They had it coming

Murder, baseball and Chicago

Oct 20th 2005 CHICAGO
From The Economist print edition

A city surprisingly at peace with itself

THE people of Chicago have much to be excited about this month. The White Sox, one of the city's baseball teams (often overshadowed by the still more hapless Chicago Cubs), have earned a berth in the World Series. Meanwhile—and perhaps for unrelated reasons—Chicagoans are getting less keen on killing each other.

In fact they are avoiding this traditional pastime so dramatically that Chicago is having an effect on the national federal crime statistics. The new figures, released this week, show there were 151 fewer homicides in Chicago in 2004—a drop of 25%. That compares with 391 fewer murders in the whole country (a national drop of 2%).

What has happened to Al Capone's kinda town? The local police claim credit for a more active approach to gang violence. More than 40% of the city's murders are officially classified as gang-related, but police reckon the real figure is probably 65%. In the spring of 2003, spurred on by some fairly grisly shootings of young children, the police department focused its resources on “preventing gang killings rather than responding to them”.

The new measures included: installing cameras in the worst areas; mapping out gang territories; assigning officers to collect information from prison snitches (gang leaders often continue to run their businesses from behind bars); keeping track of parolees; and, most important, co-ordinating all available gang intelligence to anticipate where trouble was likely to happen, such as retaliatory shootings. The police have also seized 10,000 or more guns off the streets every year for ten years in a row. As a result of all these things, gang-related homicides fell by a third last year.

The Chicago White Sox last appeared in the World Series in 1959. They lost. The appearance before that, in 1919, was more embarrassing: a group of players took bribes to throw the game. Even if Chicago's baseball excitement proves ephemeral, one hopes the murder progress is permanent.

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