Chicago seeing a drop in homicides as 2023 nears end, but not in every neighborhood

Chicago is poised to see a double-digit percentage drop in homicides in 2023, welcome news for a freshman mayor and a police superintendent who took the reins of the department just a couple of months ago.

But the small measure of success may not be exactly as it seems, a Tribune analysis of police data has found. While citywide figures show improvement, a closer look shows that neighborhoods that have for decades shouldered the brunt of disenfranchisement have paid for at least some of the gains.

A review of Chicago Police Department data on the district level shows that killings have actually increased or remained flat in many of the neighborhoods that have historically struggled the most with violence.

That may be because the downturn in fatal and nonfatal shootings has coincided with a huge spike in armed robberies and carjackings across the city, and police have shuffled resources around to deal with it — sometimes at the expense of the most troubled areas.

On the Southwest Side, the Chicago Lawn District has seen one of the largest year-over-year increases in fatal violence. CPD says 31 slayings have occurred in the district so far in 2023, a 29% increase over last year.

Jason Huff, one of the three Chicago Lawn police district councilors, said the district’s uptick in killings stems from officers being temporarily reassigned to cover other parts of the city. The district’s size is a challenge, too, Huff said, and the area’s aldermen have asked residents if they’d prefer the Chicago Lawn District to be split in two.

“The main, consistent storyline that you hear across the city is the same thing that you will hear in the 8th District,” Huff said. “It’s a staffing issue. Sometimes some of their officers are being reallocated to other, more important events, maybe downtown, for things that are going on downtown, if there’s an uproar there.”

“Overall, (with) the size of the district, it’s just hard to respond to call after call after call and not be able to do any proactive policing because of the size and volume of calls that they’re getting,” Huff added.

It is difficult to find a direct correlation between police staffing levels and homicides across the entire city, but there are examples.

Data from the city’s Office of Inspector General shows the Englewood (7th) and Austin (15th) districts — two that saw their killing totals rise this year — have dozens fewer officers assigned than they did in December 2022. Meanwhile, dozens of officers were added to districts on the North and Northwest sides where homicides fell this year.

But correlation does not always mean causation, as several districts with lower or nearly flat 2023 homicide totals also have seen a slight bump in the number of officers on patrol, according to OIG data.

The Harrison District (11th) has long been the city’s most violent. Roughly bounded by Roosevelt Road, Division Street, Western Avenue and Cicero Avenue, the district covers the epicenter of the city’s narcotics trade.

In 2022, the Harrison District saw 72 killings through late November, and so far this year, the district has recorded 73 homicides, according to police data. This time last year 353 officers were assigned there, and 361 are currently deployed.

The Englewood District, where new police Superintendent Larry Snelling was born and raised and where he worked as a patrol officer, has seen an 8% increase in killings this year, with 55 as of Nov. 26. The Grand Crossing District (3rd) in South Shore has notched an 18% increase. The Austin District on the city’s West Side saw 32 killings through late November 2022 — the same total for the district so far in 2023.

Asked about the review of data, police officials pointed to their successes.

Steep declines in killings have occurred in the CPD districts that cover Bronzeville, Kenwood, Pullman, Roseland, Brighton Park, McKinley Park, Back of the Yards, Bridgeport, Lawndale, Little Village and Morgan Park, police records show.

“Protecting the safety of all Chicagoans is the Chicago Police Department’s most important mission,” a CPD spokesperson said in an emailed statement to the Tribune. “This year, we have seen a significant decrease in shooting victims, shooting incidents and homicides. So far this year, there have been approximately 537 fewer shooting victims, 340 fewer shooting incidents and 75 fewer homicides compared to last year.”

“Though progress has been made, we know there is still more work to be done to bolster safety in every neighborhood,” the statement continued. “As we head into 2024, we will continue to tailor our public safety strategies to each individual neighborhood to ensure our residents are receiving the resources they need to feel safe and be safe.”

The department has rarely discussed deployment shifts or changes.

And the number of officers assigned to each of the CPD’s 22 patrol districts varies. As of this month, the Harrison and Englewood districts have the most, according to the city’s Office of Inspector General.

One change that has been discussed is an end to “tiered deployment,” a controversial tactic aimed at combating violence and frequently used under former Superintendent David Brown, which often resulted in officers losing their scheduled days off.

“As a close-to-32-year veteran on this job right now, I know the importance of having your time off when you’re working a job like this, because officers deal with vicarious trauma on a daily basis,” Snelling said during the Chicago Police Board’s November meeting at CPD headquarters. “As a result of that we made sure that we got rid of tiered deployment, so our officers will get their days off.”

A perception issue?

There’s little question that crime has been hounding Mayor Brandon Johnson during the first months of his tenure and increasing pressure on Snelling, his newly chosen police boss.

With armed crews sometimes committing waves of robberies in short periods in neighborhoods not used to seeing such crimes, the police have promised to meet the challenge.

And even in areas where homicides have dropped substantially, the perception of safety still has yet to follow.

The Wentworth District (2nd), which covers Hyde Park, Kenwood, Bronzeville and Washington Park, has seen homicides go down by more than a third in 2023. District Councilor Julia Kline doesn’t think that decrease has registered with her constituents and neighbors.

“I have not heard anybody talking about change and certainly not a positive change,” Kline said. “Everybody seems to have a perception that the crime is bad and getting worse.”

And it has gotten worse in some categories: Police Department data shows that motor vehicle thefts, for example, are up by more than half. But Kline said she hears some conversations about violence in the city that blow the problem out of proportion.

“Some people think, ‘Oh my God, if you step out of your car anywhere inside of Chicago city limits, you’re gonna get murdered,’” she said. “That’s crazy.”

She said she’d like to see a resource that visualizes the number of people who walk through a given neighborhood or intersection and do not experience crime.

“I think that if people could see how many millions of people go up and down the streets every day completely free from crime, it would help to decrease their feelings of being unsafe,” she said.

“I would love to be able to open up an app and see a green dot that represents every single person that has passed through a given intersection in the last hour, five minutes, whatever time period, to whom no crime has happened,” she said.

It remains to be seen how Mayor Johnson will react, but so far he appears to be moving away from adding sheer police manpower. Johnson’s first proposed budget eliminates more than 800 vacant street cop positions. It does create almost 400 new civilian positions, which his administration said will free up more officers to patrol the streets.

Meanwhile, Snelling said at November’s Police Board meeting that the department has hired more than 660 officers this year. But, Snelling told the Tribune in October, about 400 officer positions remain vacant.

A definite decrease

Chicago Police Department statistics show that, so far in 2023, homicide detectives have opened 569 murder investigations, a 12% decrease from the prior year.

According to the Cook County medical examiner’s office, the city recorded 599 homicides as of Nov. 27. In that same time frame last year, there were 692 homicides across the city.

The drop in killings has been felt across Chicago, from the Jefferson Park District (16th) on the Northwest Side to the Morgan Park District (22nd) on the Far South Side. Nonfatal shooting incidents are down 13% this year, too.

In the Morgan Park District, homicides are down by more than 50%. Police district Councilor Lee Bielecki attributed that drop to “a culmination of efforts” by the District Advisory Council, a good relationship between area residents and law enforcement and the efforts of police officers themselves.

As for whether the drop in homicides was registering among his constituents, Bielecki said 80 people attended the district council’s most recent meeting to hear more about a pair of Beverly car thefts that were captured on video earlier this month.

He said that while crime has gone down since his days working as a Chicago police officer, the crime that does occur is more visible and easily shared thanks to social media and cable TV.

Regardless, he said, “everybody wants to feel safe in their community — I don’t care if it’s in the 22nd District or in Englewood.”

Permanent answers elusive

Snelling, like all other superintendents in recent memory, has often called for a collaborative approach to reduce the city’s entrenched gun violence.

After he assumed leadership of the Police Department two months ago, Snelling told the Tribune, “We’ve allowed others to dictate how we should respond to violent crimes and acts of violence, which has led us — and not us as a police department but as a society — to forget about the victims and put the victims on the back burner.”

The Southwest Organizing Project was founded in 1996 and is among the organizations that make up Communities Partnering 4 Peace. As its name implies, SWOP operates in several neighborhoods on the South and Southwest sides, and in half of the police beats that make up the Chicago Lawn District.

Along with violence prevention, SWOP works to connect program participants with job training, education and immigration resources. The organization aims to foster partnerships among different religious institutions, schools and other community stakeholders, too.

After instances of gun violence, SWOP outreach workers will visit the area where the shooting occurred.

“During those canvasses we’re looking to run into community members, stakeholders, perpetrators of violence and also victims of the perpetrators of violence and try to get them to come into the office … (to learn) about the mentoring services that we have to try to help get them from Point A to Point B and to Point C,” Calvin Brown, SWOP’s system program director, told the Tribune.

“You can tell them all day, ‘Hey, put your guns down.’ But what we do is we ask them, ‘What can I help you with? Do you need a job? Do you need your ID? Do you need a birth certificate? What do you need? Do you need a resume?’” Brown added. “And once we get them focused on that, they don’t have time to focus on what they were doing out in the streets.”

Call for coordinated efforts

In the Grand Central District (25th), homicides are up by half. District Councilor Angelica Green said the causes of the increase weren’t clear to her.

But she said neighbors needed to work more with each other to reverse the trend — not just by calling law enforcement to share information, but by gathering with neighbors and keeping their streets and blocks clean. She wants to see more block clubs activated.

“When you form block clubs, you form a community,” she said. “When you form a community, people see that they can’t come on this block and they can’t sell drugs, they can’t just linger.”

Green said she’d like to see district officers gather feedback from residents about what their neighborhoods need. She observed that depending on what part of the district people live in, their concerns range from noise ordinances to increased gang activity.

Given the wide range of needs in the district, Green said she wanted to see police ask, “What is it that you need on this block that you think that can help? Do you think you need to have more officers? Do you need to have (fewer) officers?”

She observed that district coordination officers were particularly well positioned to do this work from within the Police Department, but called for collaboration among residents, law enforcement and civic leaders.

“Unless we do it together, it’s not going to happen,” she said. “When we’re divided, crime will always outweigh us.”

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