Elaine Richardson wonders
In "CAPS at 5," its 1998 report on five years of community policing in Chicago, the city took the opportunity to do some bragging. And why not? Between 1992, the year before CAPS went into effect full force, and 1997, 39,000 fewer people had been victims of serious crimes. Murder was down by one-fifth and violent crimes had declined by nineteen percent - figures that seemed ripe for a little self-congratulation.
And then came the bad news. "Chicago has more murders than N.Y.," the Sun-Times proclaimed in December. In fact, in 1998 Chicago had the most murders in the country, logging 700 homicides to New York's 628. That figure becomes all the more disturbing if you consider that New York has 4.5 million more people.
In New York the figures were a cause for celebration, but in Chicago no one seemed to want to say anything, except to brush off comparisons with the Big Apple. "If you look at the statistics over the last fifteen years, New York has had more than 21,000 murders since 1985; Chicago has had only 11,000," Chicago Police Officer Cesar Guzman told the New York Times. "New York has a police force of just 40,000; we have a force of 13,500. You see, there are lots of factors you have to look at, not just one figure."
Even so, that one figure, if you just compared it to Chicago's recent past, didn't seem that bad either - homicides were the lowest in a decade, down eight percent from 1997, and down twenty-five percent in the last four years. "Chicago is probably one of the safest cities in the United States," Police Superintendent Terry Hillard told reporters in December. "We're steadily decreasing [homicides] now. We've been steadily decreasing, but not as fast as everybody else."
But if Chicago, with it's nationally recognized community policing program, can't keep itself from becoming the murder capital of America, then what's going on?
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