Too many families in two of America’s most dangerous cities — Baltimore and Chicago — will spend this holiday season in hospitals and funeral homes. Last weekend, the two cities saw more than 50 people shot and eight killed.
The violence included two “mass shootings,” defined as a single incident in which more than four people are shot. In Chicago, 13 people were wounded early Sunday morning at a party in the South Side neighborhood of Englewood. Soon after, seven were shot outside a downtown hookah lounge in Baltimore.
Blame the cities’ softness on crime.
Baltimore is the more violent of the two. While Chicago’s violence level remains elevated, with 508 murders through Dec. 22, both homicides and shootings have declined since a 2016 spike. In Baltimore, however, elevated levels of violent crime have continued virtually unabated.
As The Associated Press reported on Christmas Day, Charm City could end the year with an all-time high homicide rate, as it approaches the final weekend of the year just four homicides shy of its 2017 record of 342 killings.
Many in Baltimore’s political class have tried to blame this on socioeconomic “root causes.” But these explanations fall flat. According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, between 2014 and 2017, the city’s poverty rate went down from 24.2% to 22.4%, and the unemployment rate during the same time period declined to 6.1% from 9.5%.
Similarly, after the 2016 homicide spike in Chicago, many pointed to joblessness and insufficient education spending. But between 2010 and 2015, the period just preceding the spike, the public-school system’s per-pupil spending jumped to $13,784, from $11,596. Black male unemployment, meanwhile, saw dramatic declines before the spike.
The more likely culprits of elevated violence: (1) sharp cuts in incarceration, (2) prosecutorial retreat from low-level offenses and drug laws and (3) the alienation of each city’s most capable guardians: cops.
Start with incarceration. Maryland cut its prison population, largely from Baltimore, by nearly 23% from 2007 to 2017. The state cut the prison population by a whopping 10% in just one year, 2016-17. Ditto for Illinois. Between 2015 and 2018, the number of state prisoners from Cook County (which includes Chicago) fell more than 18%, with much of the decline coming after 2016.
That kind of rapid, large-scale decarceration means more criminals on the street, where they will continue to settle their disputes violently, often with firearms they seem to have no fear of carrying in public. A third of Baltimore homicide suspects in 2017 committed their alleged offenses while on probation or parole, despite having an average of nearly 10 prior arrests. In Chicago, those arrested for shootings or homicides in 2015-16 had an average of 12 prior arrests.
The best way to describe crimes committed by high-volume, repeat offenders? Avoidable.
Then there is the prosecutorial retreat — particularly from drug enforcement. In Baltimore, 70% of 2017 homicide suspects also had prior drug arrests. In Chicago, meanwhile, drug arrests declined by 44% just before the 2016 spike in violent crime. And while correlation isn’t causation, there is clear overlap between supposedly “nonviolent” drug offenders and shooters. Progressive prosecutors take note.
As police internalize the message that “low-level” drug offenses won’t be aggressively pursued, street enforcement wanes, which means more open-air drug dealing and, in turn, more street brutality.
Which brings us to the third cause of elevated violence in both Baltimore and Chicago: rollbacks in proactive policing. According to USA Today, between 2014 and 2017,“suspected narcotics offenses” reported by Baltimore police “dropped 30%,” while “the number of people they reported seeing with outstanding warrants dropped by half. The number of . . . instances in which the police approached someone for questioning — dropped 70%.”
In Chicago, the number of monthly stops conducted by police dropped below 10,000, from a historic average of about 40,000 — a major cause of the 2016 violence spike.
As long as the political classes in these two once-great cities continue to undermine police, and as long as they fail to incapacitate the violent, repeat offenders driving so much of the violence, those living in Baltimore and Chicago’s more dangerous neighborhoods will continue to suffer the sort of carnage we saw last weekend.
This piece originally appeared at the New York Post
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Rafael A. Mangual is a fellow and deputy director for legal policy at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post