A Policy of Systematic Disarmament in Chicago

Karl T. Muth examines whether the Chicago Police Department’s objections to concealed pistol applications from black applicants constitutes de facto institutionalised racism, giving different rights to whites and non-whites.

Concealed carry - the ability to carry a pistol for the purpose of self-defense - is not about Second Amendment rights or ivory tower legal constructions. It is about a more fundamental human right, the right to self-defense. I assert administrative policies create an opportunity for administrative racism in a city with a troubling history of minority white control and, further, that when an administrative body can make decisions and not disclose the methods or rationale for that decision-making, it invites abuse.

When Illinois passed its concealed carry law, I was delighted to see a "shall issue" clause. For those of us who see the ability to defend one's self not as a privilege, but as a fundamental civil rights issue, a "shall issue" clause is crucial. Essentially, there are two kinds of concealed carry policies in the United States, "shall issue" and "may issue." Under a "shall issue" rule, if an applicant meets the guidelines of the law (has not been convicted of a felony, has not engaged in domestic violence, has not been found to be mentally unsound, and so on), the state must issue a concealed carry license to that individual. Under a "may issue" regime, the
state has broad latitude to decide whether a person really needs a concealed carry license and this subjective necessity becomes the measure of one's ability to exercise a fundamental right.

The "shall issue" clause appreciates that it is not a matter of administrative decision-making or bureaucratic mood whether a person has the right to defend himself, herself, his family, or her family. It emphasises that a person who has the misfortune to live in a poor or violent neighbourhood enjoys the same basic rights as a person who happens to live in a wealthy or safe neighbourhood. The clause sets aside characteristics like the race of the applicant, showing that the state is willing to evaluate applications on their merit, disregarding the race of the applicant and accepting that whites and non-whites have the same rights to defend themselves, their families, and their communities. At least in theory, these things are true.

The concern of many - including me - who would like to see more legally-armed people in the City of Chicago (and particularly in its violent neighbourhoods) was that a "may issue" rule would be used in Chicago (one of the most racially-segregated cities on earth and, by some measures, less residentially racially-integrated than Cape Town during apartheid) to systematically disarm non-whites. Many of us breathed a sigh of relief when "shall issue" passed, as we saw this as making it particularly difficult for the government to discriminate against African-American and Latino residents (who together make up the majority of Chicago's residents) in issuing concealed carry permits. Illinois did discriminate against the poor - making it very hard for poor people to exercise their fundamental rights (which I wrote about at length for Global Policy two months ago) - but, even though many poor people are non-white, this was something short of the overt racism we feared.

It seems, however, that policy experts - including myself - breathed that particular sigh of relief prematurely.

In an excellent front-page piece in the Chicago Tribune by Kim Geiger and Dahleen Glanton ("Gun Permits Rejected Under a Veil of Secrecy," Chicago Tribune, Front Page, 6 July 2014), it is revealed that over 800 applicants for concealed carry licenses have been turned down and haven't been told why. This includes Mr. Michael Thomas, pictured in the Tribune article, who is an African-American former member of the Air Force whose first adversarial contact with law enforcement was apparently a letter stating that he would not be allowed to carry a pistol. Also pictured in the article was Mr. Hal Baskin Sr., also an African-American male with no felony convictions who was inexplicably denied a concealed carry permit.

The police objection exception in the legislation was meant to encourage police to come forward with information they might have about a particular person who applied for a concealed carry permit, or to advise as to an extraordinary circumstance where a person might not have been convicted of a crime but where police had visited a person's address several times on a domestic violence call, for instance. It is clearly an abuse of this mechanism to use the police objection exception to, for instance, single out African-American males and deny them the right to carry a firearm.*

Civil rights litigation will move forward in the coming months and years involving these and other plaintiffs. I suspect these plaintiffs will be disproportionately male and non-white, consistent with what seems to be an unshakable belief held by Chicago and Cook County police officers that people who are non-white are not sufficiently smart, sufficiently trustworthy, or sufficiently submissive to a white-run police power structure** to be trusted with a handgun, regardless of how innocuous or meritorious that person's history may have been. If there is, in fact, a pattern in which the Chicago Police Department is disproportionately objecting to attempts by law-abiding African-Americans attempting to exercise their right to defend themselves and their families, the neo-colonial racist paternalism implied by such an administrative policy is obvious and troubling. Such a policy, if in place, is an administrative pantomime of the sentiment that people who live in non-white neighbourhoods, non-rich neighbourhoods, and non-powerful neighbourhoods neighbourhoods are people with fewer rights to defend themselves and their families and, by extension, people whose lives are worth less to the society and the State than the lives of whiter, richer, more politically-empowered residents.

I have submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Chicago Police Department asking for the gender and ethnic identifiers of the 500+ people whose concealed carry applications the Department has objected to as of July 2014. Once I receive a reply, I will follow up and make that data available here to other researchers interested in the problem of systematic racism in Chicago.

The City of Chicago is one of the metropolitan gems of the United States and it is manifestly outrageous if mostly-white bureaucrats who sleep soundly in their mostly-white neighbourhoods each night are systematically interfering with the ability for non-white residents - for whom the Chicago Police Department has demonstrated, time and again, it can spare no time or concern or protection - to protect themselves and their families by exercising not only a fundamental Constitutional right, but a fundamental human right. I will continue to follow the policies in Chicago on this issue.

* For reasons the Chicago Police Department, Illinois State Police, and Cook County Sheriff's Office have never explained, the application for a concealed carry permit in Illinois requires the applicant to state his or her racial or ethnic group. No official has ever explained why this
information is relevant in determining whether an application should be accepted or denied.

** Thomas J. Dart, Cook County Sheriff, and Garry F. McCarthy, Superintendent of the Chicago Police, are both middle-aged white men. The Bureau of Patrol and Bureau of Detectives are run by Chief Wayne Gulliford and Chief John. J. Escalante, respectively, who are both middle-aged white men. Rahm Emmanuel and Pat Quinn, Mayor of the City of Chicago and Governor of Illinois respectively, are both middle-aged white men. Mayor Emmanuel lives in Ravenswood, part of the Lincoln Square Community Area (a majority-white enclave with highly unusual demographics wherein only 3.8% of residents are African-American or self-identified as black in the most recent census). Aside from the brief and troubled tenure of Terry Hillard in the late 1990's, Chicago's police force has been under white leadership and has had a violent and difficult relationship with its non-white residents, who make up a majority of the city's population.