What To Do About Chicago's Violence
Just when you thought Illinois politics couldn't get any more absurd, Marshall Blogo offered to ride into Chicago to clean up the town. While the Marshall's and the Mayor's statements may get high marks for theatricality, their substance is sophomoric.
Copping up Chicago's streets has never depressed gang and drug trade-related violence – never has, never will. For a town whose international reputation stems largely from its spectacularly failed effort to enforce alcohol Prohibition, the sheer stupidity of its officials' attempts to re-fight that war in the 21st Century is nothing short of astounding.
"Getting tough" on drug crime has swelled Illinois's prison population while doing precious little to stop illegal drug use and its attendant violence. Make a big drug bust? Good, you've only wiped out some of the competition and made it more profitable for those "vendors" who remain. Increase enforcement, arrest more sellers? Good, you've just hiked the price for the remaining "product" on the street. Higher prices, higher profits (just ask the oil companies).
Make potential profits high enough, and some people will be willing to kill for it, which is just what's happening. Back in the 1920s and 30s, Chicago, like Mexico today, slipped towards becoming a narco state when the opportunities for legal profit became scarce and the profits from the drug trade became attractive enough to bribe police and politicians wholesale. The United States' foremost economists often boast of their adherence to the "free market," and yet our political leaders willfully ignore the supply and demand aspects of the drug trade.
If the alternative to the highly profitable drug trade is unemployment or jobs that don't pay a living wage, so much the worse. As the Tribune noted a few weeks ago, one of the most under-reported aspects of our current economic recession is that youth unemployment is at its highest level ever -– higher than at any time since the statistics began to be collected in 1947. African American youth unemployment in Chicago is an astounding 85%.
Into this already volatile mix add the gasoline of our political leaders' counter-productive actions:
* While the Mayor shovels TIF funds to already wealthy, politically connected developers and other businesses, he's cut the city's summer youth jobs program to a shadow of its former self.
* The Mayor's destruction of public housing projects and broken promises to build adequate replacement housing has shifted poor families across gang boundaries, putting the youth in those families at greater risk of violence. Instead of supporting subsidized housing for the truly needy, city planners focus on the bread and circuses of the 2016 Olympics, including how to generate Olympic Village yuppie housing around Michael Reese Hospital on the near south side. Politically connected developers are no doubt drooling at the prospect.
The last attempt to "cop up" the city in response to civilian violence brought us the police department's Special Operations Unit. Much like parts of the Mexican state today, SOU instead became a faction of the violent drug culture it was set up to destroy, terrorizing even more residents in the process. According the New York Times, on a per capita basis, Chicago police shoot and kill civilians at three times the rate that they do in New York, itself a city with an unenviable record.
It's time to recognize that the good sound bite, vote-getting quick fixes of the past have failed, and to persist in them is to only augment the violence problem in our city. Especially in an environment where state and local governments are hopelessly awash in red ink while basic infrastructure and services deteriorate, it is ridiculous to continue fruitlessly wasting resources on "enforcement" and imprisonment.
Addiction of any sort is never a pretty sight, whether that addiction is to legalized alcohol or to illegal drugs. A more sane way to stop the violence associated with illegal drugs would be to legalize and regulate them, and put the resources currently wasted on "enforcement" into a grade A drug rehabilitation system and a decent-paying jobs program that would offer a true alternative to the gangs and illegal drugs trade.
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The author is co-founder of the Gay Liberation Network, the Chicago Coalition Against War & Racism, and has been a social justice activist for many years.