Everyone is worried about crime. Violent crime, to be more specific. Right here in Chicago, to be most specific.
Turning on the TV provides no escapism: Homicides feature nightly on the news. We read of carjackings in the papers or on neighborhood blogs. Even campaign commercials compare Illinois to a war zone: One candidate pushes a platform of “law and order” to take back our state; another promises to take the handcuffs off of police and put them on criminals. Neither of these approaches is new. Both smack of the structural racism that has fed the machine of mass incarceration of people of color.
During election season, when rising violence is making many feel unsafe, it makes a ton of sense — especially political sense — to talk about safety.
Yet in an epoch in which historic injustices have also been brought to the forefront of our conversation, it also makes sense — especially moral sense — to talk about justice. In fact, it is essential today that we ensure that justice and safety are equal partners in any conversation about violence.
Before we turn toward solutions to our plague of violence, let’s look at the larger picture, including the causes of this epidemic. That picture is not pretty.
The most recent data from the FBI tells us the national homicide rate rose 30% in 2021. Furthermore, the FBI reminds us that this involves homicides across all landscapes: in large cities, but also at relatively similar rates in suburban areas and rural towns. That means homicides aren’t just on the rise here in Chicago, but everywhere. The same goes for carjackings. The same goes for “smash and grab” thefts. These are no longer only urban issues. This violence is affecting all Americans, regardless of where they live.
And, we should not forget, 77% of last year’s homicides were committed with a gun.
Looking broadly at this portrait of America, we see not only that violent crime is reaching pandemic proportions. We also see that among the root causes of this pandemic are an equally widespread inequality of income and a growing sense of despair.
Despite the massive governmental interventions of economic support we witnessed during the pandemic, America’s vast wealth gap nonetheless continued to grow during the past two years. The 2021 World Inequality Report demonstrates that, even with the uncertainties of the pandemic, the rich are getting richer and the middle and lower classes are falling further behind. While some looking down from the top complain about inability to hire fast enough, those on the bottom of the economic spectrum see the disappearance of meaningful, sustainable work. There’s a reason the opioid crisis strikes the Rust Belt and struggling urban areas. Too many people just have no hope of a better future.
This is why kids are stealing cars, too often, with a handgun. This is why the unemployed are being used as $25 an hour pawns by organized crime as fronts for their “smash and grab” tactics. It is only in a world so devoid of hope for a better future or any real security that “beef” becomes so important it leads to murder, even encompassing the innocent in its orbit. A deep, real, economic sense of hopelessness, combined with the frustrations of COVID-19 curtailments, is a flammable mixture; the horrific, ungoverned proliferation of firearms is more than enough of a match to spark the current blaze of violence we see burning.
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Safety seems far away. Yet as we try to draw it nearer, we must, alongside it, restore justice. We cannot have safety-first, or safety-only responses. That might address individual instances of crime, but will do nothing to alter the despair and hopelessness that fuel today’s violence. We can only build a more secure future for all if we ensure safety and justice walk hand in hand.
Proposals such as Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s ill-advised asset forfeiture ordinance, which seeks to compensate victims from the families of those who commit crimes, sacrifice justice for security: stripping assets from neighborhoods already so lacking in resources cannot lead to justice. Such proposals pander to the fearful, and fail to take into account that the family of those accused of crimes are often victimized by the same people who sent their kin to commit those crimes.
This is why direct-intervention efforts such as the Institute for Non-Violence and Chicago CRED sometimes seek to relocate families to nonthreatening neighborhoods: how much better to grant members of a threatened family stability than to strip them of all they possess.
It feels secure to take those with guns “off the streets.” This is why Illinois Senate Republicans are proposing, as part of a massive “tough on crime” package, a bill to prosecute carjacking suspects older than the age of 10 as adults. Treating 11-years olds as adults, trapping preteens in the carceral system, seems the opposite of justice. In contrast to this approach, we see what happens at Chicago Public Schools when a youth brings a gun to school: Holistic triage tries to find the safest solutions for them. If only we could do the same for all children. After all, it is quite obviously an adult that puts a gun into their hand.
The frightening rise in violence will lead to countless proposals to counter the trend. Our job, as neighbors, as citizens and as the electorate, is to ensure that any path to greater safety is also a path that brings justice to all.
Seth Limmer is senior rabbi of Chicago Sinai Congregation.
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