The homicide rate in Chicago has increased by nearly 60% over the last two years. But homicides — most of which are committed with guns — are up in cities across the country. So is Chicago’s spike in gun violence just part of this larger national trend, or is something different happening in our city?
A closer look at the data makes clear: Something is wrong here.
Compare Chicago to other large American cities such as Los Angeles and New York City. While the three cities are different in many ways, they shared a remarkably similar homicide rate for nearly the entire 20th century (Figure 1). There have been only two exceptions. The first was Chicago during the infamously bloody Al Capone era of the 1920s. The second is Chicago right now.
Something changed in the early 1990s. It didn’t happen overnight, but over the last 30 years, Chicago’s gun violence rate began to diverge from these other cities. Today, our city’s homicide rate is three times that of LA’s and five times that of New York’s.
So what happened in Chicago over the last 30 years? It’s natural to think that the most important factors that affect gun violence, such as funding for public schools, racial and economic segregation, or gun availability and gun laws, must also explain the safety gap across cities. But as best as we can tell in the data, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Take Chicago’s chronically underfunded public school system. The data suggests that a high school diploma protects people against the risk of gun violence involvement — either as a victim or a shooter. Yet The Century Foundation estimates that Chicago Public Schools needs to spend another $6,700 per student for Chicago to catch up to the national average in terms of academic outcomes.
But even LA and New York have not been able to reach the state of political functioning needed to dramatically improve their public schools; the graduation rates in both cities aren’t all that different from Chicago’s (Figure 2). That’s not to say improving Chicago’s public schools wouldn’t reduce gun violence. Just the opposite: It’s likely the best way to close our gun violence gap.
Right now, academic outcomes in Chicago, LA and New York are relatively similar, meaning that while public education is an important factor affecting gun violence, it’s not driving Chicago’s 30-year divergence from LA and New York.
Many people point to gun laws as another key driver of gun violence in Chicago. The data suggest guns make arguments and robberies more lethal. The fact that our country of more than 330 million people has nearly 400 million guns in circulation might help explain why our level of crime overall is not that different from what we see in many other rich countries, but why our homicide rate is so much higher.
But gun laws in Chicago and the state of Illinois overall have been among the strictest in the nation for decades, on a par with gun laws in LA and New York. It’s true that Chicago’s gun laws are easily undermined by the frequency with which guns come in through our city’s borders with surrounding suburbs and states. Gun laws might be more effective if enacted nationally rather than locally. But in any case, different gun laws between Chicago, LA and New York don’t seem like the explanation for the divergence in public safety trends across cities.
So, what did LA and New York do differently? Many criminologists — as well as Bill Bratton, chief of police in both cities at various points over the past 30 years — point to changes in policing, such as a shift to a more professionalized organization. This can include a reduction in cronyism in appointments and promotions, better officer training, data-driven management systems and efforts to increase officer and departmental accountability.
Some of these changes in LA were required by the U.S. Department of Justice as part of a consent decree with LAPD, resulting from a history of civil rights violations that stretched back decades. While the role of policing in explaining divergent safety outcomes across cities remains contested, few Chicagoans would complain about having similar trends to what we saw in LA: the city’s homicide rate has steadily declined as public support for police in surveys has steadily increased (Figure 3).
Further hypotheses that have been offered include the varying role of local philanthropy. Others point to greater alignment between criminal justice agencies in New York where, unlike in Chicago, prosecutors and police are all part of the same unit of government: the city.
The path that LA and New York took to achieving public safety need not be the path that Chicago takes. Their policy choices might not be the best blueprint for Chicago. The comparison across cities is really most useful, in my view, for helping us see three bigger-picture points about gun violence in our home city.
The first key point is to better appreciate exactly how far behind we are. This lack of progress in addressing gun violence imposes the worst consequences on Chicago’s most vulnerable communities.
It’s not uncommon to hear reporters say, “At least gun violence today isn’t nearly as bad as the early 1990s.” But while that’s true for Hispanic and white residents, it no longer holds true for Black Chicagoans. In fact, the toll gun violence took on Chicago’s Black residents last year was higher than at the peak of the crack cocaine epidemic 30 years ago, even after accounting for changes in population (Figure 4).
The second key point is that because our divergence from LA and New York started 30 years ago, the problems here run deeper than whatever any recent political leader has or hasn’t done.
The final and most important point is that we can see major change is possible. It’s easy to look at the headlines in Chicago day after day, year after year, and despair that nothing can be done. But LA and New York are proof points: Homicides have dropped 64% in LA and 83% in New York. After 30 years, it’s time to get our act together.
Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and Pritzker Director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab.
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