Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology Volume 92 Article 1 Issue 3 Spring Spring 2002 Learning from the Past, Living in the Present: Understanding Homicide in Chicago, 1870-1930 Leigh B. Bienen Northwestern University School of Law Brandon Rottinghaus Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc Part of the Criminal Law Commons, Criminology Commons, and the Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons Recommended Citation Leigh B. Bienen, Brandon Rottinghaus, Learning from the Past, Living in the Present: Understanding Homicide in Chicago, 1870-1930, 92 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 437 (2001-2002) This Criminal Law is brought to you for free and open access by Northwestern University School of Law Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology by an authorized editor of Northwestern University School of Law Scholarly Commons. 0091-4169/02/9203-0437 92, Nos 3-4 THEJOURNALOFCRIMINAL LAW&CRIMINOLOGY Vol Copytight (0 2003 by NorthwesternUnvesity, Schoolof Law Printed i USA CRIMINAL LAW LEARNING FROM THE PAST, LIVING IN THE PRESENT: UNDERSTANDING HOMICIDE IN CHICAGO, 1870-1930' LEIGH B. BIENEN* AND BRANDON ROTTINGHAUS** + There are many without whom the Chicago Historical Homicide Project would not have come into being or accomplished what it has. The Northwestern University School of Law, and Dean David Van Zandt, personally and institutionally, have offered strong support from the beginning. The Third Annual Faculty Conference, "Learning from the Past, Living in the Present: Patterns in Chicago Homicides, 1870-1930," took place on November 17, 2000. Several of the presentations at that Conference are now incorporated in this volume. The Project gratefully acknowledges the support of the Northwestern University School of Law faculty research fund, including the Irving A. Gordon Symposium fund. Other participants will be represented in later publications of the Project. The data transcription, coding and transformation of the more than 11,000 handwritten files into a text file, and then a quantita- tive file was supported by a generous grant from the Gun Violence Program of the Joyce Foundation. Elizabeth Olds, formerly a staff member at the American Bar Foundation, tran- scribed the 11,500 handwritten case entries into a text file over the course of a year. Juan Iziary, James Anderson, and Colin Proksel provided much appreciated and necessary com- puter skills. The assistance of the Northwestern University School of Law Library, C. Si- moni, Librarian, and especially the tireless efforts of Marcia Lehr, Pegeen Bassett, and other staff, has been and remains invaluable. Their commitment of time, energy, and resources over time continues to be much appreciated. The Information Technology staff at Rebecca Crown Center (Morteza A. Rahimi, Vice President for Information Technology) and the IT and support staff at the School of Law (Christel Bridges, Director), provided critical technical support, as did the students and others who coded and entered data. Many other staff at the School of Law and on the Evanston campus provided valued advice and assitance. Finally, the person who deserves special recognition is Juana Haskin at the School of Law. She has shepherded all aspects of the Project from its beginning, with a commitment of time, energy, intelligence and good spirit over the years which is very much valued and appreciated. Senior Lecturer, Northwestern University School of Law. *. Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science Department, Weinberg College of Arts and Sci- ences, Northwestern University. LEIGHB. BIENEN & BRANDON ROTTINGHA US [Vol. 92 THE BEGINNING The Chicago Historical Homicide Project at Northwestern Uni- versity School of Law began with the discovery and recent availabil- ity of a rich log of more than 11,000 homicides from 1870-1930, maintained consistently by the Chicago Police. The uninterrupted pe- riod of sixty years, and the fact of a single institutional record keeper, makes this an important new resource for the study of crime, homi- cide, urban development, and the police themselves. This long record of cases from a place of historical importance is a lens through which to view the growth and history of Chicago, bracketed by the begin- ning of the data set in 1870, until its end, in 1930. Because these crimes became cases, these records can be the foundation for a study of courts and the legal system as well. This database is also a new and important chronicle of the changing practices and attitudes of the record keepers, members of the Chicago police and the institution, the Chicago Police Force. And it is a reflection of the city's politics, for the police and their opera- tions were inextricable from those they answered to, the Mayor and aldermen, ward politicians, and the citizens of Chicago. Thus, it is an opportunity to study the rule of law, or its absence. This period was one of volatile politics and enormous economic and social change, and the police, as the symbol and embodiment of the rule of law, are part of this history. The history of crime, its punishment, of the legal and social insti- tutions whose job it was to maintain order and enforce the law, was not and is not distinct from the economic, social and political history. This database is both an archive and a diary, glimpses into the lives of the people in Chicago through the circumstances of their violent deaths. These cases are also a self portrait of an institution, the Chi- cago Police Force, a principal player in the political and social history of the city.' Eric Monkkonen explains: City police, through their daily activities, helped shape and control much of urban life in public places. Thus a study of the police and their behavior is the examination of the interface between a formal part of the urban structure and the informal actions of most city dwellers. Considered this way, the structural position and action of the police helps to illuminate a parallel problem of urban historians: how to conceive the relationship between social structure and geographical mo- bility and thus reconcile the development of cities as physical and bureaucratic forms with their highly transient populations. This major social fact ... is the "dizzying rate" of movement in and out of American cities throughout the nineteenth century. ERIC MONKKONEN, POLICE INURBAN AMERICA, 1860-1920, at I I (1981) (citation omit- ted). 2002] LEARNING FROM THE PAST The set of essays in this volume begins the analysis of these cases by a group of historians, criminologists, and legal scholars un- der the auspices of the Chicago Historical Homicide Project at Northwestern University School of Law. 2 One goal of the Project is to make these cases and the quantitative data set available to a variety of researchers, not just to criminologists and legal scholars, but col- lege and high school teachers, genealogists, amateur historians and other interested persons, and to link the data set to other sources, to capture the times and reimagine the lives of our immediate ancestors and predecessors in America, our grandparents and great- grandparents, for three long lived generations reach back to the be- ginning of this time period. These records of more than 11,000 homicides in Chicago will be archived at Northwestern University and eventually put on a web site with links to other archives and historical resources. The language of the case reports is itself an historical record of speech and the dis- course about crime and its social meaning at the time.4 The details on circumstances, the content and character of the contemporaneous language in the case entries, and the length of time to various legal dispositions in routinely reported cases are now trans- formed into both a quantitative and a text based file, allowing for the analysis of these homicides simultaneously from several perspec- tives: as autonomous case narratives, as discrete data points on indi- vidual victims and defendants in a series of cases over time, as statis- tical artifacts, as subsets of homicide cases over long or short periods, as a report on homicides in particular parts of the city during a his- torical period, as a dimension of the demographic and social changes 2 The first phase of this Project was the Third Annual Faculty Conference at Northwest- ern University School of Law, titled 'Learning From the Past, Living in the Present: Patterns in Chicago Homicides, 1870-1930,' Nov. 17, 2000. Included in that archive and accessible on the web site will be a text file of the case summaries and the quantitative, coded file for the more than 11,050 cases, as well as photo- graphs, literary works of the period, other archival material, and links to other historical re- sources. 4 It would be of great historical value if comparable case summaries for the period 1930- 1965 could be located and transformed into a quantitative file. An expanded data set could then be created and linked with the Loyola University Chicago Homicide Project, which be- gins in 1965, creating an uninterrupted time series on homicide in Chicago from 1870-2002, and continuing. Such a data set would allow for the study of long term trends in homicide, and changes in legal institutions and practice over the course of more than a century. This would present a unique opportunity to study not only changing patterns of homicide, but also patterns in the enforcement of criminal laws and the behavior of legal decision makers over a period of more than one hundred years. LEIGH B. BIENEN & BRA NDON ROTTINGHA US [Vol. 92 in the population, as a historiography of how the police recorded homicides over sixty years, as a history of case dispositions by a legal system, as an account of how the police were themselves victims and defendants in homicide cases, and in many other ways.