Public Safety in Chicago After the DNC: A New Course or Business as Usual?

The moment has come for Chicago to enact laws and provide police with the support it needs to return civility to the streets

On the weekend prior to the opening of the Democratic National Convention (DNC), Chicago suffered 20 shot. Of the 20, four were fatal. On August 23, the final night of the convention climaxed with a shooting at a South Loop restaurant at which DNC attendees had gathered for a nighttime dinner. For the duration of the DNC, 36 were shot and 11 killed, yet one day following the DNC’s farewell from Chicago, Mayor Johnson basked in national attention for executing the nearly flawless “pep rally.”

In the run-up to the DNC, under the careful direction of Governor J.B. Pritzker, both Chicago and the State of Illinois invested heavily in constructing a “Potemkin Village” for Democratic delegates and media who descended upon Chicago for the convention. Aside from the sudden cleaning of streets, fresh coat of paint, the mass of illegals disappeared from the streets, and troubled mass transit system, Chicago magically functioned infallibly. Democratic leaders also ensured that the Chicago Police Department (CPD) had both sufficient personnel and support to protect conventioneers long absent from their everyday approach to public safety.

Despite their fierce opposition to walls, Democrats gathered for the convention experienced the warmth of protection afforded by multiple barriers surrounding the United Center and McCormick Place. Democrats believe there are too many police officers, yet there seemed to be more CPD and other police personnel deployed than demonstrators. Democrats also believe in arrests only in for serious offenses, yet a proactive policing strategy was employed that included clear threats of arrests. Meanwhile there was unprecedented cooperation between law enforcement agencies at the city, state, and federal level.

If the CPD's $2 billion budget is divided by days in a year, Chicago spends the equivalent to $5.5 million for the entire city every day. Fox News reported the city asked for $75 million from the federal government to cover police personnel and equipment to protect Democratic elites and media at their four-day pep rally. This comes to the tune of $19 million a day for just two sites, the United Center and McCormick Place. This does not include the millions daily spent by the state and federal government on personnel and infrastructure.

Now that the DNC has packed its bags and left town, one nagging question remains: How will Mayor Johnson address public safety after the convention? Will the mayor and City Council provide Chicago’s very capable Superintendent Snelling the resources he needs to have beat cops who can respond timely to “high priority” 911 calls, enough detectives to close cases with actual arrests, and support to protect both witnesses and victims? Will the new state’s attorney and Cook County judges end the practice of returning violent and habitual offenders to the street? Will the Illinois General Assembly amend the SAFE-T Act and the city use its power under "home rule" to enact its own anti-crime legislation?

Clearly Chicago is in the throes of a public safety crisis. Chicagoans experienced 7.2 percent more violent crime from August 2023 through July 2024 than during the previous 12 months. In the same period, cases of aggravated assault, aggravated battery, and robbery reached five-year highs. Violent crime is up 22.5 percent compared to the same period five years ago. While the cases violent crime increased, the arrest rate for these felonies dropped to just 12.8 percent. These rates are the second-lowest level in the past five years.

Public safety is a human right, yet there is a “criminal industrial complex” in Chicago that will fight every effort to bring crime under control. This network of opponents of law and order contains a growing group of special interests who have transformed criminal justice reform into a lucrative enterprise. Within this twisted web are lawyers, community activists, university researchers, consultants, and consent decree monitors who have a financial interest in treating criminals like victims and police like criminals. It is a livelihood for many and for some quite profitable.

The criminal industrial complex wields race quite effectively to legitimize, protect, and expand its economic enterprise. They claim to be pursuing justice, not profit. They contend it is not sociopaths committing the violence, but rather the result of a criminal justice system awash in systemic racism. Never mind the fact that black males are a disproportionate amount of the incarcerated population because, as a demographic class, they commit a disproportionate amount of the crime.

The criminal industrial complex’s actions disproportionately impact the black community and is racist, if not by intent than by outcome. Sadly, a larger share of Chicago’s black residents reside in neighborhoods plagued by violent crime. As a result of the criminal industrial complex’s diligence, severe restraints have been placed on proactive policing, and violent criminals face insufficient charges — if charged at all — or released pre-trial back onto Chicago’s streets where they return to criminal activity.

In the absence of vigilant policing and a weak state’s attorney’s office, law-abiding residents in high crime neighborhoods are at the mercy of repeat offenders. Similarly, the criminal industrial complex’s work has done dire damage to the reputation of law enforcement. As a consequence of the criminal industrial complex defaming the profession of policing, blacks are disproportionately affected as CPD ranks have been depleted, leaving black Chicagoans with fewer police officers to respond to 911 calls and an inadequate number of detectives to close cases and protect witnesses.

Crime statistics are revealing

According to the FBI 2019 Uniform Crime Report, broken down by race, African Americans comprise only 12.5 percent of the population nationally but account for 55.9 percent of all homicide offenders. Among all homicide victims, 54.7 percent are black. The per capita offending rate for blacks was roughly eight times higher whites. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, blacks between the ages of 10 and 34 die from homicide at 13 times the rate of whites. In Chicago, blacks comprise 32 percent of the city’s population, but nearly 80 percent of the murder and attempted murder victims are black. Worse, 90 percent of the assailants in which blacks were victims are black.

FBI statistics, furthermore, revealed over 80 percent of high-priority 911 calls, including shootings, assaults, robberies, burglaries, and carjackings, come from predominantly black communities. This means more police officers are working in high-crime areas in which blacks are dominant by virtue of the fact the 911 calls originated in the same neighborhoods. Therefore, CPD is more likely to perform more arrests and face more dangerous and sometimes lethal encounters.

Largely ignored by the anti-police activists is the impact violent crime is having on women, particularly black women. A CBS News Chicago analysis of Chicago Police crime data found that black women accounted for 30 percent of all crime victims in 2022; nearly one in three black women were targeted by crime in Chicago last year. Black women and girls under 18 are hardest hit, with fourteen black girls attacked and injured for every one white girl.

Considering these statistics and how they expose the vulnerability of blacks to violent crime, it is puzzling how Mayor Johnson and his progressive allies remain silent on this issue. It is likely because the damning statistics exposing blacks committing violent crime at far higher rates than the white or Hispanic demographic conflicts with the mayor’s usual stock response the violence ravaging the Chicago’s black community is a product of racism and historic disinvestment. It is hard to portray those who brutalize women and children as victims of an unfair judicial system.

Recall Mayor Johnson’s response to tragic shooting of a black women by a clearly incompetent Sangamon County Sheriff Officer who should have never been hired. Johnson irresponsibly described the shooting as “yet another unarmed black woman losing her life at the hands of law enforcement.” Though Johnson was swift to condemn all law enforcement, he has been closed-mouth about how the policies practiced by State's Attorney Kim Foxx, Cook County judges, and Sheriff Tom Dart — the release of violent criminals and unenforced “orders of protection” — have contributed to a surge in violent crime in which blacks are the primary victim.

Restoring police strength

There is no substitute to having an adequate number of police officers to ensure that every local “police beat” has the requisite number of officers to respond to high priority 911 calls in real time, every CTA station and train platform has CPD officers present, and the CPD Bureau of Detectives is staffed at a level in which it can carry out investigations and arrest offenders in criminal cases. At almost 11,700 officers on paper, CPD has 1,700 fewer officers than it did in 2019. Superintendent Larry Snelling asserts that CPD is at down at least 2,000 officers.

Supporters of the "defund the police" movement often claim that CPD consumes an excess amount of city revenue and that slashing police positions can save money for social welfare programs. Regarding funding, de-funders only look at the city's corporate fund, which budgets employees and not the overall city budget and shows police receiving less than one-sixth of annual expenditures. By contrast, the separate Chicago Public Schools budget spends five times the amount than the city spends on CPD.

As for savings from not filling vacancies and ultimately eliminating police positions during a period of increasing crime, the cost to the city for CPD overtime in 2023 reached $300 million. This was three times the then record $100 million spent in 2019 before police strength was reduced. The $200 million in additional overtime combined with the money CTA squanders on poorly paid and trained unarmed security, who have no power of arrest, would finance an additional 1,800 positions.

Restoration of police strength must include the long overdue comprehensive assessment of how police officers are being assigned and deployed as well as an examination of daily staffing levels. The efficient use of existing police resources has always been an issue. The fact remains that the percentage of officers dedicated to local districts, serving as detectives and on duty on any given day is far below that of other large urban police districts. Such an assessment is long overdue.

Providing CPD with the tools and support they need to be effective

Increased police strength however will not be enough. Other actions needed that can improve and supplement public safety efforts.

• The state should amend the mislabeled “Safe-T Act” to provide clear exemptions to the no bail rule for violent and habitual offenders.
• The Safe-T Act should be amended to deny or revoke bail and provide severe penalties for those who threaten witnesses and victims, threaten police and other “First Responders,” and those who violate “orders of protection.”
• Chicago should use its "home rule" powers to enact its own public safety ordinance to ensure there are penalties for those who engage in domestic violence, hate crimes, or attack police.
• The city should pass a “nuisance ordinance” to impose serious financial penalties on those who damage public and private property, disrupt commerce or violate the public way.
• CPD and other appropriate city agencies should cooperate with federal agencies on the enforcement of immigration laws on issues of national security and public safety.
• The city should create a “justice system review unit” to provide full transparency when it came to crime statistics, access to data and decisions of judges, prosecutors, as well as police officers.

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Chicago can take control of its own destiny by enacting its own measures to keep dangerous and habitual offenders off the street and ensure their are consequences for less serious crimes. A comprehensive review is needed of the Chicago's legislative authority on matters of public safety to expeditiously craft a series of ordinances that would, without pre-empting state law, give CPD and Chicago residents the benefit of tools that would contain and help roll back the crime epidemic.

Like their opposition to providing low-income families with school choice while sending their own children to private schools, university lab schools and magnet schools, to many Democratic leaders display the same hypocrisy on public safety. This was amply demonstrated during the DNC. Mayor Johnson’s delay in ending ShotSpotter until after the DNC was perhaps the most blatant example. It is time to make the effort to afford Chicago’s residents and businesses the “safe city” afforded to the national Democratic Party.