When William Bullion moved into an apartment at Milwaukee Avenue and Paulina Street in 1987, he gave no thought to being an urban pioneer. The blighted area simply was one of the few ZIP codes that fit his budget.
“But I just knew things were going to get better–and they did,” said Bullion, a freelance theater director. “It’s been at least five years since I’ve felt personally vulnerable.”
Certainly Bullion owes his peace of mind these days to the evolution of a neighborhood, but it also is perhaps a testament to some end-of-the-year news that fueled the headlines alongside Y2K: The nation–as well as Chicago–over the past two decades has experienced a dramatic drop in the crime rate, cinched by further lowered numbers in 1999.
It is a development that is most often conveyed in dry statistics. But as the new year begins, reflections from a sampling of Chicago residents show that it has percolated into the consciousness of everyday citizens in ways large and small.
Whether it’s letting kids go around the block without a parent, a flat market for home security systems or a feeling of lowered stress for some beat cops, there are signs that for some, the crime drop seems real.
At the same time, many people who have had a direct experience with violent crime or who live in areas still under siege continue to feel fear that is immediate and unabated.
Still, there is an undisputed confluence of prosperity and demographics, community policing and a decrease in drug use that has toppled homicide rates in many American cities last year.
In Chicago, which in 1999 had one of its lowest murder rates in 32 years after leading the country in homicides the year before, the numbers tell a story that plays out in oddly contrasting ways– from the operating room of heart surgeon Valluvan Jeevanandam to William Miller’s Yellow Cab No. 99 to Officer Deb Gills’ West Side beat.
“There’s a big difference in the stress level of the job,” said Gills, a veteran cop in the Grand-Central District.
“We’re not as stressed out rushing from one job to the next. And the people we have to deal with seem to feel it, too. They’re a lot nicer. It’s much less tension-filled.”
Rev. John Phelps, president of Life Directions, a peer-mentoring program in eight city high schools, detects fledgling signs of a turnaround–especially when it comes to gangs, he said.
“Some of the kids are waking up to the fact that they’re being manipulated,” he said. “Best of all, though, is that we have young people that we worked with in the early ’90s who are now adults and coaching younger kids.”
Of course, such encouraging news means little if the neighbor three doors down was robbed, said Arthur Lurigio, chairman of the department of justice at Loyola University. “When crime happens to someone near you or someone like you, you believe your own chances of being a victim have gone up, too. That affects people’s lives more dramatically than any statistics.”
Moreover, he said, “If we look at the homicide data around the world, we are still far and away the most violent. We have no reason to celebrate and certainly no reason to be complacent.”
Indeed, many city dwellers have not appreciably altered their daily routine, even as they acknowledge a new sense of security.
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“You do see more people out walking with their kids,” said Barbara Slutsky, a gerontologist who lives a couple of blocks from the Cabrini-Green public housing development.
But for her part, Slutsky said as she walked her dog, “I still look over my shoulder all the time.”
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William Miller, 64, a cabdriver for more than 20 years, is too accustomed to being careful to approach his job any other way. Statistics are an abstract. Reality is the bullet that seared through him on Christmas 19 years ago when a frustrated, would-be robber jammed a shiny .32 against Miller’s neck, pulled the trigger and then bolted from the cab with nothing to show for his industry.
Miller still has a puckered scar where the bullet exited.
“I was in the hospital three days,” he said as he shot pool during a break Wednesday afternoon at the Yellow Cab garage on South Indiana Avenue.
For him, the fluctuations in the crime rate mean nothing. “I been doing this for 20 years,” he said, taking aim at the 6 ball and knocking it into the side pocket. “It’s all about what type of attitude you have.
“If your attitude is good, then you have no problems. If your attitude is bad, then you find problems.”
Thanks largely to added safety precautions, including the installation of panic buttons and a computerized tracking system, a Yellow Cab driver has not been killed on the job in three years, company vice president Jan Johns said– “We used to average six drivers killed each year in the city.”
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With 600-plus heart transplants under his belt Dr. Valluvan Jeevanandam is known as a surgeon’s surgeon. His nimble fingers can hook up delicate arteries and graft intricate valves more deftly than most people can sew on a button. But for his patients–and for the nearly 4,000 Cook County residents on the transplant waiting list–the drop in homicides is a lesson in irony.
While the rest of society rejoices at such good news, for this segment of the population it is a mixed blessing, especially with the state in the midst of an acute organ shortage, according to the Regional Organ Bank of Illinois.
“It is the most frustrating part of the job,” says the University of Chicago’s chief of cardiac and thoracic surgery. “We have the know-how to save lives, but we can’t help if we don’t have an organ.”
Certainly, other factors affect the donor pool. Better surgical techniques in the ER are saving more lives; so are mandatory seat-belt laws and air bags. But the lower crime rate has definitely created a gap in the donor pool; and when 300 Illinois residents die on the waiting list each year, it is felt profoundly.
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Debbie Levinson, an English teacher at Kenwood Academy in Hyde Park, said, “I’m genuinely surprised to hear this (the drop in crime). Everything seems so more violent, from the metal detectors we have at school, to signs trying to curb profanity, it seems to be all around us.”
“We’re just trying to bring a push for more civility” in school because of all the outside influences, she said.
She noted that in the year that saw the school shootings in Littleton, Colo., and elsewhere, south suburban Homewood-Flossmoor High School, which her daughter attends, had a bomb threat–false, as it turned out– on the last day of classes.
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The lower crime rate hasn’t slowed the sales of deadbolt locks, self-defense classes or German shepherds. But if the International Housewares Show–which opens later this month at McCormick Place–is any barometer, home security items may be on the decline. The number of exhibitors has shrunk from 16 in 1990 to five this year, said Debbie Teschke, a show spokeswoman.
Sales have also been flat at Ace Hardware Corp. “It really hasn’t panned out for us,” said Charlie Crittenden, a buyer for the Oak Brook-based company. “The consumer still wants the deadbolt, but not the window locks or the window alarms, motion detectors or the other stuff.”
When it comes to crime, education seems to have nudged out gadgetry these days, Crittenden said. “People just seem to be a lot smarter about keeping a light on and making it look as if someone’s at home.”
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Sharvon Freeman is just 26 years old, but that doesn’t mean she’s not an expert on violence prevention. She sees it in her West Side neighborhood (“There’s a lot less drug trafficking”) and she sees it in herself, crediting Life Directions, a program that got her focused when she was a student at Farragut High School.
“It was a real turning point in my life. . . . I could have gone one way or another,” said Freeman, who attended Malcolm X College and now works as a security guard. “Having an adult mentor made a big difference.”
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Vince Lawrence, 29, is a cashier at an Amoco station at 43rd and State Streets. The service station almost literally sits in the shadows of some of the bleak buildings of the Robert Taylor Homes.
Lawrence, a native of California who came to Chicago “for love,” plans to be married in June–and he is careful regardless of the crime rate. Statistics can’t put a pretty face on the potential dangers on the other side of the bulletproof cashier’s window.
“It makes me feel a little better,” Lawrence said of the lower crime rate.
But he said, “You can’t let your guard down. You have to be careful–and that’s just not here, that’s everywhere.”
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As for William Bullion, he hopes that lightning strikes twice. He’s opening a theater near Chicago Avenue and Noble Street, which he plans to unveil in spring.
And he’ll soon be a homeowner in Logan Square, another neighborhood that has had its share of crime.
That $500-a-month loft he’s vacating? It’s renting for $1,600.