2aguy
Diamond Member
- Jul 19, 2014
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Chicago gun murder has gone down....because the police are actually focusing on gun criminals instead of focusing on law abiding gun owners......
See...when you actually go after the criminals...you can actually lower the crime rate. When you focus on law abiding people who simply own guns for self defense and other legal purposes, you don't effect the crime rate.....democrats hate guns, so they attack law abiding gun owners at the same time as they continue to release violent gun criminals....then, when the gun crime rate goes up, they demand more gun control against law abiding gun owners....the problem is on the democrats, not law abiding gun owners....
And one of the big problems with democrats releasing violent gun offenders......? The killers are out on bail in a few days...back in the very neighborhoods where the witnesses are........
One of the reasons why clearance rates are so low is that witnesses are unwilling to cooperate with law enforcement, unwilling to testify, and that makes it very difficult to bring cases against suspected assailants in these gun crimes. The state could provide better resources to protect those witnesses and help them feel safe.
What Can We Learn From Chicago's Declining Gun Violence?
Nor did it. In February 2017, the Chicago Police Department began setting up new district offices for police and analysts from the Crime Lab to track trends, predict trouble and deploy resources accordingly. The first such offices, christened Strategic Decision Support Centers, sprung up in the neighborhoods of Englewood and Harrison. Since then, the department has expanded its use of SDSCs to 20 of the 22 police districts.
But just as the violence two years ago prompted a search for what might have caused the surge, the declines in 2017 and 2018 have yielded an array of explanations. Officials have cautioned that it’s too soon to celebrate, but to help us make sense of the numbers, I went to Max Kapustin, a research director at the Crime Lab who has been heavily involved in studying the city’s crime statistics and assisted with the effort to set up SDSCs. The interview was conducted in December, and it has been edited for length and clarity:
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MK: The SDSCs have brought about a massive change in policing and management practices in the districts that have them. You get the folks that have the information you need in the same room, you get them to share that information, and you formulate your decisions based on that, and you do that day in, day out. This sharing of information across silos and using data to inform decision making was not happening enough at CPD prior to the SDSCs. But I don’t want to make CPD out to be noteworthy in this respect: This happens in a lot of police departments. It’s probably the exception rather than the rule that information is shared easily, and there’s still a ways to go until information is truly flowing across all these silos in CPD.
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One of the reasons why clearance rates are so low is that witnesses are unwilling to cooperate with law enforcement, unwilling to testify, and that makes it very difficult to bring cases against suspected assailants in these gun crimes. The state could provide better resources to protect those witnesses and help them feel safe.
Another issue they should focus on is the massive backlog at the State Police lab, which Chicago relies on to process certain kinds of evidence. The justice system already works more slowly than anybody would like, and it’s a detriment if these cases languish because we’re waiting for evidence from the lab. If the state wanted to devote more resources to remedying that backlog, it certainly could.
And about that violence?
MK: Not at all. It’s so amazingly unequal how the violence is distributed. It is heavily, heavily, heavily concentrated in the South and West Sides, but not just in the South and West Sides, but in specific neighborhoods within those sides, so you can’t even paint with that broad a brush. It’s very, very localized, even to certain blocks in certain neighborhoods.
See...when you actually go after the criminals...you can actually lower the crime rate. When you focus on law abiding people who simply own guns for self defense and other legal purposes, you don't effect the crime rate.....democrats hate guns, so they attack law abiding gun owners at the same time as they continue to release violent gun criminals....then, when the gun crime rate goes up, they demand more gun control against law abiding gun owners....the problem is on the democrats, not law abiding gun owners....
And one of the big problems with democrats releasing violent gun offenders......? The killers are out on bail in a few days...back in the very neighborhoods where the witnesses are........
One of the reasons why clearance rates are so low is that witnesses are unwilling to cooperate with law enforcement, unwilling to testify, and that makes it very difficult to bring cases against suspected assailants in these gun crimes. The state could provide better resources to protect those witnesses and help them feel safe.
What Can We Learn From Chicago's Declining Gun Violence?
Nor did it. In February 2017, the Chicago Police Department began setting up new district offices for police and analysts from the Crime Lab to track trends, predict trouble and deploy resources accordingly. The first such offices, christened Strategic Decision Support Centers, sprung up in the neighborhoods of Englewood and Harrison. Since then, the department has expanded its use of SDSCs to 20 of the 22 police districts.
But just as the violence two years ago prompted a search for what might have caused the surge, the declines in 2017 and 2018 have yielded an array of explanations. Officials have cautioned that it’s too soon to celebrate, but to help us make sense of the numbers, I went to Max Kapustin, a research director at the Crime Lab who has been heavily involved in studying the city’s crime statistics and assisted with the effort to set up SDSCs. The interview was conducted in December, and it has been edited for length and clarity:
--------------
MK: The SDSCs have brought about a massive change in policing and management practices in the districts that have them. You get the folks that have the information you need in the same room, you get them to share that information, and you formulate your decisions based on that, and you do that day in, day out. This sharing of information across silos and using data to inform decision making was not happening enough at CPD prior to the SDSCs. But I don’t want to make CPD out to be noteworthy in this respect: This happens in a lot of police departments. It’s probably the exception rather than the rule that information is shared easily, and there’s still a ways to go until information is truly flowing across all these silos in CPD.
---------
One of the reasons why clearance rates are so low is that witnesses are unwilling to cooperate with law enforcement, unwilling to testify, and that makes it very difficult to bring cases against suspected assailants in these gun crimes. The state could provide better resources to protect those witnesses and help them feel safe.
Another issue they should focus on is the massive backlog at the State Police lab, which Chicago relies on to process certain kinds of evidence. The justice system already works more slowly than anybody would like, and it’s a detriment if these cases languish because we’re waiting for evidence from the lab. If the state wanted to devote more resources to remedying that backlog, it certainly could.
And about that violence?
MK: Not at all. It’s so amazingly unequal how the violence is distributed. It is heavily, heavily, heavily concentrated in the South and West Sides, but not just in the South and West Sides, but in specific neighborhoods within those sides, so you can’t even paint with that broad a brush. It’s very, very localized, even to certain blocks in certain neighborhoods.
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