Though Mayor Lori Lightfoot has her hands full this week dealing with the fallout of a botched police raid that ended up terrorizing a woman in her own home, an at least equally horrifying public safety crisis deserves at least as much attention as a miserable year ends.
I’m talking about the absolute explosion in shooting incidents and especially murders this year, one that shows no sign of abating.
Even worse, less than half of those incidents end up getting solved, and though there are some signs of improvement and a statistical battle over how bad things are, no one is saying the picture is pretty.
Here's the latest data from the Chicago Police Department. It goes through the week of Dec. 13, so it pretty much encompasses all of this COVID-19-afflicted year. (See below.)
While the number of complaints of robbery, aggravated battery and burglary are about even compared to the same period last year, the number of murders has soared 56 percent, leaping from 475 to 739. That’s up 32 percent from two years ago, and approaching the worst of the last big crime wave in 2016.
The number of reported shooting incidents was up almost as much, 54 percent, hitting 3,128 for the year to date.
One aspect of that which has drawn particular attention is how many of those murder and shooting cases, often involving gang feuds, ultimately get solved.
“Only 25 percent of Chicago’s 2020 murders this year have actually been cleared this year,” with the clearance rate for shootings that do not involve a fatality only a fraction of that, says former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, who ran for mayor against Lori Lightfoot last year and now is a consultant to the Fraternal Order of Police union. “It’s becoming increasingly clear there is a lack of accountability for violent crime offenders.”
CPD pushes back on that, offering conflicting data.
According to Chief of Detectives Brendan Deenihan, the actual homicide clearance rate is 44.41 percent this year, a tad under last year’s 49.68 percent but considerably better than the 28.9 percent mark hit 2016.
Deenihan determines “clearance” in a different way than Vallas does, counting the total number of homicide cases that were resolved in a year regardless of when they occurred and dividing it by the number of new homicides in that year. That means some murders that occurred in 2016 or 2017 get counted as “cleared” this year, but murder cases increasingly take years to resolve as items such as tape from security cameras are used more and more.
But why are less than half of murders solved even by his count? Largely because most involve groups of people getting into conflicts with other groups of people, he says. And instead of calling police and talking, those groups take revenge and seek their own version of street justice themselves. And COVID has complicated everything.
Other large cities and the FBI determine clearance rates on the same multiple-year basis as Chicago, says Roseanna Ander, executive director of the University Crime Lab and Education Lab, which consults for the CPD. Still, she notes, Chicago’s murder clearance rates are a good 20 to 30 percentage points below those in Los Angeles and New York City.
On the other hand, Ander adds, under Deenihan the actual number of murder cases cleared this year has jumped up to 326, about 100 or slightly more than in recent years. “I think that’s noteworthy,” she says, and perhaps a sign of improvement.
The city declined to provide clearance rates on shootings that do not involve fatalities. I’ve had to request them under the Freedom of Information Act and will pass them on when I get them.
Says Vallas: “One gets the feeling that a complacency is setting in, certainly among many elected officials, and that the historic rise in violent crime is becoming new normal.”
So ends 2020. Overall, it’s ugly, isn’t it?
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