Thirty-seven Chicago Public School students were murdered in the 2008-09 academic school year and then two more students – Shawn Wilson, 16 and Abraham Tabani, 15 – were killed in June as summer vacation started. The spike in murders of CPS students – 21 were killed in the 2007-08 – has alarmed city educators, politicians and community advocates. Asked about the murder rate, Mayor Richard Daley struggled to defend Chicago to CNN anchor Anderson Cooper last month. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois recently met with Attorney General Eric Holder about how the federal government can help.

The alarm is understandable but it creates a false impression that Chicago is growing more violent. In fact, the overall homicide rate is down this year and the city murder rate has plunged in the last decade.

The homicide rate is up in a category far more specific than “CPS students” – it’s actually CPS students who are black male teenagers living in a certain part of the city. In the 39 murders – none of which happened on school grounds – the vast majority of the victims were black male teens gunned down in predominantly poor and black South Side neighborhoods. This reflects a national trend: while overall the homicide rate has held steady the past five years, there has been a big increase in gun violence among black male adolescents.

Why is this? At least some blame can be put on the federal government, specifically the George W. Bush administration and a Republican-controlled Congress which cut money for urban crime fighting programs and made it harder to trace illegal guns. Changes in federal policy alone can’t explain youth gun violence, especially the way youth gun violence transpires in Chicago. But it helps makes sense of an epidemic too often dismissed as senseless or indicative of something that’s specifically wrong with Chicago.

The Real Problem

The homicide rate in Chicago has fallen since the crack cocaine epidemic of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Last year Chicago garnered some national media attention for leading the country in total homicides (as opposed to per capita homicides, where Detroit was no. 1). But the 508 homicides last year compares favorably with the 666 murders in 2001 – or the 943 homicides of 1992. Nationally and in Chicago the homicide rate dramatically fell in the 1990’s and has held steady for the last decade.

Even the increase reported in violence among Chicago public school students is a bit misleading, since there is little historic data available about CPS murders. The Chicago Police Department does not record if a homicide victim is a CPS student. And CPS did not even keep track of student homicides until the late 1990’s when Paul Vallas was running CPS. "I just felt we had to make it more sensational and draw attention to murders that were basically going unnoticed," Vallas, now superintendent of the Recovery School District of New Orleans, told Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn in February. But the practice was apparently abandoned in 2001 when current U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan took over the school system of the nation’s third-largest city. The Chicago Tribune resurrected the statistic in 2007 in a look at the 2006-07 school year. The history of counting CPS murders reveals that headlines like “36 Chicago area students killed sets record” (from the Washington Times) actually reflect about five years of inexact statistics culled from both CPS and newspaper reports.

Nonetheless, youth homicides are clearly up and they are worse in Chicago than other major cities. For example the Los Angeles public schools – with twice as many students as Chicago’s – saw 23 of its students killed in 2008-09.  Chicago’s murder rate among public school students is “a very serious social problem that is appropriately receiving a huge amount of attention,” says Harold Pollack., a professor of public health at the University of Chicago and author of a recent report on gun violence among youth in Chicago.

It is a very serious problem afflicting a very specific slice of the CPS population under specific circumstances. Press and CPS accounts show that some 34 of the 39 murders were gun murders. All but two of the victims were teenagers with most 15 and over. Most of the victims were black – one victim was white and an estimated five were Latino (this is despite the fact that Latinos comprise more than 40 percent of the CPS student population, roughly the same as blacks). And all but three of the victims were male – with one female, seven-year-old Itzel Fernandez, a victim of arson.

So the victims were predominantly black male teenagers killed by guns. Also, the suspects police apprehended were often also black teenage males. And the murders mostly happened in only a few black neighborhoods on the city’s South Side like Englewood and Woodlawn. “Gun violence isn’t happening, fortunately, on a regular basis in most parts of the city,” says Thomas Mannard, executive director of Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence. “You’re finding that it is in certain geographic areas of Chicago.”  Generally, the pattern in Chicago represents a national trend.

Bush Abstains From Taking Bite Out of Crime

Last December, Northeastern University’s Criminal Justice Department released a report that looked at national homicide trends between 2002-2007. The study – partly funded by the U.S. Justice Department – found that, overall, the homicide rate held steady. But it also said that “the picture for young black males, especially teenagers, is radically different.”  In that five-year period, the homicide rate for black male juveniles jumped 31 percent. The number of black male juveniles who were perpetrators of homicides leapt 43 percent. Moreover, the number black male juveniles killed specifically by guns skyrocketed 54 percent. The number of black male juveniles who killed with guns spiked 47 percent.

The study’s authors – Northeastern professors James Alan Fox and Marc L. Swatt – stressed that the rise in homicides among young black males in the last few years can’t be compared with the “extraordinarily high levels witnessed during the crack-related street gang wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s.”  In fact, recent numbers illustrate what Fox and Swatt call  ”the success of crime prevention and crime control efforts of the past decade than about contemporary failures.”  Still, the rise in Chicago and elsewhere is significant and demands an explanation.

Certainly, federal policy changes have accelerated the decline in African American economic fortunes. The Bush administration with the cooperation of Congress cut the budgets of departments like Labor and Housing and Urban Development, which have programs specifically designed to help inner city workers and families.  These changes have already made economically segregated cities like Chicago even more polarized.  “These murders are happening in communities of desperation in the absence of hopes and jobs,” declares Phillip Jackson, executive director of the Black Star Project an advocacy group for Chicago black and Latinos. “These are crimes of economic violence.”

But it is in the area of crime prevention where federal policy has most directly impacted local law enforcement  In its first two years, the Bush administration cut Justice Department programs to fight urban crime and largely re-directed the money so the Department of Homeland Security could combat terrorism.  The most famous casualty was COPS, an acronym for Community Oriented Policing Services. COPS was launched in 1994 a year after the juvenile homicide rate had reached an all-time high. It used mostly federal money to put more police officers on the street to stop crime. In 1998, for example, COPS doled out $1.5 billion for cities to hire more officers and start new crime prevention programs like the Distressed Neighborhood Pilots Project. Funding for the program, though, dried up by 2004. The legacy of COPS legacy included 118,000 federally funded police hires and a much lower homicide rate.

The Bush administration and Congress also slashed Justice Department money for Juvenile Justice and the Edward Byrne Justice Assistance Grant programs. Both programs gave grants to cities for prevention and education programs as well as drug treatment programs. “These programs minimize the risk of young people getting in situations that will lead to violence,” says Mannard of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence.  Not only did these programs see their funding cut in half, but the money that was spent sometimes went to dubious faith-based initiatives. For example, a Congressional investigation last year found that money went to an abstinence-only sex education program run by Elayne Bennett, wife of former George H.W. Bush “drug czar” Bill Bennett. “The resources have been drained from prevention programs,” says James Allen Fox, the leading author of the Northeastern study and an organizer of homicide statistics for the Justice Department.

The resources, though, are coming back: President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder resurrected the COPS and Byrne Justice Grant programs in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, better known as the stimulus bill. The bill provides $1 billion for the COPS hiring recovery program and $2 billion in Byrne grants. “As crime rates rise, the budgetary resources available to combat urban crime have dwindled,” Holder said at a speech in March to the National League of Cities Conference, adding that “two out of three urban police departments are reporting budget cuts or hiring freezes,” Chicago recently applied for a $106 million COPS grant that would put 400 more officers on the street. Last year 300 officers retired, and the city has yet to find the money for replacements.

How Do Guns Get To Chicago?

Eighty percent of CPS homicides were gun homicides even though guns are illegal in Chicago. Clearly, the city government cannot alone stop gun violence. “If you’re in one part of Chicago you can just go across the street and buy a gun in Indiana,” says Mannard of the Council Against Handgun Violence. “If you’re in another part of the city, you can cross the street and buy the gun from a suburban town. Without strong federal policies it’s just really hard to prevent people from having access to guns.”

Gun-related legislation has been a political third rail in Washington for decades (“The National Rifle Association controls the federal gun agenda in Washington!” Mannard exclaims). But there were specific changes in the Bush administration that made it easier to obtain illegal guns. And most of these changes are found in the 2003 Tiahrt amendment, named after Todd Tiahrt, Republican Congressman from Kansas, who in that year attached a rider to the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) budget.

The Tiahrt amendment made it illegal to publicize information about the origins and movements of guns used in crimes.  Before, the ATF could release to the public and policymakers information about where a gun was first sold and where it ended up being used. But now only prosecutors and police departments can use gun trace data. And even they can only use the data for investigating specific crimes, not for establishing a general pattern of where illegally acquired guns were first legally sold. “Prior to the Tiahrt amendment it was possible for us to link the gun dealer and the illegal guns,” says Fox.  “Over half of illegal youth crimes were linked to one percent of gun dealers. We could previously identify the gun dealers that were not up to par with industry businesses practices.”

The 2003 Tiahrt amendment also effectively ended the policy of gun buyers being checked against a national criminal database. Before, the database would hold the records of gun buyers for 90 days to inspect if there was reason to restrict their right to buy a gun. Now, the gun buyers’s names and addresses are in the database for only 24 hours. When no one can check gun buyers backgrounds, it can lead to some embarrassing revelations. The Government Accountability Office found last month that 90 percent of the people on the terrorist watch list who attempted to buy a gun were successful. Moreover, Tiahrt has ended oversight not just of gun buyers but of gun dealers as well –  the ATF no longer takes an annual inventory of the firearms at gun dealer shops. “Someone can go into a shop now and buy 100 guns of one make or model,” says Mark Walsh, field director of the Illinois Campaign Against Gun Violence.  “A lot of those guns end up being used and bought by street gangs.”

Indeed, there is a connection in Chicago between gangs and gun violence. Press accounts almost always describe CPS gun homicides as “gang-related.” That’s a nebulous term, but one that can partly explain how teenagers get guns. “It’s a term we impose upon a situation to try to explain it,” says Pollack of the University of Chicago. “Gangs are often quite fragmented. But the structure of the gang can procure a gun for someone. They know where to get them.” 

In his campaign for president, Barack Obama vowed to eliminate the Tiahrt amendment. He has since pushed to make ATF gun trace data generally available to law enforcement instead of just for specific criminal investigations. But there has been no move by the administration or Congress to undo the Tiahrt’s other provisions, such as the 24-hour (instead of 90-day) database on gun buyers or the lifting of controls on wholesale gun dealers.

What Government Can Do

There are many reasons – not all of which can be generalized – for the crimes that took the lives of 39 Chicago public school students. It is unfair to single out any one politician, institution or law as solely responsible when homicide statistics rise and fall. And, to be sure, Chicago and the country have become less violent over the past fifteen years.

Still, the murder weapon in 34 of these 39 homicides was an illegally obtained firearm. It is hard to believe that most of these 34 murders would have still occurred if a gun had not been available.  “Teens will kill over incredibly trivial matters and are much more trigger happy,” says Fox of Northeastern. “People over 25 commit murder for very different reasons, like armed robbery – it doesn’t have the randomness, haphazardness, and triviality.” Pollack of the University of Chicago gives a typical example of one teenager murdering another. “Someone has been embarrassed at a party and so he leaves the party and goes and gets a gun. These crimes are so impulsive that they are easy to solve – the criminal almost never behaves in their own self-interest.”

This winter, for example, three CPS students were gunned down at the same time at 87th St. and Exchange: Johnny Edwards, 13; Raheem Washington, 15; and Kendrick Pitts, 17. The suspect – Martin Ybarra, 20 – allegedly shot them while aiming for someone else. Two weeks later Kendrick Pitt’s brother – Carnell Pitts, 19  — was fatally shot at a South Side party.

The lack of economic and social opportunity in many Chicago black communities, the lack of work and activities for teenage males who then resort to gangs,  teenage hormones and fears – all these factors may explain why young people might want guns. But they don’t explain how they actually get one.  Chicago and Washington need to do more to deal with the social and economic disadvantages of black male teenagers growing up in communities like Woodlawn and Englewood. But whether or not these root social problems can be solved soon enough to save lives, there remains the practical question of how to keep guns out of teenagers’ hands.  These are questions of policing and investigation – things government has proven capable of promoting in the past.  The murders of CPS students is a sensational problem, but it is also a problem national leaders can take steps to solve if they want to.

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