Friday, May 23, 2008

Nationwide drop in murders skips some Chicago neighborhoods

This isn't good well statistics wise anyway:
Fewer people were killed in Chicago last year: Between 2000 and 2007, the murder toll dropped 30 percent.

That would seem to be good news, but not if you talk to people in Washington Park or Chatham or North Lawndale.

In those neighborhoods and six others, it’s a different story.

An average of 16 people were murdered in Washington Park, Chatham, North Lawndale, South Shore, Near West Side, West Pullman, East Garfield Park, South Chicago and Auburn-Gresham in 2006. That’s 141 lives taken.

That same year, 33 people were killed in Austin.

A Medill analysis of homicide figures found that the numbers are virtually the same for each of those neighborhoods in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005. All tolled, that’s 298 people killed in Austin, 969 people killed in the others – a total of 1,267.

To explain Chicago’s continued violence in specific neighborhoods in contrast with an overall drop, some point to the largely vacant land on which the Robert Taylor Homes once stood and wonder what happened to the gangs that once trafficked drugs there.

A criminologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago points to New York, where housing complexes were torn down and new housing was erected on the same site. There, the poverty rate remained the same but the incidence of violence plummeted.

“Rates in Chicago have not gone down to the level of cities like New York or San Francisco or Seattle -- other cities with high murder rates that have dropped,” said John Hagedorn, the UIC criminologist. “Chicago hasn’t followed that pattern.”

Hagedorn has linked some of the continued murder and violence in Chicago to gangs that once controlled the drug trade in the housing complexes trying to establish new territory in their new neighborhoods.

Most CHA residents are law-abiding, but Hagedorn was interested in the ones who weren’t. He interviewed gang members for a study he conducted on organized violence.
Go read the whole thing. And take advantage of the EveryBlock Sixth Ward feed located under the weather section. Besides that's where I found this story.

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