Chicago Police Research Articles

Do more eyes on the street reduce Crime? Evidence from Chicago's safe passage program

Chicago's Safe Passage program attempts to ensure the safety of student traveling to and from schools by placing civilian guards along specified routes. The program was launched during the 2009-2010 school year and was expanded to 140 schools by 2015-16. We use data from more than 10 years of geocoded Chicago police reports and school level data to analyze the Safe Passage program's effects on crime rates and the rate of absenteeism from schools. Our findings suggest that the program is an efficient and cost effective alternative way of policing with direct effects on crime and student's outcomes. Exploiting both spatial and temporal variation in the implementation of the program, we find that the presence of guards results in lower levels of crime, with violent crime declining by 14% on average. The rate of absenteeism is estimated to decline by 2.5 percentage points. We find no evidence of spillovers of crime to areas that are not along the Safe Passage routes.

Where the Other 1 Percent Live: An Examination of Changes in the Spatial Concentration of the Formerly Incarcerated

Traditionally, prisoner reentry has been regarded as an urban phenomenon, with most returning prisoners concentrating into a select few disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. However, metropolitan-area changes—including the demolition of public housing, the suburbanization of poverty, and desegregation—may have altered the prevailing spatial distribution of returning prisoners, thereby spreading the challenges of prisoner reintegration to new geographic domains. Accordingly, I examine the extent to which the geographic distribution of formerly incarcerated individuals in Chicago and Illinois has changed since the late 1990s, including both the causes and consequences of changes, drawing on sixteen years of prisoner release data from the Illinois Department of Corrections, combined with data from the U.S. Census, the American Community Survey, the Chicago Police Department, and the Chicago Housing Authority.

In-group Bias and the Police: Evidence from Award Nominations

This paper examines the impact of in-group bias on the internal dynamics of a police department. Prior studies have documented racial bias in policing, but little is known about bias against officers due to lack of available data. We construct a novel panel dataset of Chicago Police Department officers, with detailed information on officer characteristics and work productivity. Exploiting quasi-random variation in supervisor assignment, we find that white supervisors are less likely to nominate black officers than white or Hispanic officers. We find weaker evidence that male supervisors are less likely to nominate female officers than male officers. We explore several theories of discrimination that can explain our main findings. Requiring interaction between supervisors and officers reduces the minority nomination gap, but white supervisors still exhibit in-group favoritism. Our findings suggest departments should focus on policies that address in-group bias due to its effect on career advancement.

Structural Misgendering Of Transgender Sex Workers in Chicago Via Mug Shots? A Case Study Of Practicing in the Social Sciences

This article is a case study of practicing in the applied social sciences and explores vital methodological questions at the intersection of sex work, gender identities, sex, and police policy in the context of criminalization. Specifically, how do we conduct research via public, quantitative data on transgender individuals who are not able to self-identify? The project arose from the observation of what were potentially transgender sex-workers' mug shots on a police website used to publicize the arrests of johns buying commercial sex. Our findings complement the literature on sex work in the United States and suggest that the Chicago Police Department is not only misidentifying transgender arrestees on the website but engaging in a form of entrenched gender delegitimization—or structural misgendering. The aim of this paper is to bring attention to this potentially harmful practice and encourage discussions and developments for conducting research with and about transgender individuals.

Does emergency financial assistance reduce crime?

Does emergency financial assistance reduce criminal behavior among those experiencing negative shocks? To address this question, we exploit quasi-random variation in the allocation of temporary financial assistance to eligible individuals and families that have experienced an economic shock. Chicago's Homelessness Prevention Call Center (HPCC) connects such families and individuals with assistance, but the availability of funding varies unpredictably. Consequently, we can determine the impact of temporary assistance on crime by comparing outcomes for those who call when funds are available to those who call when no funds are available. Linking this call center information to arrest records from the Chicago Police Department, we find some evidence that total arrests fall between 1 and 2 years after the call. For violent crime, police arrest those for whom funds were available 51% less often than those who were eligible but for whom no funds were available. Single individuals drive this decrease. The decline in crime appears to be related, in part, to greater housing stability—being referred to assistance significantly decreases arrests for homelessness-related, outdoor crimes such as trespassing. However, we also find that financial assistance leads to an increase in property crime arrests. This increase is evident for family heads, but not single individuals; the increase is mostly due to shoplifting; and the timing of this increase suggests that financial assistance enables some families to take on financial obligations that they are subsequently unable to meet. Overall, the change in the mix of crime induced by financial assistance generates considerable social benefits due to the greater social cost of violence.

Algorithmic paranoia: the temporal governmentality of predictive policing

In light of the recent emergence of predictive techniques in law enforcement to forecast crimes before they occur, this paper examines the temporal operation of power exercised by predictive policing algorithms. I argue that predictive policing exercises power through a paranoid style that constitutes a form of temporal governmentality. Temporality is especially pertinent to understanding what is ethically at stake in predictive policing as it is continuous with a historical racialized practice of organizing, managing, controlling, and stealing time. After first clarifying the concept of temporal governmentality, I apply this lens to Chicago Police Department’s Strategic Subject List. This predictive algorithm operates, I argue, through a paranoid logic that aims to preempt future possibilities of crime on the basis of a criminal past codified in historical crime data.

Abstract 4251: Neighborhood data system to enable health disparities research in Chicago

Abstract Background: Chicago has become the focus of national concern following findings of striking disparities in cancer incidence and mortality, with worse outcomes for Non-Hispanic Black persons. Chicago also has communities with very high crime rates, racial/ethnic segregation, and resource-poor communities. Social stressors, including crime, social isolation, low socioeconomic status (SES), interpersonal and institutional discrimination, and residence in resource-poor settings intersect at individual- and neighborhood- levels across the lifespan and are associated with poor health outcomes. However, the extent to which these social determinants separately and together contribute to cancer health disparities is unclear. Purpose: To elucidate health disparities attributable to neighborhood social stressors in the Chicago setting, a pilot Chicago Neighborhood Data System (ChNDS) is currently in production, using the Chicago Police Department crimes database, data from the 2010 Census short form, 2008-2012 American Community Survey (ACS), University of Chicago MAPSCorps project, and Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) geodatabases. Approach: We use principal components analysis (PCA) to generate composite indices of neighborhood-level factors at the small area level (census tract or block group): racial/ethnic composition; SES; immigration/ acculturation; other sociodemographic characteristics; crime; and community assets including density/proximity to types of businesses, retail food, and recreational facilities. Future directions: Data record linkages at the small area-level will be performed between the pilot ChNDS and observational and population-based datasets to examine the impact of neighborhood-level characteristics on research study participation, disease occurrence, healthcare utilization, and disease outcomes in Chicago. Citation Format: David J. Press, Scarlett Lin Gomez, Briseis Aschebrook-Kilfoy, Habibul Ahsan. Neighborhood data system to enable health disparities research in Chicago [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2018; 2018 Apr 14-18; Chicago, IL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2018;78(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 4251.

Vagaries of Police Behavior

Reforms often restrict the use of specific police tactics. We identify a possible unintended consequence of such reforms: that police will sabotage the new rules by substituting one tactic for another. We show that police in Chicago responded to new restrictions on pedestrian stops by making traffic stops instead, and that police in Venezuela responded to new restrictions on arrests by killing suspects. This evidence of substitution, in two very different contexts, can inform policy as well as longstanding debates about the origins of and remedies for police abuse of power.

Neighborhood Violence, Peer Effects, and Academic Achievement in Chicago

Research shows that exposure to local neighborhood violence is associated with students’ behavior and engagement in the classroom. Given the social nature of schooling, these symptoms not only affect individual students but have the potential to spill over and influence their classmates’ learning, as well. In this study, I use detailed administrative data from five complete cohorts of students in the Chicago Public Schools (2002 to 2010), crime data from the Chicago Police Department, and school-level surveys conducted by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research to assess the strength of this peer effect. The estimated negative relationship between peer exposure to neighborhood violent crime and individual achievement is substantial and remains after adjusting for other peer characteristics and student fixed effects. Surveys suggest these results are related to trust, discipline, and safety concerns in cohorts with larger proportions of students from violent neighborhoods.

Black sites, “dark sides”: War power, police power, and the violence of the (un)known

The US Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture and the Guardian’s exposé of the Chicago Police Department’s “off-the-books interrogation compound” at Homan Square have again thrust torture into debates concerning the nature and limits of state and police violence. Following a longstanding pattern, key actors framed both cases as revelatory and exceptional and used them as fodder for public condemnation and calls for reform. In order to confront and contest similar patterns of facile outrage, we theorize a cultural-cognitive process of disavowal, whereby the inherent violence of the US state is willfully situated by its subjects in politically and culturally redacted black spaces. Here, black spaces allow political subjects to disavow the many horrors—rendition, torture, murder—committed on their behalf and in the name of security. We argue that these are not simply metaphorical, imaginary spaces, but rather material landscapes linking the certainties of US imperial violence to routine and uncontested acts of police violence and the interrogation rooms, jail cells, and prisons of an intensely racialized, yet largely disowned mass-carceral regime. Our aim, then, is to map the state’s black spaces in order to demonstrate the reciprocities between war and police and to situate the politics of redaction within broader systems of violence and dispossession.

Gun Theft and Crime.

Some law enforcement officials and other observers have asserted that theft is the primary source of guns to crime. In fact, the role of theft in supplying the guns used in robbery, assault, and murder is unknown, and current evidence provides little guidance about whether an effective program to reduce gun theft would reduce gun violence. The current article analyzes publicly available national data on gun theft together with a unique data set for Chicago. The results tend to support a conclusion that stolen guns play only a minor role in crime. First, publicly available data are used to calculate that thefts are only about 1% of all gun transactions nationwide. Second, an analysis of original data from Chicago demonstrates that less than 3% of crime guns recovered by the police have been reported stolen to the Chicago Police Department (CPD). If a gun is reported stolen, there is a 20% chance that it will be recovered, usually in conjunction with an arrest for illegal carrying. Less than half of those picked up with a stolen gun have a criminal record that includes violent offenses. Third, results from surveys of convicted criminals, both nationally and in Chicago, suggest that it is rare for respondents to have stolen the gun used in their most recent crime. The data on which these results are based have various shortcomings. A research agenda is proposed that would provide more certainty about the role of theft.

What Caused the 2016 Chicago Homicide Spike? An Empirical Examination of the 'ACLU Effect' and the Role of Stop and Frisks in Preventing Gun Violence

Homicides increased dramatically in Chicago in 2016. In 2015, 480 Chicago residents were killed. The next year, 754 were killed–274 more homicide victims, tragically producing an extraordinary 58% increase in a single year. This article attempts to unravel what happened. This article provides empirical evidence that the reduction in stop and frisks by the Chicago Police Department beginning around December 2015 was responsible for the homicide spike that started immediately thereafter. The sharp decline in the number of stop and frisks is a strong candidate for the causal factor, particularly since the timing of the homicide spike so perfectly coincides with the spike. Regression analysis of the homicide spike and related shooting crimes identifies the stop and frisk variable as the likely cause. The results are highly statistically significant and robust over a large number of alternative specifications. And a qualitative review for possible “omitted variables” in the regression equations fails to identify any other plausible candidates that fit the data as well as the decline in stop and frisks. Our regression equations permit quantification of the costs of the decline in stop and frisks. Because of fewer stop and frisks in 2016, it appears that (conservatively calculating) approximately 239 additional victims were killed and 1129 additional shootings occurred in that year alone. And these tremendous costs are not evenly distributed, but rather are concentrated among Chicago’s African-American and Hispanic communities. The most likely explanation for the fall in stop and frisks that appears to have triggered the homicide spike is a consent decree entered into by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) with the Chicago Police Department (CPD). Accordingly, modifications to that consent decree may be appropriate. More broadly, these findings shed important light on the on-going national debate about stop and frisk policies. The fact that America’s “Second City” suffered so badly from a decline in stop and frisks suggests that the arguably contrary experience in New York City may be an anomaly. The costs of crime — and particularly gun crimes — are too significant to avoid considering every possible measure for reducing the toll. The evidence gathered here suggests that stop and frisk policies may be truly lifesaving measures that have to be considered as part of any effective law enforcement response to gun violence.

Adopting data interpretation on mining fine-grained near-repeat patterns in crimes

The near-repeat effect is a well-known phenomenon in crime analysis. The classic research methods focus on two aspects. One is the geographical factor, which indicates the influence of a certain crime risk on other similar crime incidents in nearby places. The other is the social network, which demonstrates the contacts of the offenders and explain ”near” as degrees instead of geographic distances. In our work, these coarse-grained patterns discovering methods are summarized as bundled-clues techniques. In this paper, we propose a knotted-clues method. Adopting a data science perspective, we make use of a data interpretative technology and discover that the near-repeat effect is not always so near in geographic or network structure. With this approach, we analyze the near-repeat patterns in all districts of the dataset, as well as in different crime types. Using open source data from Crimes in Chicago provided by Chicago Police Department, we find interesting relationships and patterns with our mining method, which have a positive effect on police deployment and decision making.

Neighborhood Context and Homicide Clearance: Estimating the Effects of Collective Efficacy

Only a handful of macro-level studies of homicide clearance exist, and the impact of community characteristics is mixed. In addition, community members are critical to clearances, but the willingness of residents to unite for the collective goal of aiding in investigations (via collective efficacy) remains to be tested. Combining data from the Chicago Police Department, Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), and U.S. Census, we estimate the effect of collective efficacy on homicide clearances in Chicago neighborhoods, while taking into account neighborhood characteristics and case composition. Results indicate that economic disadvantage, residential stability, and victimization significantly decrease homicides clearances, while collective efficacy increases clearances.

Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Contact with Police in Chicago: Disparities across Sexuality, Race, and Socioeconomic Status

In this article, we examine intersections of race, sexuality, and socioeconomic status (SES) in people’s experiences with police contact in Chicago. Utilizing representative data concerning police contact as well as sexual and racial identification, we examine variations in police contact for respondents occupying different racial, sexual, and economic social locations. In so doing, we examine the case of an urban area often lauded for progress in sexual minority rights to quantitatively evaluate disparities in the experiences of sexual minorities occupying different racial and sexual positions in society. In conclusion, we draw out implications for (1) developing intersectional analyses of contemporary sexual minority experience; (2) understanding the ways race, sexuality, and SES shape experiences with police contact even in settings deemed more progressive than the broader society; and (3) the ways in which incorporating an analysis of bisexuality into mainstream social science complicates existing assumptions and theories.

Police Torture in Chicago: Theorizing Violence and Social Justice in a Racialized City

Harvey's Social Justice and the City was published just as a major case of social injustice was unfolding on Chicago's South Side. Starting in the early 1970s and continuing for almost twenty years, police officers under Detective Jon Burge tortured confessions from as many as 200 black men. We use the contrast between Social Justice and the City and the Chicago police torture cases to emphasize the work that geographers have accomplished since the 1970s in theorizing race, space, and place. The torture cases have led to a decades-long struggle for justice and reparations waged by survivors, families, and activists. Here we examine the spatiality of the torture and how racialized practices of policing, housing, and employment operate across scales, sometimes amplifying the effects of each practice. Looking backward from the 1970s it is possible to see the torture cases as an extension of a long history of racial violence rooted deeply in U.S. history. Looking forward, these cases have clear parallels with contemporary events, including recent “blue-on-black” police killings and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Our aim, more broadly, is to begin theorizing violence within the larger debate over social justice in the contemporary U.S. city and to examine more closely how violence has been used repeatedly in Chicago and other U.S. cities to enforce social and spatial definitions of “race” and racial boundaries.

The Introduction of Tasers and Police Use of Firearms: Evidence from the Chicago Police Department

Many police jurisdictions have recently expanded their Taser arsenals with a goal of reducing officer-involved shootings. We analyze substitution between Tasers and firearms by means of an event study made possible by a policy change at the Chicago Police Department. Before March 2010, only sergeants and field training officers had access to Tasers; after that date, they were made available to patrol officers. We find that the change in Taser policy led to a large increase in Taser use, but not to a decrease in the use of firearms.

Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration by Matthew J. Cressler

Reviewed by: Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration by Matthew J. Cressler Kim R. Harris (bio) Matthew J. Cressler, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2017). 288 pages. Five members of the Black Panther Party and fifty others identified as "Concerned Black Catholics and Whites Concerned about the Black Community" occupied the narthex of St. James Church, Chicago, for a first "Black Unity Mass" on January 5, 1969. Members of the Chicago Police Department's "Red Squad" tactical unit observed the protest, taking notes on what they dubbed a "prayin." During the same hour, "regular" church goers attended Mass in the nave of St. James, undoubtedly hearing the prayers and freedom songs ringing out from the demonstration. Ironically, the protestors' General Intercessions, controversial in their time, have a contemporary ring. Their prayers for Black pride, unity, faith and in honor of a Black Baptist minister could appropriately be offered in 2018, for one of the many Catholic liturgies in celebration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday. Similarly, the fact of present-day Black Catholic celebrations in parishes and cathedrals, accompanied by piano, drums, electric bass, interpretive dance and diocesan-wide gospel choirs, was made possible, in part, by the confrontations, prayers, determination, and cultural evangelization of Black Catholic Chicagoans. Historic and present-day liturgical comparisons and the detailed descriptions of ecclesial conflicts in Authentically Black and Truly Catholic, underscore author Matthew J. Cressler's thesis. He contends that undergirded by official changes in the Catholic Church's liturgical practice and engagement [End Page 123] with the "modern world" after the Second Vatican Council, the intersection of Black Catholics in the United States and Black Power in the late 1960s and 1970s ignited a revolution in the expression of Black Catholic identity and in the community's worship style. In particular, Cressler attributes both local and national influence among Black Catholics, as well as in the wider United States Catholic Church, to the courage and "missionary" zeal for ecclesial self-determination and cultural relevance of Black Catholics in Chicago. Cressler begins by documenting the exponential increase in the numbers of Chicago's Black Catholics from 1940 to 1975. Most were converted to what they came to believe to be the "One True Church," universal and above the racial color line. White religious, women and men of orders such as the Society of the Divine Word and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People, self-described "missionaries," dedicated themselves strategically and systematically to the conversion of newly arrived African-Americans of the "Great Migration." Cressler illuminates his research with converts' personal testimony gathered from journal entries, interviews (many conducted by himself), letters, and other archival materials. Cressler offers a complexity of reasons for the African-American conversions. He contends that not only the prospect of greater educational opportunities, but also the experience of "quiet" and "dignified" liturgies, the inspiration and maintenance of family relationships, and the chance to "be somebody" all impacted conversion decisions. Cressler highlights the so-called "Chicago Plan" of mandatory family religious education and Mass attendance for all who sent their children to Catholic schools, as a foundation for many conversion choices. The author's analysis contains little comparison between the Chicago Black Catholic mid-twentieth century conversion experience with that of African-American Chicagoans who chose other "high church" Christian denominations, also featuring "quiet" or "dignified" liturgies. He makes strong connections, however, between the converts' embrace of new devotional traditions, their chosen separation from former associations, and alternative participation in contemporaneous "religio-racial movements," including the Nation of Islam, the Moorish Science Temple of America, and the Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation of the Living God. Cressler provides a riveting telling of the struggles for Black Catholic self-determination between priest-activists such as George Clements and Rollins Lambert, along with Concerned Black Catholics, the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, the Afro-American Patrolman's League and Chicago's Archbishop Cardinal John P. Cody. He also includes accounts of [End Page 124] intra-group leadership and...

Everyday police work during mental health encounters: A study of call resolutions in Chicago and their implications for diversion.

In recent decades, there has been sustained focus on police responses to persons experiencing mental health crises. The Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) model has been a seminal effort to improve safety, reduce arrests and enhance the use of emergency psychiatric assessment. With CIT well established, new discussions have emerged around how to further enhance the police-public health interface, including diversion from hospital emergency departments. In this context, this article takes stock of current police practices, utilizing descriptive data on 428 mental health-related calls addressed by Chicago Police over 3years triangulated with insights from 21 in-depth officer interviews. During these calls, hospital transports were conducted more often than arrests. Moreover, informal interventions - without any legal action or hospitalization - were used most often, speaking to the "gray zone" nature of mental health-related encounters. Taken together, the data reveal the need for non-crisis diversion options that address chronic vulnerabilities.

A Clear View from the Prairie: Harold Washington and the People of Illinois Respond to Federal Encroachment of Human Rights

The national debate over sanctuary cities demonstrates the deep divide between local community protection of its members and federal law that disrupts family and community bonds. This article discusses two Chicago efforts to prohibit city police from enforcing federal laws. Former Mayor Harold Washington issued his first 1985 Executive Order prohibiting city employees, including police, from cooperating with federal immigration officers unless required by law. Responding to misuse of city records and discriminatory tactics by federal officers, Mayor Washington recognized that civic harmony and health depended upon community trust that Chicago would not partner with federal immigration enforcement. Over a century earlier, the Chicago Common Council, after finding that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 undermined justice and dishonored humanity, prohibited Chicago police from assisting in the apprehension and removal of slaves. This article examines these two Chicago responses to federal law by: (1) examining the shifting relationship between local and federal enforcement of immigration law since the colonial days; (2) providing the context and rationale for Mayor Washington’s Executive Order 85-1; (3) exploring the context and rationale for the Chicago Common Council’s 1850 order; (4) addressing the proposed 2003 national legislation that sought to require municipal police to assist in enforcing federal immigration law; and (5) surveying the breadth of Mayor Washington’s vision for city government in protecting all community members. His vision to protect human rights, ban discrimination, and build a secure community demonstrated the distinct disadvantages of the proposed Clear Law Enforcement for Criminal Alien Removal Act of 2003 and the Homeland Security Enhancement Act of 2003. Although neither bill was enacted, Mayor Washington’s vision continues to provide a critique of efforts to involve municipal police in enforcement of immigration law.