Summer slam
Extra police are headed to black neighborhoods this summer where youth are already buried under misdemeanor arrests.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s decision to deploy 500 additional beat officers this summer to a handful of the city’s highest-crime areas could mean that more black teens are headed to jail for low-level crimes at a rate disproportionate to teens of other races.
A Chicago Reporter analysis of Cook County court cases found that black teens aged 15, 16 and 17 are nearly four times more likely to be charged with misdemeanor crimes than white and Latino youth combined.
This summer, the additional officers are heading to eight districts, seven of which are majority-black. These areas are also home to the bulk of 15-, 16- and 17-year-olds from Chicago who have had misdemeanor court cases initiated against them over the past five years, according to the Reporter’s analysis.
“Police in high-crime neighborhoods patrol with a different set of eyes, with greater suspicion,” said Arthur Lurigio, a criminal justice and psychology professor at Loyola University Chicago.
For decades, Edith Crigler, associate director of the Chicago Area Project, has worked with police, schools and other nonprofits on the city’s South and West sides to deflect youth from the criminal justice system. That job has become more difficult, she said, as residents increasingly rely on police to remove kids who are roughhousing in the alleys or hanging out on street corners.
“Adults call police when they see any little thing,” she said.
Fifth Ward Alderman Leslie Hairston, whose South Side ward includes two of the targeted districts, said it’s often difficult to tell which “kid has drugs on them or is working as a lookout.”
As a result, over the past five years, twice as many black teens in Chicago were arrested merely on the suspicion of peddling drugs, for example, compared with the number of white teens in all of Cook County who were arrested for marijuana possession.
During that time, 1,379 cases of soliciting unlawful business were opened against 17-year-olds alone in Chicago. Only one-quarter of the cases included drug charges, the Reporter’s analysis found. The youth were ultimately convicted in only 79 of the cases. Five of the defendants were white, but 99.2 percent of them were black.
“Just because you’re a black boy standing on the corner with some friends doesn’t mean that you’re up to no good,” Crigler said. Some of the teens she works with come from homes that are so dysfunctional that hanging out with their friends on the streets can be a haven. “But police officers don’t have the tools and the language to communicate with these children,” she said.
Hairston said “it’s always a concern” that police might end up cracking down too hard on youth in her ward, which includes South Shore, parts of Woodlawn and Washington Park. But she defers to the courts to decide whether arrests warrant prosecution.
Only one-quarter of the juvenile misdemeanor cases initiated against teens aged 15, 16 and 17 between 2006 and 2010 ended with a conviction, the Reporter found. Even those cases that fell apart can have lasting consequences, Lurigio said.
“If you’ve been arrested previously, that increases your risk of arrest. It also increases your chance of being prosecuted,” Lurigio said. “If you have a previous arrest, you’re more likely to be found guilty or to plead guilty.”
Police brass are hoping that assigning more cops to regular beats will help engage residents and foster new relationships to make quality arrests that undermine crime. But some residents are skeptical that the department will be able to quickly heal major trust problems between residents and police, which has been in decline for years.
Pat Hill, executive director of Chicago’s African American Police League, said changing police attitudes toward high-crime areas overnight is unlikely.
When officers don’t live or have connections with the communities that they police, Hill said, it can be difficult to distinguish between youth who are aimless and those who are criminal.
Hill, a retired police officer and high school teacher, knows from experience. After buying a house at 38th Street and Wabash Avenue that sat in the heart of the Wentworth police district she patrolled daily, she grew skilled at recognizing who was at the root of the district’s crime.
When Hill saw teens hanging out on a weekday, she’d walk them back to their school. Back at the station, she’d take heat from her superiors who felt she should have instead arrested the youth on truancy charges.
“You have white boys [engaged] in the same behavior and it’s considered delinquency,” she said. “But when black boys do it, it’s criminal.”
acaputo@chicagoreporter.com
This is a very important
This is a very important article that highlights issues that need to be seriously addressed by the community, schools, organizations, parents, the criminal legal system and youth. While reading the article, I concluded that are three main issues here:
1. Calling the police as the first response when perceiving that youth are causing trouble. What types of community education/engagement can we come up with that will help people see that calling the police is not always the most effective response?
2. Law enforcement policing certain districts more harshly.
3. Black youth treated more harshly by the criminal legal system for engaging in the same behavior as white youth.
What strategies can be implemented to fix these issues?
Additional policing while important is not the answer
While everyone agrees that there is work to be done by the community, schools, organizations, parents, the criminal legal system and youth, you must ask also, "What have the elected officials done over these years, when these areas where spiraling out of control?" How is it that City Officials turned a blind eye to what was happening and did nothing? Now the conditions require so much heavy lifting that it seems to be an overwhelming task.
Looking at the voting records of the Aldermen in the 5th, 7th, and 8th Wards and how they voted on Mayoral issues instead of Community issues over the years is key. The issues in these Wards are very similar:
-unemployment
-under performing schools
-increase in drop-out rates
-home foreclosures
-drugs/gangs/violence
-food deserts
-chronic illnesses
-mental illness
Throwing more police into the mix is not the answer. It is almost a guarantee that more Black people will be locked up when stuff hits the fan. The "criminals" in the neighborhood have already figured out that the police are not coming when called. That's a common complaint at local CAPS meetings--"I called the police 5 times and they did not come." "The police came and did not get out of their car." "I stood on the block watching them." Dare I say it again, the "criminals" have already figured that out. That leaves the residents and the idle teens potential prey or victims.
I agree that we need new strategies, and more focused commitment from our elected officials, and legislators who are controlling the resources into these areas.
1. Vacant lots and row upon row of closed businesses. There is one on every corner. These could be turned into food gardens or other types of economic development that could put kids to work.
2. Business Development - Businesses that are threatening to leave Chicago could be given tax incentives based on their willingness to invest in these communities and schools.
3. Job training centers - an initiative for the Chicago Public Schools may be to create an academic curriculum that is two-fold: college prep and job training focused. Sorry President Obama, as much as we wish it were true, every child will not be headed to college, but they still need to work. Unfortunately, every family does not qualify for loans, and contrary to the standard calculations for a FAFSA, we really cannot afford to send kids to college out right. Again, they still need to work.
4. Police protection and 911 - Police are to serve and protect period. That is the expectation of the community and it is the Oath that they take. Changing the protocol of who to call for what may need to take place on the Police side, not the public. As calls come into 911 they may be evaluated and dispatched over to a 311 Non-emergency operator, but telling the public not to call 911 will take years of retraining. Don't call 911 campaigns will cost marketing dollars that could certainly be more wisely spent.
Stephanie Whitaker
Additional police are not the answer
Twenty years after the Chicago fire in 1871 (when the city’s population was 300,000), Chicago’s population was a little over a million people. By 1910’s Chicago's population had risen to over two million, and by the mid 1920’s, the population was three million. This growth was driven by European immigration, making over 70% of its population either foreign-born or first generation. Due to challenging economic circumstances, parents were working overtime to provide the “bare essentials” for their children. These times required children to work to contribute to the family’s livelihood. Unfortunately, neither source of income was enough, leaving children “ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clothed, illiterate, and wholly untrained and unfitted for any occupation" (Beuttler and Bell, 2010, p. 4). The results were unfortunate families who, due to being disrupted by poverty and unfamiliar community circumstances due to immigration, were not able to flourish. Evidence of the extent of this hardship was also found in high rates of European immigrant’s domestic violence in Chicago from 1875 to 1920 (Adler, 2003). Accordingly, in 1889, Jane Addams (1860–1935) founded Hull House on Chicago’s Near West Side as a social settlement house “to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city” (Beuttler and Bell, 2010, p. 5). Essentially, Hull House programs were to assist in the social settlement and adaptation of the European immigrants. It was also noticed:
“Children over ten years of age were arrested, held in the police stations, tried in the police courts. If convicted they were usually fined and if the fine was not paid sent to the city prison. However, often they were let off because justices could neither tolerate sending children to Bridewell nor bear in themselves guilty of the harsh folly of compelling poverty-stricken parents to pay fines. No exchange of court records existed and the same children could be in and out of various police stations an indefinite number of times, more hardened and more skillful with each experience.” (Addams, 2004, p. 133).
Accordingly, in their efforts to change the harsh conditions besetting Chicago’s European immigrant youth, in 1989 Jane Addams and her colleagues established a Juvenile Count in Illinois to distinguish between delinquency and criminality. Due to the State of Illinois’s concerns regarding rising rates of juvenile delinquency, the first Juvenile Court in the United States was built. The procedures of this new institution were not to be adversarial. Rather, they were “primarily protective and educational rather than punitive, and the commission of a child to a correctional institution is deemed to be for his welfare and not for the sole purpose of inflicting penalty” (Beuttler and Bell, 2010, p. 5). Ten years later, in 1909, these foresighted women persuaded the State of Illinois to discover the cause of delinquency. Consequently, the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute (later called the Institute for Juvenile Research - IJR) was created, and the neurologist, William Healy, M.D., was hired to be the first director. Dr. Healy was charged with not only studying the delinquent’s biological aspects of brain functioning and IQ, but also the relevant social factors, attitudes, and motivations (Schowalter, 2000). These studies determined that there was no relationship between biological heredity and criminality. Later, IJR researchers Shaw and McKay (1942) noted delinquency was due less to biological, ethnic, or cultural factors and more due to social disruption that eroded formal and informal social control in specific transitional neighborhoods (delinquency areas) in a city. This finding predated the seminal research of Sampson et al (1997) that coined the term “collective efficacy.” Sampson et al (1997) learned in 49 equally poor Chicago, African-American neighborhoods there were six neighborhoods that lacked "collective efficacy." These neighborhoods had high rates of violence. Neighborhoods that had “collective efficacy” had residents who spoke to one another's youth and monitored their behavior in the community. Accordingly, there were very low rates of violence (Sampson et al, 1997).
Chicago KKK corrupt cops
They are trying to get as many blacks as they can in jail as the can, Cops are like the KKK their is a huge WHiTE crime ring in Chicago who got away with hundreds of crimes and stole all the citys money by making these corrupt cops investigate their frameup crimes for 5 years
Nobody wants to go after the white boys, they are covering for the whites criminals
the beauty within
The government is spending much more time, effort, and money to convict so called "troubled" juveniles. Why can't they use the money for after school programs and organizations such at the Boys & Girls club, if they were really concerned about the well being of the youth and cleaning the streets. Our Government is own enemy. What a corrupt system. I can' believe that out of the 1,379 cases of soliciting unlawful business were opened against 17-year-olds alone in Chicago. the ratio of white to black was 5:74.