Resurrecting Chicago's South Side

with Matt Rosenberg

As many of my readers know, I’m a proud native of Chicago’s South Side. That place shaped me. Parts of it were rough, but it was home to a vital black community with thriving families, good schools (many of which were integrated), and decent jobs. Much of the culture—the music and style—that made and makes Chicago such a distinctive place emerged from the South Side of my youth.

So it has been especially heartbreaking to watch the place I love slide into decline, and for that decline to have accelerated so drastically over the last two years, with violent crime skyrocketing and very few scalable solutions coming from the city’s entrenched political class. Certain areas I wouldn’t have dared go unless I was dressed to the nines I now wouldn’t dare go out of fear for my life. Watching from a distance, it can sometimes feel like the South Side is in a death spiral.

That decline narrative is certainly real, but as I learned from my conversation with the journalist Matt Rosenberg, it isn’t the whole story. The South Side’s problems are matters of life and death, both for the city and for too many of the individuals living within it. A small minority of gang members and other criminals are dismantling the place. But the same kind of folks I grew up with are still there, and good people on the ground, like Pastor Corey Brooks, are putting their heads down and addressing dysfunction on a grassroots level. Matt’s recently published book, What Next, Chicago?: Notes of a Pissed-Off Native Son, documents the good, the bad, and the ugly of present-day Chicago, and he walks me through some of it in this excerpt from our longer conversation.

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GLENN LOURY: Now, you were citing some statements by county executive Toni Preckwinkle, by the chief judge, Tim Evans. Implicitly, Kim Foxx, the state's attorney, I assume, is implicated in this, which is a soft-on-crime, let's make excuses and so on. And I'm just wondering where that ideology comes from, because these are not stupid people. These people can look and see what's going on, just like everybody else.

I'm reluctant to say that they're so craven and cynical that they they know but nevertheless mouth these platitudes, because they think it's going to get them elected or it's going to get them a favorable press or whatever. Aren't they also partly motivated by a feeling that you can't solve the problem of disorder and criminal violence by locking up everybody? They don't want to see the Cook County Jail overflowing with these young kids. They think mass incarceration is a real issue. Maybe they believe, a little pie-in-the-sky, that social programs and spending more money will do some good. But it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, would it, for the business community to take a more socially responsible attitude toward investing and opportunity? Let it be [a] Corey Brooks-mediated opportunity for the kids in the city.

So, is there not another side to this law and order issue? And you know, we're pro-enforcement. I am. You know I am from the things that I said in the show. I'm very worried about the consequences for ordinary people who cannot afford to move away from the problem and get their kids out of it. But is just simply coming down with a hammer on the bad actors a viable way of solving this problem?

MATT ROSENBERG: No. I agree with the impulse that we can't just arrest, convict, and incarcerate our way out of this. I think finding the middle ground is the nirvana, the holy land here. I think that when people across the city are afraid to come out of their homes and go walk the streets of their own neighborhood, when downtown has now, in the first six weeks of 2022, turned into an accelerating crime zone on top of a record year that just came before it, there are some problems.

So for instance, bail reform, which was instituted by Chief Judge Tim Evans in Cook County in 2017, if it were applied to first-time non-violent offenders particularly, that's the easy one to agree to. Yeah. Don't give someone a high bail. Don't make them wait behind bars before trial if they're a first time offender and it's a non-violent crime. The problem is, guys with multiple gun law felonies under their belt you know, get busted for a new gun law violation and they get let out lickety-split, you know, paying maybe $250 or $500 bail. All too often they'll go out and do something violent, carjacking or up to and including murder.

Then there's probation, Glenn. It's not just this lightning rod of bail reform, which, as you know, was a huge issue in New York, L.A., and San Francisco, as well as Philadelphia. The conservative critique, you've heard many times, that these are all prosecutors to whom intermediaries of George Soros have donated money. I don't dismiss that. That's a piece of this. There's a philosophy here, and it's rooted in aspirations, in a hope for social progress. I always want to run away from the idea of, “My opponent is a bad person.”

Right.

And unfortunately you get that a lot, I suppose on both sides. Particularly from the left, though. If you talk about accountability, reasons not to kill, reasons not to carjack, the role of parents, you know, you're a finger-wagging, conservative dogmatist. So that's a real problem. We have a polarized dialogue. But no.

So let's make probation work better. But let's not have to hear about stories like Ella French, the Chicago police officer being killed during a traffic stop in August in Chicago, on the South Side by a man who was on probation for a felony. Let's not have to hear about Melissa Ortega, the eight-year-old girl in Little Village, the Latino mecca, just last month killed by a 16-year-old gang banger who was on probation for three carjackings. Oh, and it was called “intensive probation.” I wonder what constitutes probation these days. Let's not have to hear about another Michael Brown, 16 years old, slain this last week in Bronzeville as he walked home from his Chicago military academy, a high-expectation City of Chicago high school, not even a charter high school, slain by a suspect, now charged, who had numerous prior offenses. Let's not have to hear those stories.

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So let's make the social programs work, and that comes to vetting NGOs, something I talked about at the beginning. What are the performance data? How do you evaluate whether a violence prevention program is really doing its work and there are different measures that are recommended by different people. Some say, don't just look at the escalating, a number of murders or number of carjackings each year, but instead look at the number of young men and women who go into a particular violence program, like say Chicago CRED, one that is run by Arne Duncan, Former President Obama's education secretary, and a likely candidate for Chicago mayor in 2023. Look at the number of young men and women they bring into their program, and then look at what percentage of those people turn their lives around. And lives do get turned around sometimes. And also, we can't measure some of the success, because these are carjackings that don't happen, right? These are murders that don't happen.

Do you know the Crime Lab, I think that's what they call it, at the University of Chicago. Jens Ludwig, I think, is the guy who's running the show, my friend Harold Pollock, a long time friend of mine, who's a professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Don't they do this kind of a programmatic evaluation work? And to the extent that they do, what are they saying about separating the effective from the ineffective crime prevention-intervention initiatives?

I need to dig in deeper to that, and maybe they do, too. There is important work being done at the U of C Crime Lab and also at Northwestern University by a researcher named Andrew Papachristos, who's done some very significant granular analyses of who exactly it is that's involved in the shootings and how whom you associate with has a great, great impact on whether you end up with a bullet in you or fired at you.

People should look this guy up, Andrew Papachristos, because I've seen some of these papers with the maps, you know, the networking and you the gang affiliations and the who's killing whom. And it's a very tightly knit network of mutual affiliation. It's not like random, mostly not like random. There are, of course, random killings, but a lot of it is nested within the structure of affiliations amongst a relatively small number of people. You say 5%.

And at one point, and I have to go back and double-check this, at one point I read one published report that Papachristos had, and this was maybe several years back, estimated that there were about a hundred thousand gang members in Chicago. That might be a little high now, but if that were true, that would represent less than 5% of our total population of 2.7 million. And that goes to my coinage of the term, “a tyranny of the minority.”

So most people, if you go down to Washington Heights or Roseland or Englewood or Chatham or Auburn Gresham, you'd be surprised how many solid-looking blocks, well-kept homes, small business people and others are going about their lives in an honorable and decent way. And they are law abiding, but they are also very scared. It seems to me less of a stretch, less of a judgy moral thing when you start to talk about parenting and the young men who've run off the rails who are making this city a modern day Terrordome, sort of this post-apocalyptic place, sadly. It's less judgy and it's less moral if you acknowledge at the same time that it's a very small minority, and it just is what it is.

But as to your point about better evaluation of the violence prevention programs, I think it's needed. I'm not aware of any definitive research which shows us how to evaluate. I want to dig deeper on that. But it's important now, because the push is coming for more spending, even from the city budget, on violence prevention programs. And myself, I cautiously endorse more spending by the city. What we've learned, the people at the programs have learned that the private sector and the foundations, they're tapped out after three or four years, and they're like, “Look, you need to get taxpayer support for this.” And they know that now, at most of these programs.

But the city has not really stepped up. They stepped up from about $36 million in 2020 to I think maybe about $80 million in Chicago in 2021. And there are people, including Arne Duncan, who are now calling for hundreds of millions to be invested. And when you're talking about a city budget in the many billions, you know, maybe a couple of hundred million spent on some of the better violence prevention programs, if we can determine which ones those are, maybe that's a fair thing to do. But at the same time, Glenn, it's not an either-or thing. I think the mayor and the city council members, including now the six socialists on the City of Chicago Council, up from one.

Six out of what? 40?

Out of 50, but there was only one of them before 2019. So that's the direction our electorate is going in. If these aldermen—alderpersons, excuse me—and the mayor would step up and use their bully pulpits to talk about parenting, and what about parenting classes? They exist. You know, I think the hard part is for a lot of white people, they're just walking on eggshells. They're scared to death of being called racist because that's such a trope now. And I'm the white Jewish guy here to say, look, I've been to the South Side, I've talked with black people in their homes, Latinos, and in their workplaces, and, frankly, conservative values live on the South Side of Chicago and the West Side of Chicago. Very few of these people would probably ever vote for a Republican or call themselves Republican, but they echo the values of my grandmother, Glenn, and probably your grandmother, too. And they're like, “Daddy's gotta be there. Parents gotta watch over their children. Don't let your kids run wild.”