A Safer Chicago? We've Already Got One

Karl Muth explores how we should approach the long term trends in violence in Chicago.

I was recently about to fly to Chicago when a friend of mine in London commented that she doesn’t know how I am so enamoured with a city that is one of the most dangerous in the world.

It is true that Chicago has an enormously high rate of people getting shot. An unimaginably high rate by British standards. In the past ten years, more people have been shot in the city of Chicago than coalition casualties in Iraq. And Afghanistan. Combined. Cumulatively over a ten year period. Think about that for a second. Iraq is 169,000 square miles larger than Chicago. To put that in perspective, Iraq is 169,234 square miles in size. Chicago is 234 square miles in size. Afghanistan is about 70% larger than Iraq. The two combined are almost exactly 1,800 times the size of Chicago.

But Chicago today is safer than it has ever been in recent memory. Crazy, right? How violent did it used to be, if this is an improvement?

The number of people being shot and killed (note this includes only shootings that actually kill the target successfully) is far lower than it was forty years ago, when it was almost double what it is today. Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, which may help explain the diversity of weapons used in murders – 41% of “D murders” (“felony domestic murder”) are stabbings in Chicago. But the murdering doesn’t stop with guns and knives: there are more people murdered in Chicago with a baseball bat, tyre iron, wrench, or section of pipe each year than are shot and killed in the City of London in total. Around 100 people in London are murdered per year by any means. Nearly 100 people are shot in Chicago in a three-day summer weekend.

But comparing the number of people shot in Chicago against the number of people shot in London may be like comparing the number of surfers eaten by sharks in Cape Town against the number of people eaten by sharks in Blackpool.

The world is vastly safer than ever before on nearly every dimension. And Chicago is vastly safer than it has ever been.

Looking back over the past 100 years, Chicago is safer in the following ways. Vastly fewer people die from workplace accidents today than even in the 1950’s. Since the 1970’s (when modern crash testing was implemented for motor vehicles), vastly fewer automobile collisions result in deadly or crippling injuries. The murder rate in Chicago has dropped by nearly half; at its height in 1970, there was a person murdered roughly every eight hours in the city (as of 2012, there was a person murdered in Chicago every fifteen or so hours). More people are employed in “white collar” or service industry jobs that do not require risking life and limb to earn a wage. Very few people in Chicago today work in the most dangerous trades of a century ago, such as being barge dockhands on the river.

While it is always good to aspire to a safer, better city, it is foolish to not recognise that we are already well on our way to that goal. Efforts by the media and by policymakers (politicians) to paint Chicago as “the murder capital of America” or as an unsafe, terrible place are deceptive, counterproductive, and wrong. Chicago has always been, and continues to be, a place of vast social, industrial, and commercial progress – a place at the leading edge of America in many areas. Only by recognising and studying the progress we have made can we be honest in our contemplations of what progress might be yet to come.