Policy Perspective
Chicago's Great Crime Drop
Spring 2007, Volume 29, Number 1
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Mayors and police chiefs from around the country recently gathered in Washington, D.C., to debate how to respond to an epidemic of murder and other violent gun crimes hitting a number of mid- and large-sized cities—hitting them so hard that they are driving up national totals for the first time in 15 years. “Crime is coming back,” Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton warned the crowd.
But the chief’s message was not aimed at Chicago. The FBI’s national crime statistics, released in mid-September, indicate that Chicago has thus far avoided the rise in crime that is confounding many cities. Between 1991, which was the peak year, and 2005, Chicago homicides fell by 52 percent and all gun crimes by 62 percent. Other violent crimes and major property crimes such as burglary and auto theft also fell by half. The city has not experienced an end to this great drop in crime.
Why did crime drop here so sharply and for so long, and what does that foretell? My research points to some explanations, while discounting other popular claims.
Chicago’s crime, for example, did not drop because the city got richer. In fact, the city’s response to the economic good times of the 1990s was tepid. The percentage of Chicago youths who live in poverty scarcely changed at all, and neither did the number of low-income households. The benefits of the booming 1990s mostly went to those already well off.
Neither does the aging of the population provide an answer. Younger newcomers more or less canceled out the graying of the city’s white and African American neighborhoods.
It was also not because there were simply more police around. Critics point to the Bush administration’s decision to end federal support for local police hiring as a key factor in rising crime. In Chicago, the number of police went up by a little more than 10 percent during the 1990s, but then growth stopped—and crime just kept dropping. This investment in policing, which represents a significant financial commitment by the city, could not have accounted for a decline in crime of more than 50 percent through 2005.
What about drug markets? In some cities it is claimed that the crack epidemic of the 1980s fueled drug wars that then tapered off in the 1990s. But in Chicago indicators of cocaine and heroin abuse (arrests and hospital emergencies) point in the opposite direction. In 2004, the city experienced five times as many crack arrests and many more hospital emergency room visits involving cocaine and heroin than in the early 1990s.
Violence did not subside because our gangs became more polite, either. Gang violence went up and down during this period, but non-gang homicide has dropped steadily. The other good news, for all but the National Rifle Association, is that gun carrying seems to be down considerably.
How about prisons? Locking up more people seems to have helped during the 1990s, when Illinois’ prisons were growing, but it could not have played much of a role since. The number of Chicagoans going to prison peaked in 1999 but then declined noticeably, while crime continued to drop.
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That takes us to the city’s community policing program, Chicago’s Alternative Policing Strategy or CAPS, the largest in the country. The program has helped steer police efforts in response to local priorities and has involved hundreds of thousands of residents in crime fighting. The effects of this neighborhood mobilization around crime could not have kicked in until the second half of the 1990s, but statistical evidence shows that it then made a difference. Some of the program’s most impressive successes have been in places that needed help the most. Public involvement has been strongest in higher-crime, African American neighborhoods—where crime has gone down the most. In fact, 70 percent of the drop in gun crime in Chicago between 1991 and 2005 was in predominately black police beats. They were the biggest winners.
Furthermore, police have been policing “smarter” across the country. Considerable evidence shows that focused, data-driven “hot-spot” policing and other strategies backed up by better data and rigorous management oversight can reduce crime. Beginning around 2000, Chicago adopted many of these strategies, along with new information systems that enable police to rigorously manage them.
The benefits of the great crime drop for all Chicagoans have been huge. If crime had remained at its 1991 level, by the end of 2005 Chicago would have had 3,100 more homicides and 275,000 more robbery victims. Vast, uncontrollable economic or demographic factors didn’t keep that epidemic from happening. Rather, close-to-home investments, law enforcement, and community involvement made the big difference in the city’s crime drop. Keeping both energized and focused on communities that need the most help is our best recipe for preserving what we have won in Chicago.
Wesley G. Skogan, professor of political science and an IPR faculty fellow, is the author of Police and Community in Chicago: A Tale of Three Cities (Oxford University Press, 2006). These results were included in the 2006 report “Reflections on Declining Crime in Chicago” for the MacArthur Foundation.
