EDITORIAL: Choosing Chicago`s murder toll

Dec. 29--Only in Chicago, where murder is a macabre civic pathology and an almost daily habit, would the slaughter of more than 400 people in 2013 be cause for relief. But with the 503 killings of 2012 still haunting the city, this year's 410 through Dec. 26 is an improvement. Context, though, counts: These two years flank by nearly equal margins what's now the typical murder toll here: When 2013 ends Tuesday, Chicago will have averaged some 458 killings in each of the last 10 years.

That constancy is remarkable, given that murder is not one crime but a constellation of crimes -- from tavern brawls to child abuse to gang shootings -- in which someone winds up dead. Note in the accompanying graphic how gradually the trend line typically changes through the decades. Looking at that graphic, you'd think murder has a mind of its own, diverting from a reliable average one year and, the next year, stubbornly regressing toward the mean.

No wonder, then, that criminal justice researcher James Alan Fox of Northeastern University in Boston hazards a disturbing guess of what happens now if Chicago doesn't keep finding ways to buck the averages. Fox, who over the years has examined Chicago murders as a consultant to the Tribune Editorial Board, has a unique view of homicide stats: his database of America's more than 600,000 murders over the last 36 years, a trove that even the FBI envies. That unmatched wealth of numbers tells him:

"The good news for Chicago is that your murder toll is way down. But the odds say it'll probably go up next year."

Credit and blame

That doesn't have to be, Fox adds. Beating the odds, though, means breaking a cycle that has played out here time and again:

A spike in homicides, like the one Chicago suffered early in 2012, or an especially wrenching case, like the killing of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton early in 2013, focuses politicians, police commanders, community groups and the news media. Murder becomes the talk of Chicago. And when Chicago decides to care about violence, this city can unleash powerful forces and drive the numbers lower -- for a while.

The tendency then is for all of us to lose our focus, to let other priorities distract us.

This time, after the success of 2013, none of us should congratulate ourselves and move on. We instead should make sure Chicago beats the historical odds in 2014 and beyond. How so?

The usual Chicago response to murder surges or heater killings is for public officials and citizens alike to ask what police did to let the numbers rise -- or, in good years, to ask how they drove the numbers down. That's why Chicago police superintendents, and the mayors at whose pleasure they serve, routinely get too much blame or too much credit when the murder numbers move:

While reducing Chicago's murder toll does rely in part on what police do, their role often is reactive. By the time someone dials 911, a Chicagoan may be near death or firmly in its grip. All sorts of other factors drive the murder toll: the availability of guns, gang tensions, the quality of paramedic care victims receive, even the density of traffic an ambulance encounters between a crime scene and a trauma center.

Cops on the dots

That said, there's a decade's worth of evidence that a policing strategy applied here in various forms since 2003 reliably suppresses annual Chicago murder tolls that previously had totaled 600 or more for 36 consecutive years. Even one killing is too many. But putting more "cops on the dots" -- that is, intensifying the police presence where violence occurred is likely to occur -- saves lives by the hundreds. We applaud the steady progress.

After the 2012 bloodbath, Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy in February moved 200 officers from desk duty to revolving "saturation teams," and in March he doubled to 400 the number of officers working overtime on their days off. Those officers, supplemented by new police rookies, keyed on 20 "impact zones," violence-prone parts of the South and West sides.

By the end of November, overtime costs stood at triple the $32 million City Hall had budgeted for 2013. And the murder count for the year was down sharply. Cause and effect? Hard to prove.

Police contacts tell us McCarthy's accountability sessions with commanders of the city's 22 police districts have heightened the pressure on them to deliver lower numbers. Police also are pro-actively visiting 420 people on a department "heat list," a computer ranking of individuals at risk of causing, or suffering, violence: Officers warn them against criminal conduct and offer them help getting jobs or social services.

But judging by patterns of the past, it's likely that one powerful deterrent to some killings in 2013 is the sheer public ruckus caused by the 2012 increase. Criminals, too, see news stories and know when they risk dire consequences; like the rest of us, some of them respond to heightened scrutiny with good behavior.

The issue when murder tolls rise, then, isn't the Police Department's dereliction of duty. The real variables are focus, deployment, perseverance. Preventing violent crimes hasn't always been Job One for the police, because politicians and citizens haven't persistently made that as high a priority here as it has been in New York City and other locales.

Moving the numbers

Our point for a decade now has been that Chicago -- its officials, its organizations, its communities -- can move the murder numbers. You've read this argument before:

As a city, we should realize that we are likely to have the murder rate we choose.

We choose our murder rate when we fund our schools, when we weigh gun control bills, when we leave the demand for narcotics untreated.

We choose our murder rate when we set Chicago's policing priorities, when we let gangs invade our neighborhoods, when we determine for how long the people who scorn our laws should be incarcerated.

We choose our murder rate when we conclude that some lives matter less than others.

Cutting Chicago's murder rate means saving the lives of people who have long arrest records and who themselves wreak violence. It also means saving the lives of people who are thoroughly innocent victims, or children who cannot possibly defend themselves, or people whose scrapes with the law don't diminish the heartbreak their families feel at their funerals.

Too often, though, Chicago hasn't sustained citywide concern for the frightened, law-abiding people whose streets are shooting galleries. And so, for lack of a relentless civic resolve that reaches much beyond whatever deterrents the cops create, that average of 458 murders a year has become the tolerable body count. As the graphic shows, that number, while horrific, is lower than it was in earlier decades. Among the reasons: smarter policing, better trauma care and somewhat calmer drug markets.

Now, double down

We yearn for the day when Chicago boasts that it has eliminated poverty, educated every youth and helped each troubled citizen overcome alcohol, drugs or mental illness. Those successes would cut the number of people driven to the dangerous lifestyles that correlate with many of this city's murders. But with those goals elusive and with gunplay as routine as sunsets, killers will continue to snuff out lives. Improving the schools, strengthening families and curbing the power of other problems to increase the crime rate is one goal of the Tribune's current project to draft a new Plan of Chicago.

Yes, Chicago, all of us should appreciate the lower toll of 2013. Then we should double down and choose to slash it more. That can't happen if only people who live on terrorized blocks care about the carnage. Chicago probably will get the trend its broader populace and pols demand -- or accept.

Back to the graphic: Over the past 50 years, our collective failure to quell this butchery has cost Chicago more than 34,000 lives.

Copyright 2013 - Chicago Tribune