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 Superintendent Garry McCarthy, appearing at a City Council
committee hearing, said crime has been dropping in recent years in
Chicago. He also disputed allegations that his police department has
been manipulating crime statistics to make it seem like Chicago is
safer than it really is.
"We have about one-third less crime in this city over the last three
years. We've got to do something about the perception," McCarthy
said, adding that it can take a long time for people in crime-ridden
neighborhoods to feel like crime truly has declined.
McCarthy told council members that homicides so far in 2014 were
down 7 percent from the same period last year, representing the
lowest number for the period since 1963. The latest data on the
police website listed 203 murders through July 20 compared with 215
in the same period last year.
The Chicago metropolitan area does not have the highest homicide
rate per capita in the United States - New Orleans and Detroit are
higher, for example. But it has recorded the highest total number of
homicides in recent years.
Chicago, a city of 2.7 million, reported 414 murders in 2013, down
from 503 in 2012.
McCarthy defended police in the wake of an audit by the Chicago
Inspector General's office this year that showed that police had
undercounted some crimes in 2012 by counting as a single crime some
incidents that actually had multiple victims.
In addition, Chicago magazine in April published an investigation
that it said showed that some of the drop in homicides last year was
due to reclassifying them as "noncriminal deaths" rather than
homicides.
'IT'S NONSENSE'
In a television interview before the committee hearing, McCarthy
said it was not true that police were skewing the numbers.
"Absolutely not, it's nonsense," he said.
As in most U.S. cities, homicides in Chicago are way down from the
1990s, when they often topped 900 a year. But weekends still are
marred by multiple shooting deaths, and children are routinely
caught in the crossfire, typified by an 11-year-old girl killed by a
stray bullet at a slumber party in July.
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In a sign of the city's obsession with crime, the Chicago Sun-Times
carries a "shooting tracker" on summer weekends, mapping every
incident of gunfire. The newspaper also runs a "homicide watch" with
details on every murder in the city. A murder and an attempted
murder on Thursday illustrated two of the city's crime trends:
violence between gangs and illegal guns.
A 34-year-old man was fatally shot on Thursday in the Humboldt
neighborhood just six days after his 13-year-old son was shot dead a
few blocks away in a drive-by shooting that left six other teenagers
and young men wounded. Both the father and son were associated with
gangs, police sources said.
Also on Thursday, a disgruntled business executive shot his boss in
the head and stomach in a downtown office building then killed
himself with his gun. His victim was hospitalized on Friday in
critical condition. McCarthy said the shooter did not have a gun
owner's ID and the weapon was probably illegal.
One of McCarthy's biggest drives in his three years as
superintendent has been to crack down on illegal weapons, the
majority of which come from out of state, often from places with
looser gun-purchasing rules than those in Chicago. Police have
seized more than 3,900 illegal firearms in 2014.
"There's too many guns coming in, too little punishment going out,"
McCarthy said.
(Editing by Will Dunham)
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