City sees drop in murder rate, but not in South Side’s Englewood - Chicago Sun-Times

City sees drop in murder rate, but not in South Side’s Englewood - Chicago Sun-Times

"If you look at Englewood, you might think violence is spiraling out of control in Chicago.

Week after week, the South Side neighborhood has been ground zero for harrowing crimes like Tuesday’s mass shooting at a fast-food restaurant that left two dead and five wounded. This year, 56 people were killed in Englewood through Tuesday — a 40 percent increase over the same period in 2010.

Citywide, though, murder was down more than 2 percent this year, and overall crime dropped 8 percent.

“If you live in a very dangerous neighborhood, you’re still seeing a lot of crime,” said Arthur Lurigio, a criminal justice professor and associate dean at Loyola University. “But the truth is that we’re safer now than we were 40 years ago.”

Chicago’s crime rates are at their lowest in decades. There were more than 800 murders in Chicago in 1970, compared to 419 this year through Tuesday and 437 through all of 2010.

Other big cities like New York and Los Angeles have seen even more dramatic reductions in crime. New York’s murder rate is a third of Chicago’s, and Los Angeles’ murder rate is about half of ours.

“The goal is zero,” police Supt. Garry McCarthy said. “When I stop hearing about kids getting killed, when I stop hearing about kids getting shot, then maybe I’ll be satisfied.”

McCarthy said he is not happy with this year’s murder totals but believes the department is responding to new strategies he put into place since he took office in May.

Of nine categories of major crimes, the only ones to increase this year were aggravated sexual assault and motor vehicle theft, McCarthy said. They both rose slightly, he said.

“We brought a new playbook,” he said. “It takes some time.”

Over the past seven months, McCarthy has carried out Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s campaign promise to shift about 1,000 officers to the patrol division. They were moved to the city’s 25 districts from desk jobs and citywide crime-fighting units that McCarthy has disbanded.

The Fraternal Order of Police called the redeployment a “shell game,” saying the city should hire more officers instead of shifting them from one unit to another.

McCarthy said a key to his crime-fighting philosophy is giving district commanders more autonomy. They are held accountable through a process called CompStat, which was started in New York in the 1990s.

Under CompStat, the department provides commanders with a regular stream of crime statistics and expects them to adjust their strategies accordingly. They must explain their decisions to McCarthy and other police brass at weekly CompStat meetings."