Editor’s note: This is Part 1 of a two-part series on crime solutions from Katie Hill and Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago Crime Lab.
The overheated political moment we’re in has led people to say surprising things — for example, that our criminal justice system is a “sickness” to be “eradicated.” But it’s a mistake to think that criminal justice accountability and the addressing of root causes are mutually exclusive.
Chicago city government and local philanthropy have made a big bet on one particular root cause strategy: community violence intervention. CVI groups hire “credible messengers,” who often have had personal exposure to the criminal justice system, to keep their ears to the ground for conflict and try to interrupt it and, when possible, connect people to needed social services.
But what we ourselves often hear from CVI organizations is that CVI alone isn’t enough.
We hear that if it’s easy to steal hundreds of dollars of stuff from Walgreens in minutes, with little chance of getting punished, a CVI worker trying to persuade someone to take a minimum wage job instead faces an uphill climb. If shootings go unpunished, friends and family of victims can feel (perhaps understandably) that the only path to justice is “self-help” — fueling cycles of retaliation. Those dynamics make CVI workers’ jobs not just harder, but also more dangerous.
Taking these views seriously means viewing CVI and policing and enforcement as complements, not substitutes.
This is also consistent with the best available data and evidence: When cities hire more police, on average violence declines. Perhaps counterintuitively, arrests for these serious crimes decline as well, suggesting police are being preventive — some combination of deterrence and violence interruption. These violence reductions are very progressive, helping the most disadvantaged communities the most.
But we can’t take these benefits for granted; some cities police far better than others. For example, some cities do too much zero-tolerance policing, which our research shows doesn’t help public safety. More generally, around the country, we see police departments with similar budgets serving similar types of cities but achieving enormous differences in outcomes such as murder rates.
The unhelpful “either/or” framing is perhaps due to increasingly scarce government resources. How do we get better enforcement to complement CVI if the city is broke, struggling to deal with a budget deficit of $1.15 billion?
The only thing we can do is get more social good from the dollars we’re already spending on our police and criminal justice system. We need to get Chicago police up to the level of the departments widely considered to be best in the country, Los Angeles and New York City. They’re clearly not perfect, but who in Chicago would turn down the 80% to 90% reductions in homicides those cities have experienced over the past 30 years?
What are the best police departments doing more of? Partly the same thing that all modern-day organizations do to be successful: Use data to identify and solve problems. This is particularly important in policing given the enormous predictable structure of gun violence.
For example, there is a liquor store on the South Side of Chicago that is open until midnight, which is later than most other liquor stores that typically close by 10 p.m. Up until 10 p.m., everyone goes to their local liquor store, surrounded by people they know. And then from 10 p.m. to midnight, people converge from all over the South Side on the same spot to buy booze, running into people from other neighborhoods they don’t know or might have lingering conflicts with (“your sister said this thing to my girlfriend at a high school football game three years ago”). Statistical models that predict when and where gun violence happens show that is a gun violence hot spot, but only between the hours of 10 p.m. and midnight. Few humans could spot that pattern.
This makes clear why data can be so helpful: With just a few thousand officers on patrol at any time in a city of several hundred square miles and 2.7 million people, let’s make sure we’re consistently giving extra attention to this one spot between 10 p.m. and midnight. One demonstration from out in Los Angeles showed that using data rather than human intuition could fully double the amount of crime prevention that a given level of police staffing can achieve.
There are lots of other opportunities to improve our use of data here in Chicago as well, not just within the police department but also in the prosecutor’s office and even the court system. The costs pale in comparison to, say, hiring lots more police or building more jails and prisons.
Perhaps the clearest way to see that root causes and enforcement are complements, not substitutes, is to look at what former Los Angeles police chief (interim Chicago Police Department superintendent) Charlie Beck attributes the large drops in LA and New York homicides to: early and rapid adoption not just of data-driven policing but CVI as well.
In thinking about what to do here in Chicago, we must stop talking about this as if they’re siblings fighting for a bigger share of the pie. Root causes versus accountability is simply not the right question.
Katie Hill is executive director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago, Pritzker faculty director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab and author of “Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence.”
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