Understanding the Complexities and Origins of Gun Violence in Chicago
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Trinity College Trinity College Digital Repository Senior Theses and Projects Student Scholarship Spring 2021 Understanding the Complexities and Origins of Gun Violence in Chicago Christopher Bilicic [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses Part of the American Politics Commons, Criminology Commons, Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons, Social Justice Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Bilicic, Christopher, "Understanding the Complexities and Origins of Gun Violence in Chicago". Senior Theses, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 2021. Trinity College Digital Repository, https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses/866 UNDERSTANDING THE COMPLEXITIES AND ORIGINS OF GUN VIOLENCE IN CHICAGO A thesis presented by Christopher Bilicic to The Political Science Department in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Honors in Political Science Trinity College Hartford, CT April 10, 2021 Professor Anna Terwiel Stefanie Chambers Thesis Advisor Department Chair 2 Contents Chapter 1: Introduction 3 Chapter 2: Chicago’s History of Housing Discrimination and Racial Segregation 28 Chapter 3: Legal Cynicism and Chicago’s History of Police Abuse 68 Chapter 4: Public Policy Solutions 83 Chapter 5: Conclusion 134 3 Chapter 1 Introduction 4 Last summer, in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side, Yasmin Miller was driving home from her local laundromat with her 20-month-old son, Sincere Gaston, seated in the back of her car. Several stray bullets from a nearby shooting hit Yasmin’s car, killing her son. At a vigil for Sincere, Yasmin Miller made an emotional plea to her South Side community: “We need your help. We got to do better. I don’t want another mother to feel my pain. I can’t sleep, eat, I cannot do anything without that boy, nothing. It is killing me” (Shulze 2020). Several days later, also on the South Side, a 7-year-old girl attending a Fourth of July celebration and a 14-year-old boy walking down the street were both shot and killed. (MacFarquhar and Chiarito 2020). In many American cities, heart-wrenching stories like Yasmin’s are sadly the norm. Ripping through neighborhoods, urban gun violence has taken children from their parents, parents from their children, and shattered people’s lives. Nowhere is this deadly trend more apparent than the city of Chicago. In 2016, the city’s violence hit shocking levels, with close to 4,000 shootings and 632 homicides, of which 90% were committed with guns. From 2017 to 2019, the city’s gun violence and homicide rates dropped slightly. However, with 3,468 shootings and 643 homicides so far in 2020, the city has already surpassed the record numbers of 2016 (Chicago Tribune 2020). As a result, Chicago has become a city known for and defined by its high rates of gun violence and homicide; many refer to it as “Chi-raq”. Tragically and predictably, gun violence does not affect everyone equally. In 2019, Chicago’s population was nearly 3 million people where 49.4% of its residents were white and 30.1% were black (U.S. Census Bureau 2019). Despite comprising a minority of the population, 80% of gun violence victims in Chicago in 2016 and 2020 were black (Chicago Tribune 2020). 5 The city’s gun violence is further concentrated: the vast majority of victims are male black teens and men. According to the University of Chicago Crime Lab, in 2015 and 2016, black youth and men aged 15 to 34 make up only 4% of Chicago’s population but over half its shooting victims. Whites, in contrast, constitute only 5% of homicide victims (University of Chicago Crime Lab 2017). This gendered and racial reality is further illustrated by patient records at the Lurie Children’s Hospital, where, from 2013 to 2017, black teens aged 15 to 19 had a homicide- victimization rate of 365.3 per 100,000. On the other hand, all other teens in the city have a homicide-victimization rate of 22 per every 100,000 (Lurie Children’s Hospital 2019). Additionally, according to Chicago’s leading anti-violence nonprofit organization, the majority of perpetrators of gun violence are gang-affiliated black teens and men aged 17 to 26 (Chicago CRED 2019). This gun-violence divide is not only racial but spatial, as Chicago is one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. Indeed, the city is almost entirely divided based on race, with black residents concentrated on the South and West Sides and whites either downtown or on the north side of the city. For example, the South Side areas of Washington Park and Burnside are 98% black, while Lincoln Park and Edison Park on the north side are 80% white (Corporation for Enterprise Development 2015). Citywide, of Chicago’s 1.6 million black residents, 48.2% live in majority-black neighborhoods on the West and South Sides (Comen 2019). In addition to race, Chicago is also extremely segregated based on economic status and opportunity. For example, in 2015, the majority-black neighborhoods of Riverdale and Fuller Park had poverty rates of 61% and 56%, respectively (Hertz 2016). The metrics for these areas mirror statistics for the city as a whole: in 2018, Chicago’s black residents had a poverty rate of 6 34% and an unemployment rate of 16.2%. Whites, in contrast, had an unemployment rate of 4.7% and median household income of $70,960, nearly $46,000 more than the figure for blacks. Worst of all, in 2018, the unemployment rate for black men ages 20 to 34 was 40% (Semuels 2018). With this in mind, according to Chicago’s leading antiviolence organization Chicago CRED (Creating Real Economic Destiny), violence and racial inequality are heavily concentrated, with nearly 80% of gun violence occurring in just 15 of Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods – the almost exclusively black areas of the South and West Sides (Chicago CRED 2019). In 2015, for example, majority-black Fuller Park had a homicide rate of 104 per every 100,000 residents, while the figure for majority-white Lincoln Park stood at 6 per every 100,000 (Hertz 2016). Therefore, violence, race, and inequality perfectly overlap in Chicago, where black residents are not only heavily impacted by the violence but live in an almost completely separate reality from whites. Due to this divide, the situation in Chicago is often referred to as a “tale of two cities” in which residents living on the northside often dismiss the black South and West Sides as dangerous, violent, and full of crime. This divide is seen by many as natural and Chicagoans often go about their daily lives unaffected and accepting this as the norm. Most importantly, over the last several years, Chicago’s high rates of violence in black neighborhoods is frequently brought up in response to the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement. For years, the U.S. has seen numerous unarmed black men gunned down by police across the country. In response to these killings, the BLM movement has exploded, with thousands of Americans taking to the streets calling for an end to police brutality and racial inequalities. Those against the BLM movement often counter by asking what about “black on black crime”? Indeed, horrific stories 7 like Yasmin’s and statistics showing high rates of violent black crime are often cited in this counternarrative. These critics argue that black violent crime in cities like Chicago is the real problem, not racism or police brutality against black Americans. Moreover, this black crime narrative often arises in the numerous police shootings of unarmed black men. In 2014, Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old black teenaged boy, was shot 16 times by police officers on Chicago’s South Side. The police dash cam footage shows McDonald was unarmed and walking in the street. When asked why he shot McDonald, Police Officer Jason Van Dyke stated that he feared for his life; he erroneously thought McDonald was armed (Husain 2019). This narrative is frequently cited as justification for killing unarmed black men. Indeed, in shooting after shooting police officers like Van Dyke state that they feared for their lives or that they thought the person was armed, and that instead of reaching for, say, a wallet to produce identification, the black victim was reaching for a gun. In response, critics often blame implicit bias by police officers who equate being black with being criminal. Thus, through these shootings, a common theme arises: fear, criminality, and blackness. Most of all, this theme of criminality and blackness often comes up in specific conversations about gun violence in Chicago. For example, former President Trump often brought up the high rates of violence in Chicago describing the black neighborhoods and black residents who are most impacted as “living in hell because it’s so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot”. President Trump then, in turn, called for “law and order” and more aggressive policing or tough on crime tactics to combat, what he describes, the “carnage” in Chicago (Abt 2010, 123). Simply painting Chicago’s black neighborhoods as “dangerous” and full of “carnage” and bullets re-enforces the image or stereotype of blackness and criminality. 8 Thus, anytime crime and black Americans are discussed in the same sentence this common arises yet again. Critically, this focus on black crime and the criminalization of black Americans is nothing new. In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander recounts the rise of “law and order” rhetoric and argues that, despite statistics that say otherwise, black Americans have and continue to be criminalized.