Crime in Chicago
Chicago's biggest criminal justice challenges have changed little over the last 50 years, and statistically reside with homicide, armed robbery, gang violence, and aggravated battery.
Many of the predominantly African American neighborhoods on the South Side are impoverished, lack educational resources and noted for high levels of street gang activity.
[63] Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy was terminated by Rahm Emanuel following the fall out from the shooting of Laquan McDonald.
[64] A gunshot wound to the body's center of mass can quickly prove fatal without immediate medical attention due to blood loss and internal injuries.
[70] In September 2015, an area and neighborhood of Chicago, West Garfield Park, was named "America's mass shooting capital", citing 18 occasions in 2015 in which at least four people were shot in a single incident.
[73][74][75][76][77] Filmmaker Spike Lee's 2015 release, Chi-Raq, highlights Chicago's gun violence using a narrative inspired by the Greek comedy Lysistrata.
Although there have been substantial changes in population and infrastructure since then, the community areas remain the most widely used geographic units by Chicago planning agencies, advocacy groups, and service providers.
Greylord was the longest and most successful undercover operation in the history of the FBI, and resulted in 92 federal indictments, including 17 judges, 48 lawyers, eight policemen, ten deputy sheriffs, eight court officials, and one state legislator.
Operation Incubator obtained about a dozen convictions or guilty pleas, including those from five members of the City Council and an aide to former Mayor Harold Washington.
Operation Silver Shovel resulted in the conviction of six Chicago aldermen and a dozen other local officials on a wide range of corruption related charges.
A report from the Office of the Legislative Inspector General noted that over half of Chicago's elected alderman took illegal campaign contributions in 2013.
[142] In 2015, mayor appointed Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, was convicted in a $23 million kickback scheme and was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.
[143] In addition to the Bennett conviction, a joint investigative report issued by the Office of the Inspector General and federal authorities documented widespread corruption within Chicago Public Schools in 2015.
The audit noted the criminal shakedown of a CPS vendor, a records forgery scheme by a principal, numerous instances of employees abusing CPS's tax-exempt status to purchase personal items at big-box retailers, illegally using taxpayer-funded resources to campaign for political causes and stealing from taxpayer-funded accounts intended for purchasing student materials.
A 2015 report released by the University of Illinois at Chicago's political science department declared Chicago the "corruption capital of America", citing that the Chicago-based Federal Judicial District for Northern Illinois reported 45 public corruption convictions for 2013 and a total of 1,642 convictions for the 38 years since 1976 when the U.S. Department of Justice began compiling the statistics.
UIC Professor and former Chicago alderman Dick Simpson noted in the report that "To end corruption, society needs to do more than convict the guys that get caught.
[145][146]Examples of other high-profile Chicago political figures convicted on corruption related charges include Rod Blagojevich, Jesse Jackson Jr., Isaac Carothers, Arenda Troutman, Edward Vrdolyak, Otto Kerner, Jr., Constance Howard, Fred Roti and Dan Rostenkowski.
In October 2015, the FBI announced that Michael Anderson would take over for a retiring Robert Holley as Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago Bureau.
[147][148] Most corruption cases in Chicago are prosecuted by the US Attorney's office, as legal jurisdiction makes most offenses punishable as a federal crime.
[153] Chicago was among the first U.S. cities to create an integrated emergency-response center to coordinate the response to natural disasters, gang violence, and terrorist attacks.
[159] For decades, the policy gave officers much more autonomy to conduct stops and pat-downs if there exists a reasonable suspicion that a suspect might be armed and dangerous.
As a result, Chicago is often omitted from studies such as Morgan Quitno's annual "Safest/Most Dangerous City" survey, which relies on FBI-collected data.
The police use "guardian-like" intervention, a method relying on information from an individual's criminal history in order to predict the likelihood of becoming a victim or perpetrator of violence, to "build public trust and legitimacy.
Chairman of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, Dean Angelo called the report "totally biased" and "utterly ridiculous".
Officers anonymously reported to the Chicago Sun-Times that they have been afraid to make investigatory stops because the Justice Department and American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois have been scrutinizing police practices.
Data of the supposed pullback was reflected with an 80 percent decrease in the number of street stops that officers made since the beginning of 2016.
In addition, an audit conducted by Chicago's Office of the Inspector General found significant problems in the accuracy of CPD's crime data.
An unnamed police source quoted in the magazine says there are "a million tiny ways to do it", such as misclassifying and downgrading offenses, counting multiple incidents as single events, and discouraging residents from reporting crime.
The police department has responded that their statistics are generally accurate and that the discrepancies can be explained by differences in the Uniform Crime Reporting used by the FBI and CompStat.
[191] In April 2021, the City of Chicago filed a lawsuit against Westforth Sports of Gary, Indiana, alleging that it consistently ranks as one of the highest suppliers of guns used in crimes.
