Satyaraj Hazarika, IPS
DIG (Central Range), Assam
Introduction: A review of shooting incidents in Chicago city in 2016 led researchers to just a handful of neighbourhoods where fifty percent of all shootings happened-Austin, Garfield Park, North and South Lawndale, Eaglewood, and West Pullman. Research also revealed that one four-by-four block area in Humboldt Park, has been in the top 5 percent shootings in the city every year for the last 27 years. Network science can be used to understand the shootings, according to Andrew Papachristos, a professor of sociology and Institute of Policy Research fellow.
It explains everything from connection between people, and spatial relationship with crime. The similar way places affect what people buy, feel and behave. Network also determines who gets shot. According to Papachristos “understanding these connections.. in a systematic way can make our cities healthier, smarter, and safer “.
Crimes keep on rising through 2016 to 2020 in Chicago when in the year of the pandemic homicide figures touched 772. Chicago city-data is revealing in the sense that there is a spike of 56 percent from 2019 figures when the homicide figure was 496.So far this year, Chicago is reporting 597 homicides, on the same lines as last year but 15 police beats this summer resulted in 23 percent drop in murders.
There was a worldwide outrage over the death of George Floyd an Afro-American man who died due to police brutality on May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With it came crashing down notions of social justice and police forces in Minneapolis had to face Federal investigation. Many on the left, felt Chicago shootings and homicides are result of the outrage over the Minneapolis incident, and more policing will be harmful to vulnerable communities. But people in high crime communities also feel that whatever the progressives feel about police abuses, they want police reforms to have a curb on abuses and effective policing to tackle crime.
Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown said, “Gangs fighting over turf are destroying lives and communities, killing innocent children, young people and adults”. Brown blamed the illicit drug trade and Chicago's gun culture for the spike in homicides.
Drugs in US cities are trafficked by Mexican cartels like Sinaloa across the US-Mexican border. Guns enter through Chicago through the US-Canada border. Chicago in Illinois has fairly tight gun laws, with handgun ownership banned in 1982. In 2010 the ban was struck down by US Supreme Court, and in 2013 Illinois approved concealed carry in 2013. However Illinois does not ban assault weapons or large -capacity magazines. Also firearm dealers does not require state license to sell ammunition. From 2013 to 2016, illegal weapon seizure in Chicago, the third largest US city, touched 7,000 each year.
Focusing police efforts on hot spots of crime reduced crime when the first randomized experiment on hot spot policing, the Minneapolis Hot Spot Policing Experiment in 1995.It used the computerized mapping of crime calls to identify 110 hot spots of roughly street-block length. Police increased patrol in these block, which qualified to be the 'Broken Windows' of Wilson and Kelling. The findings show that after a ten month period Soft-crime calls (eg disturbances, drunks, vandalism) came down by 7.2 percent to 15.9 percent. Hard-crime calls (eg Burglary, Auto theft, assaults) declined by 2.6 percent to 5.9 percent. For now the current research on police crime prevention hot spot policing is the model on which crimes are reduced.
Criminals have also adapted to the police launching of hot spot policing by moving their crime areas just round the corner, which is called crime displacement or diffusion. New studies were conducted to understand the displacement or diffusion into the immediate spatial areas near the targeted sites. Again the criminals are not constrained by time, and adapted their behaviour, in a number of ways that reflected what they 'thought' was occurring around them. In terms of displacement qualitative data showed three types. Method wise where the offender altered the method of crime; temporal where they altered the time of commission of crime and crime type where they changed the crime type. The most common type of displacement is Method where the offenders devised a counter-strategy to evade the police intervention. The study findings are consistent with victim surveys which suggest that citizens do not have accurate perception of crime problems in their neighborhood.
Street level crime needs accurate observation by citizenry and police so that offenders do not operate without fear of getting caught. 'Broken windows' concept in Crime prevention strategy is a combination of community based policing where police gets the cooperation of citizens to identify the streets where crime is rife and repair the 'Broken Windows' by zeroing on the locality by targeted police response.
