The Violence Project

Thanks, Human Goods, for the heads up on this story.

The July/August edition of The Atlantic takes a look the recent rise in violence across the country, focusing on the movement of crime in Memphis, Tennessee. In less than 10 years, Memphis has seen a rise in crime in areas long deemed “safe” or upwardly mobile. Experts pointed to the closing of public housing complexes and migration of its residents as a possible factor, since crime in the areas that housed the complexes has declined.

Lately, though, a new and unexpected pattern has emerged, taking criminologists by surprise. While crime rates in large cities stayed flat, homicide rates in many midsize cities (with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million) began increasing, sometimes by as much as 20percent a year. In 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group surveying cities from coast to coast, concluded in a report called “A Gathering Storm” that this might represent “the front end … of an epidemic of violence not seen for years.” The leaders of the group, which is made up of police chiefs and sheriffs, theorized about what might be spurring the latest crime wave: the spread of gangs, the masses of offenders coming out of prison, methamphetamines. But mostly they puzzled over the bleak new landscape. According to FBI data, America’s most dangerous spots are now places where Martin Scorsese would never think of staging a shoot-out—Florence, South Carolina; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Reading, Pennsylvania; Orlando, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee.

Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis’s hometown turned into America’s new South Bronx? Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city’s chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it’s a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don’t want to hear. It’s an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades.

If this issue seems familiar to Chicagoans, it should. This has been a source of debate as Chicago public housing buildings are being torn down and its residents sent to neighborhoods just as violent or more violent than the ones they left behind. Medill colleague Erin Halasz recently wrote about this very issue, finding that the decline in murders this past decade has skipped a number of Chicago neighborhoods, or moved to neighborhoods that did not see such violence in the past. The following chart examines homicides in the Grand Boulevard neighborhood (which housed the notorious Robert Taylor homes) and Greater Grand Crossing and Washington Park, just two miles south of Grand Boulevard.

Erin Halasz/Medill

The next question in this murder mystery is how much of this violence has moved farther into the suburbs surrounding Chicago. While homicide numbers for the city of Chicago are easy to find, I’ve had a harder time finding something on homicides in the Chicago metropolitan area. If anybody has any leads on this, feel free to write. If not, investigation time it shall be.

CeaseFire

Where to begin? Today marks one month since the last day of school for Chicago Public School students. The last week of school saw thousands of students go to Soldier Field to hold a rally, speaking out on the gun violence that has taken too many young lives. But with one step forward of people coming together, the unity was dealt a step back when, the night before the rally, 15-year-old Ignacio Montano was shot and killed. Montano had been a student at Kelvyn Park High School.

Since that week, Chicago has seen a chilling rise in shootings that some feared might come with the warmer weather, but didn’t say publically because they already used that excuse when 37 people were shot during one weekend in April. In one month:

Violence across city leaves two teens dead, one hurt

3 teens injured in shootings

1 killed, 1 injured in Lawndale shooting

5 people shot in front of Bellwood home

Teen shot in basement of South Side church

2 children wounded by gunfire on far South Side

Boy shot in Austin neighborhood dies of wounds

Boy, 15, wounded in drive-by shooting on Chicago’s South Side

That sampling only goes back to June 30. Just last night two more teens — 15-year-old Juan Aguilero and 17-year-old Marlow Jones — were shot and killed in separate incidents on the South Side. All that can come to mind is a lyric from an old U2 song that asks, “How long must we sing this song?”

This rash of violence comes on the heels of a report released by the Children’s Defense Fund that says 3,006 children and teens died from gun violence in 2005, the first increase since 1994. According to its press release, the eight children and teens killed by gun violence each day is the equivalent of one Northern Illinois University shooting every 15 hours and one Virginia Tech shooting every four days.

Maybe if all of these shootings happened downtown, like the one at this year’s Taste of Chicago, we might have a little more action beyond preaching to the choir about what needs to be done. Even Chicago’s own presidential hopeful, Barack Obama, offered his take on the recent violence at a June 25 press conference.

“We have to put more cops on the street. We have to trace guns that have been used. We have to have improved schools, after-school programs, and summer school programs,” Obama said. “Those are things government can do. Parents have to do their jobs. Fathers have to be home and be apart of their children’s lives”

Not quite breaking news. We have heard this remedy in one variation or another from countless officials, but with little action to back it up.  It almost sounded like a repeat of his Father’s Day speech on the responsibility of fathers. Maybe it’s time we started giving speeches to those we elect on the responsibilities of being a leader.

I apologize for the recent hiatus.  The new quarter has brought new and more work, which has taken away a lot of my time from this blog.  I will continue posting, but, unfortunately, at a slower pace temporarily.  That doesn’t mean the subject of this blog has waned in importance, because judging by what has been going on in Chicago this summer, it’s more relevant than ever.  For now, I’ll keep writing, and I hope you will keep reading.