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.

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 Starbucks a few blocks from police headquarters; a worker driving home at night from her job at FedEx, 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 Superintendent Garry 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.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal

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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal