A Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) bus was parked on the side of the road on a warm, sunny afternoon in late June. Red police tape was tied from the driver’s side mirror to a nearby fence, blocking off the sidewalk. A separate ream of red and yellow police tape cordoned off both sides of the street.
About an hour earlier, two men wearing masks had walked onto the bus and shot a seventeen-year-old boy in the head and a sixty-six-year-old man before running off the bus, Chicago Police told The Progressive in an email. The boy was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. The man suffered a graze wound and refused medical attention.
About two dozen police officers and detectives worked the crime scene in Chicago’s West Garfield Park neighborhood. Residents sat on stoops watching and pedestrians passed by, walking around the closed road.
“It’s not safe no where now, you know, shit happens everywhere,” a longtime neighborhood resident who preferred to remain anonymous told The Progressive at the scene. “You can’t even sit on your porch.”
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A vehicle in which a five-month-old girl was shot in the head and killed and a forty-one-year-old man was wounded is covered in police tape in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood on June 24, 2022.
Closer to the bus, a cameraman for a local news station parked his white station van across the street from the police tape.
The summer of 2020 “felt more dangerous than any other summer I’ve been in Chicago,” the cameraman said as he set up his gear.
The cameraman, who asked to remain anonymous, has covered crime for multiple Chicago news stations for the last fifteen years.
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Two Chicago Police officers guard a crime scene where a seventeen-year-old boy was shot and killed on a CTA bus on June 26, 2022.
“Before the pandemic, or now, there’s tourists, there’s business people, there’s restaurants open,” the cameraman says. “During the pandemic, you felt like you were out there alone.”
“The pandemic hit us…like a bus,” Wesley Skogan, a Northwestern University professor who researches crime and policing, says in a phone interview. “Nothing started happening until April 2020.”
Suddenly, “kids weren’t in school,” Skogan says. “They were out wandering around. Recreation programs were closed. Organizations that provided services were closed. Violence interrupters were home.” In 1995, the nonprofit organization, Cure Violence, which seeks to stop homicides in Chicago, started deploying said violence interrupters—individuals with authority in the community, oftentimes former gang members—on the streets to speak with gang members in an effort to reduce shootings.
Lance Williams, a professor at Northeastern Illinois University’s Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies, tells The Progressive that, early in the pandemic, many offenders with aggravated weapons charges were “released back into the neighborhoods on electronic monitoring.”
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A Chicago Police officer shines a flashlight on what appears to be blood on a sidewalk at a homicide scene on June 17, 2022.
“Whenever you have something like that going on,” Williams says, it “contributes to more anxiety, which leads to more violence.”
He adds that the Chicago police “stepped back” over the last few years because of the pandemic and the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, all of which engendered among active shooters “a sense of no accountability.”
As urgency around the pandemic waned, Willams says, “the county began to go back and reincarcerate those guys that they had let off on home confinement.”
In 2019, Chicago recorded 502 homicides; in 2020, that number spiked to 778. And in 2021, it rose again to 794 homicides, the highest annual figure since 1995. There were 394 homicides reported in the city through July 10 in 2021, and 335 in that same time period in 2022, Chicago Police told The Progressive in an email.
Skogan says that this reversal could be due to pandemic restrictions easing. “The things we saw in 2020 and 2021,” he said, referring to the lockdown, the closing of schools, social programs, and more, “those are fading away.”
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has pointed to an initiative that her office started as one reason for the drop in homicides this year. Launched in 2020, the program, called “Our City, Our Safety,” seeks to allocate funds and resources to fifteen of the city’s most violence-stricken neighborhoods, providing jobs, housing, and other forms of intervention.
“It’s a good plan, it gets at the root causes,” Dan Schober, a professor at DePaul University and director of the Chicago Gun Violence Research Collaborative, told The Progressive over the phone.
Schober adds that, while the plan is still being implemented, it should reduce gun violence in the city over the next five years.
“The pandemic sets the context for everything, and things like ‘Our City, Our Safety’ can be implemented with more specificity in the absence of stay at home orders,” Schober says.
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Several Chicago Police officers congregate and talk in the street at a homicide scene on June 17, 2022.
Williams remains skeptical of the initiative. “It’s a really thorough and comprehensive plan,” he says, “however, that’s all it seems to be—a plan.”
There have been funding problems with the initiative and the “folks who [are] most impacted by violence were not included in the planning process,” Williams continues, adding that “a lot of people were offended” about not being included in any of the programs funded by the initiative.
The root causes of gun violence—poverty, racism, easy access to guns, and a lack of access to mental health care remain omnipresent. But Williams explains that in Chicago, violence often follows neighborhood “population shifts”—areas where gentrification or other forces have pushed out up to 80 percent of longtime residents.
“Whenever you have a high level of population changes,” he adds, homicide numbers climb.
“It will jump for a couple years and then when things settle down—you know, enough killings happen, enough people get locked up—then it settles down again,” he says. “And it won’t spike again until you get another unusual thing. In this particular case, it was COVID.”
Currently, many Chicago neighborhoods suffering from high levels of gun violence are becoming depopulated, he says. “They’re being pushed out of the city to the south suburbs, primarily, western suburbs. So the violence is not going to go away, it’s just going to be shifted out of the city.”
While each of the professors that I spoke with acknowledged the unpredictability of homicide rates, they nevertheless remained hopeful, for varying reasons, that gun violence will drop in the city of Chicago over the next three to five years.
“It’s going to go down,” Williams says. “And it’s probably going to go back down to…400 [homicides] or less.”