always has higher-than-average numbers because it is a bigger-than-average city. But, its homicide rate, reported annually by the FBI in homicides-per-100,000 population, does indeed fall behind such other large cities as St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans and Memphis.
Other sources put Chicago even lower on their rankings. The Trace, a nonprofit project of investigative journalists focused on gun violence, put Chicago in ninth place with 28.6 homicides per 100,000 residents, well below St. Louis in the top slot with 88.1 per 100,000.
But these statistics aren’t anything for Chicago to gloat about.
For one thing, all of the cities above Chicago on the list are smaller (some of them, like Detroit, likely would be lower on the list if they had not lost such a high percentage of their population). You could argue that Chicago is most accurately compared not with smaller cities but with New York and Los Angeles, both of which have lower homicide rates.
Nor do the raw numbers tell us much about the causes of our gun violence epidemic and what can be the cures.
Why, for example, did homicides rise in 2020 while most other crimes declined? The pandemic? Illegal guns? Lax prosecutors?
Amid the flood of depressing statistics and parade of possible remedies, crime experts have reached a depressing consensus about one reality: Nobody knows for sure why crime rates rise or fall, although almost everyone seems to have a pet theory.
The nation’s problem of gun violence is too often compounded by another problem: An epidemic of ignorance, made worse by a commingling of useful information with misleading nonsense.
Some of that misinformation is politically motivated. Former President Donald Trump used Chicago to score such points (”worse than Afghanistan”), painting the city as the big, failing Democratic-run hometown of President Barack Obama, in particular, as if he was the source of all our problems. Time and again, he threatened to “send in the feds.”
That’s politics. But, left to metastasize, perceptions become reality. So do misperceptions.
And that can lead to misdirected and self-defeating responses.
The problem of gun violence and its devastating impact on families and communities is made worse by a paucity of good information and an excess of knee-jerk solutions that create more problems than they solve.
Yet, in a problem as multifaceted as gun violence, even a questionable solution in the hands of effective leaders can lead to some progress.
Last year, the final year of his presidential term, Trump actually did send federal agents into Chicago. Mayor Lori Lightfoot predictably objected, at first, citing the televised images of unidentified federal agents in camouflage uniforms during the unrest in Portland, Ore.
But she soon partnered with Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney John Lausch, with whom she earlier worked at the Justice Department. Together they coordinated resources to crack down on a major source of Chicago’s excess of guns on its streets: illegal gun trafficking from neighboring states like Indiana where gun laws are more lax.
In that instance, a project initiated in political bombast became an encouragingly bipartisan remedy to one aspect of the multifaceted gun violence problem.
But the city’s gun-related body count, after taking an encouraging dip in 2019, already was rising in 2020 to what would be its highest number of homicides since 1996, when fatalities totaled 796 near the end of a crack-fueled crime wave.
By the end of the year, Chicago police reported more than a 50% jump in homicides to 769 from the 495 homicides tallied in 2019.
So far this year, homicides rose to 524 by the end of August, according to the Chicago Police Department, 3% more to date than in 2020, a year made worse by street unrest, the pandemic and George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police.
What is to be done? One helpful answer to both the national and the local problem came from Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a CNN interview as the FBI’s latest grim statistics were released: Treat gun violence not only as a crime but as a “serious public health threat.”
“We don’t even know who enters the emergency department, in most places, as a result of firearm injury,” she said.
She’s not the first CDC director to say it. Dr. David Satcher, who served during part of President Bill Clinton’s administration, took a similar position. But pressure from the National Rifle Association, fearing government research into firearms would lead to more gun restrictions, persuaded Congress to cut off CDC gun research funding in 1997.
Yet, it was NRA friend Donald Trump who signed a 2018 bill that restored research funding into suicide and other gun violence in the past two years to the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.
Treating gun violence like a contagious disease is no longer a far-fetched notion. Experts like Dr. Gary Slutkin, the University of Illinois at Chicago epidemiologist who founded the “violence interrupter” program Cure Violence, formerly known as CeaseFire, has been promoting that position for years.
The idea is that violence spreads like a disease — with retaliatory shootings, for example, triggering more retaliatory shootings — and that interrupters, some of whom also have criminal records, can break that cycle of violence. Use of violence interruption has spread to other organizations and cities, even as debates over its effectiveness continue.
More research is needed, as researchers like to say. So is more action.
