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Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

> Obviously there are crime issues in certain parts of the city but most of the people I hear loudly complain about it are old white people that don't live here anymore.

Unless "old" is >29, there are plenty of people who still complain about crime in Chicago including many black people (black communities have been most impacted by the 2014-onward crime wave). But Chicago is a segregated city, so the cushier, largely white, progressive neighborhoods are more insulated from both crime and minority opinion about crime. There are definitely lots of Fox News listeners who complain about Chicago's crime (my father-in-law being among them), but while the Fox caricature might be inaccurate, crime is still very much an issue even to the "old" 30+ crowd of various races and ethnicities.

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The Chicago crime narrative is mostly a bad-faith political football.

By the numbers, it's safer to be a professional in Chicago than it was at any point in the 1990s, where this wasn't part of the national conversation.

But a movement towards criminal justice reform (which started out bipartisan, with Koch support!) elected a bunch of high-profile reformist prosecutors and shifted everyone's attention towards police oversight at exactly the least congenial time, on the eve of a bunch of exogenous shocks (the pandemic, the economy, the full flowering of a disastrous anti-gang policing strategy) that juiced violent crime.

There's political hay to be made of the crime numbers (Chicago's are far from the worst of all the metro areas in the US, but we're such a large city that the decontextualized numbers are easy to sell on TV), and easy sides to take --- the defunders on one end, the "tough on crime" conservatives on the other, here to make the case that Chicago (and Philly and San Francisco) fucked up by electing reformist Democrats to prosecutor posts, and so now crime is the first word out of everyone's mouth when it comes to this city.

Notably, none of that attention has anything to do with improving the lot of the people who live in Lawndale or South Shore; the national conversation basically boils down to whether we should create National Guard cordons around these areas, or whether we should instead abolish the police departments in these neighborhoods. It's a joke, not a public policy debate.

We're not going to resolve any of it on this thread. It sounds callous to say this because it is callous, but it is also, non-normatively, the descriptive correct answer for professionals wondering about how crime in Chicago would effect them: if you don't live in the hardest neighborhoods in Chicago, it's unlikely to be meaningfully different from any other comparably dense urban area.

Yes, I fully agree that many people who criticize Chicago's crime are doing so in bad faith, but by the numbers Chicago's violent crime is climbing again after decades of decline. That there are bad faith people among critics of Chicago crime doesn't imply that we should ignore Chicago's very real crime problems, nor that all critics of Chicago crime are acting in bad faith.

> But a movement towards criminal justice reform (which started out bipartisan, with Koch support!) elected a bunch of high-profile reformist prosecutors and shifted everyone's attention towards police oversight at exactly the least congenial time, on the eve of a bunch of exogenous shocks (the pandemic, the economy, the full flowering of a disastrous anti-gang policing strategy) that juiced violent crime

Chicago's crime began surging back in 2014-2015, and I'm pretty sure the likes of Fox News were happy to talk about it back then (certainly I recall my father-in-law ranting about it around that time). The idea that they waited until there were confounding factors like the pandemic to talk about it probably has no bearing in truth, although I'm sure they boosted that topic again in 2020 and 2021 when Chicago homicides soared to ~30-year highs (as they did all over the country).

> Notably, none of that attention has anything to do with improving the lot of the people who live in Lawndale or South Shore;

In fairness, it's not like the conditions of people in those neighborhoods abruptly fell off in 2014 such that it would explain the surge in violent homicides. If you're interested in reversing the surge (which is probably where most of the opportunity lies, assuming that if something can drive crime to surge so dramatically/quickly, that perhaps it can be similarly made to decline dramatically/quickly), you're probably going to look at the causes of the surge rather than investing more in education in those communities in the hopes that it will yield a positive return in ~10 years.

Like most of the rest of the country, property crime and violent crime are on the rise in Chicago. But index crimes in Chicago are far below where they were at any point in the 1990s. The full context isn't just "crime is up", but also "up from where".

And yes, there were changes that have explanatory power over the increase in gang homicides on the south and west sides; a string of them, in fact. The atomization of the large "institutional" Chicago gangs, the disinvestment and flight from the roughest neighborhoods to suburbs in the south and west, and, yes, the way CPD managed the problem, "flooding the zone" in whatever the most recent hot-spot while leaving other problematic areas to fester. A lot of this is Chicago's fault.

But it has not at all much to do with the quality of life for professionals in the city. For most families that live in Portage Park, South Shore might as well be in Indiana.

> But index crimes in Chicago are far below where they were at any point in the 1990s. The full context isn't just "crime is up", but also "up from where".

That context isn't helpful for someone who is considering where to live. I don't care what crime rates were in a city 30 years ago, I care how a given city's crime rates compare to other places today (and possibly in the foreseeable future).

> But it has not at all much to do with the quality of life for professionals in the city.

I take your point that, in a segregated city like Chicago, the north-side crime rates are going to be a lot lower than the city average, but I'm pretty sure rates are rising in virtually all neighborhoods.

Yes, and that's what I'm telling you: that the "rising crime rate" story tells you nothing at all about what it's like to live here, because crime is rising from historic lows, and the headline crimes are gang-related and largely confined to neighborhoods you won't live in --- something you can see pretty clearly from the different rates of increase of homicide (the quintessential gang crime) and violent crime overall (still near all-time lows).

You came to this discussion with a data point that clearly isn't meaningful. You don't even need empirical data to see that; logic is enough to tell you that you can't deduce quality of life from "crime is up". Up from where? But, to be helpful, I've provided that context for you.

It seems like you misunderstood my argument. Based on:

> You came to this discussion with a data point that clearly isn't meaningful. You don't even need empirical data to see that; logic is enough to tell you that you can't deduce quality of life from "crime is up".

... it seems like you think I'm arguing "rates are up over the last decade and thus quality of life must be bad overall". My argument is that crime rates are high overall (tenth worst of the top 100 big cities) and on a worsening trajectory. The near-term trajectory (i.e., the last ~decade) is important because we don't live in a city from moment to moment, but we will likely be in a city for 5 or more years. I also don't purport to claim that crime rates tell you everything about a place's quality of life, in case that wasn't clear. Yes, it is unlikely that a professional will live in the worst neighborhoods in Chicago, but they're also less likely to live in the worst neighborhoods in any other city they might move to.

You could credibly argue that Chicago's more segregated nature means more variation in crime rates between the worst and the best neighborhoods, which I completely believe (and consequently I also consider more qualitative assessments of cities in addition to a strictly numerical approach considering the dearth of data).

Ok! You're probably right and we're probably just talking past each other.

No worries, I'm sure I contributed to the confusion in some way. :)

"bad faith" yet every relevant stat which you'd measure the health of a city, arguably the largest one being population gain/loss, is going the wrong way. So the whole argument about this being some sort of made-up political narrative is just provably wrong. Crime stats, population loss, budget deficit, credit rating, school strikes, school truancy, school poverty line, property values...I could go on. Take your pick. The scoreboard says Chicago is losing, this isn't some political conspiracy.

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