HOW CHICAGO’S STREETS BECAME THE WILD WEST

The Ferguson effect, failed city leadership and an ill-advised deal with the ACLU have made the city ever more dangerous

By Heather Mac Donald

The Wall Street Journal
June 16, 2016

Someone was shot in Chicago every 150 minutes during the first five months of 2016. Someone
was murdered every 14 hours, and the city saw nearly 1,400 nonfatal shootings and 240 fatalities
from gunfire. Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot, nearly one an hour, topping the previous year’s tally of 53 shootings. The violence is spilling from the Chicago’s gang-infested South and West Sides into the business district downtown. Lake Shore Drive has seen drive-by shootings and robberies.

The growing mayhem is the result of Chicago police officers’ withdrawing from proactive
enforcement, making the city a dramatic example of what I have called the Ferguson effect.
Since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014, the conceit that
American policing is lethally racist has dominated media and political discourse, from the White
House on down. Cops in minority neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities have responded by
backing away from pedestrian stops and public-order policing; criminals are flourishing in the
vacuum.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel warned in October 2015 that officers were going “fetal” as the
violence grew. But 2016 produced an even sharper reduction in proactive enforcement. Failures
in city leadership after a horrific police shooting, coupled with an ill-considered pact between the
American Civil Liberties Union and the police department, are driving that reduction. Residents
of Chicago’s high-crime areas are paying the price.

Most victims in the current crime wave are already known to police. Four-fifths of the Memorial
Day shooting victims were on the Chicago Police Department’s list of gang members deemed
most prone to violence. But innocents are being attacked as well: a 6-year-old girl playing
outside her grandmother’s house earlier this month, wounded by gunfire to her back and lungs; a
49-year-old female dispatcher with the city’s 311 call center, killed in May while standing
outside a Starbucksa few blocks from police headquarters; a worker driving home at night from
her job atFedEx, shot four times in the head while waiting at an intersection, saved by the
cellphone at her ear.

Police officers who try to intervene in this disorder often face virulent pushback. “People are a
hundred times more likely to resist arrest,” a police officer who has worked a decade and a half
on the South Side told me. “People want to fight you; they swear at you. ‘F--- the police, we
don’t have to listen,’ they say. I haven’t seen this kind of hatred towards the police in my career.”

Antipolice animus is nothing new in Chicago. But the post-Ferguson Black Lives Matter
narrative about endemically racist cops has made the street dynamic much worse. A detective
told me: “From patrol to investigation, it’s almost an undoable job now. If I get out of my car, the guys get hostile right away.” Bystanders sometimes aggressively interfere, requiring more
officers to control the scene.

In March 2015, the ACLU of Illinois accused the Chicago PD of engaging in racially biased
stops, locally called “investigatory stops,” because its stop rate did not match population ratios.
Blacks were 72% of all stop subjects during a four-month period in 2014, said the ACLU,
compared to 9% for whites. By the ACLU’s reasoning, with blacks and whites each making up
roughly 32% of the city’s populace, the disparity in stops proves racial profiling.

This by now familiar and ludicrously inadequate benchmarking methodology ignores the
incidence of crime. In 2014 blacks in Chicago made up 79% of all known nonfatal shooting
suspects, 85% of all known robbery suspects, and 77% of all known murder suspects, according
to police-department data. Whites were 1% of known nonfatal shooting suspects in 2014, 2.5%
of known robbery suspects, and 5% of known murder suspects, the latter number composed
disproportionately of domestic homicides. Whites are nearly absent among violent street
criminals—the group that proactive policing aims to deter.

Despite the groundlessness of these racial-bias charges, then-Police SuperintendentGarry
McCarthy and the city’s corporation counsel signed an agreement in August 2015 giving the
ACLU oversight of stop activity. The agreement also created an independent monitor. “Why
McCarthy agreed to put the ACLU in charge is beyond us,” a homicide detective told me.

On Jan. 1 the department rolled out a new form for documenting investigatory stops to meet
ACLU demands. The new form, called a contact card, was two pages long, with 70 fields of
information to be filled out. This template dwarfs even arrest reports and takes at least 30
minutes to complete. Every card goes to the ACLU for review.

The arrangement had the intended deterrent effect: Police stops dropped nearly 90% in the first
quarter of 2016. Criminals have become emboldened by the police disengagement.
“Gangbangers now realize that no one will stop them,” says a former high-ranking official with
the department. People who wouldn’t have carried a gun before are now armed, a South Side
officer told me. Cops say the solution is straightforward: “If tomorrow we still had to fill out the
new forms, but they no longer went to the ACLU, stops would increase,” a detective said.

A profound pall also hangs over the department because of a shockingly unjustified police
homicide and the missteps of top brass and the mayor in handling it. In October 2014, 17-year-
old Laquan McDonald, behaving erratically and suspected of breaking into cars, was shot to
death by a Chicago police officer. A police dashboard camera captured the terrible scene as he
was killed despite not posing an immediate threat.

The police department never corrected the initial reports that falsely portrayed the shooting as
justified—until a judge ordered the video’s release in November 2015. The police department
had cleared the officers involved; now one is charged with murder. Mayor Emanuel fired
Superintendent McCarthy and appointed a task force that subsequently accused the Chicago
police of systemic racism.

Mr. McCarthy says he didn’t release the video or correct the record because he didn’t want to
compromise a federal investigation. That is a justified protocol under ordinary circumstances.
But this was no ordinary shooting, and the damage done by the prolonged false narrative, also
left uncorrected by City Hall, is incalculable.

Mayor Emanuel, genuflecting to the city’s activists, has adopted many of his task force’s
sweeping recommendations. Yet the premise of those recommendations—that the department is
fatally racist and brutal—is false. The McDonald shooting was a tragic aberration. In 2015, even
as crime was increasing under the Ferguson effect, the Chicago police shot 30 people, eight
fatally, representing 1.6% of the 492 homicides that year. Chicago’s ratio of fatal police
shootings to criminal homicide deaths is less than the national average; among the 10 most
populous cities, the department’s per capita rate of fatal shootings is far less than that in Phoenix,
Dallas and Philadelphia, even though the Chicago PD takes more guns off the street than any
other police department in the nation.

I recently met Felicia Moore in a South Side neighborhood late one night. A wiry middle-aged
woman with tattoos on her face and the ravaged frame of a former drug addict, she told me: “I’ve
been in Chicago all my life, it’s never been this bad. Mothers and grandchildren are scared to
come out on their porch.” Mayor Emanuel needs to quickly reassure Chicago police officers that
they will be supported for proactive policing before more lives are lost.