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Saturday, April 19, 2014
The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates The city’s drop in crime has been nothing short of miraculous. Here’s what’s behind the unbelievable numbers.
The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates
The city’s drop in crime has been nothing short of miraculous. Here’s what’s behind the unbelievable numbers.
It was a balmy afternoon last July when the call came in: Dead body found inside empty warehouse on the West Side.
Chicago police officers drove through an industrial stretch of the
hardscrabble Austin neighborhood and pulled up to the 4600 block of West
Arthington Street. The warehouse in question was an
unremarkable-looking red-brick single-story building with a tall
barbed-wire fence. Vacant for six years, it had been visited that day by
its owner and a real-estate agent—the person who had called 911.
The place lacked electricity, so crime scene technicians set up
generators and portable lights. The power flickered on to reveal a
grisly sight. In a small office, on soggy carpeting covered in broken
ceiling tiles, lay a naked, lifeless woman. She had long red-streaked
black hair and purple glitter nail polish on her left toenails (her
right ones were gone), but beyond that it was hard to discern much. Her
face and body were bloated and badly decomposed, her hands ash colored.
Maggots feasted on her flesh.
At the woman’s feet, detectives found a curled strand of telephone
wire. Draped over her right hand was a different kind of wire: thin and
brown. The same brown wire was wrapped around each armrest of a wooden
chair next to her.
The following day, July 24, a pathologist in the Cook County medical
examiner’s office noticed something else that had been obscured by
rotting skin: a thin gag tied around the corpse’s mouth.
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Thanks to some still-visible tattoos, detectives soon identified this
unfortunate woman: Tiara Groves, a 20-year-old from Austin. She was last
seen walking alone in the wee hours of Sunday, July 14, near a liquor
store two miles from the warehouse. At least eight witnesses who saw her
that night told police a similar story: She appeared drunk and was
upset—one man said that she was crying so hard she couldn’t catch her
breath—but refused offers of help. A man who talked to her outside the
liquor store said that Groves warned him, excitedly and incoherently,
that he should stay away from her or else somebody (she didn’t say who)
would kill him too.
Toxicology tests showed she had heroin and alcohol in her system, but
not enough to kill her. All signs pointed to foul play. According to the
young woman’s mother, who had filed a missing-person report, the police
had no doubt. “When this detective came to my house, he said, ‘We found
your daughter. . . . Your daughter has been murdered,’ ” Alice Groves
recalls. “He told me they’re going to get the one that did it.”
On October 28, a pathologist ruled the death of Tiara Groves a
homicide by “unspecified means.” This rare ruling means yes, somebody
had killed Groves, but the pathologist couldn’t pinpoint the exact cause
of death.
Given the finding of homicide—and the corroborating evidence at the
crime scene—the Chicago Police Department should have counted Groves’s
death as a murder. And it did. Until December 18. On that day, the
police report indicates, a lieutenant overseeing the Groves case
reclassified the homicide investigation as a noncriminal death
investigation. In his writeup, he cited the medical examiner’s
“inability to determine a cause of death.”
That lieutenant was Denis Walsh—the same cop who had played a crucial
role in the alleged cover-up in the 2004 killing of David Koschman, the
21-year-old who died after being punched by a nephew of former mayor
Richard M. Daley. Walsh allegedly took the Koschman file home. For
years, police officials said that it was lost. After the Sun-Times reported it missing, the file mysteriously reappeared.
But back to Tiara Groves. With the stroke of a computer key, she was airbrushed out of Chicago’s homicide statistics.
The change stunned officers. Current and former veteran detectives who reviewed the Groves case at Chicago’s
request were just as incredulous. Says a retired high-level detective,
“How can you be tied to a chair and gagged, with no clothes on, and
that’s a [noncriminal] death investigation?” (He, like most of the
nearly 40 police sources interviewed for this story, declined to be
identified by name, citing fears of disciplinary action or other
retribution.)
Was it just a coincidence, some wondered, that the reclassification
occurred less than two weeks before the end of the year, when the city
of Chicago’s final homicide numbers for 2013 would be tallied? “They
essentially wiped away one of the murders in the city, which is crazy,”
says a police insider. “But that’s the kind of shit that’s going on.”
For the case of Tiara Groves is not an isolated one. Chicago
conducted a 12-month examination of the Chicago Police Department’s
crime statistics going back several years, poring through public and
internal police records and interviewing crime victims, criminologists,
and police sources of various ranks. We identified 10 people, including
Groves, who were beaten, burned, suffocated, or shot to death in 2013
and whose cases were reclassified as death investigations, downgraded to
more minor crimes, or even closed as noncriminal incidents—all for
illogical or, at best, unclear reasons.
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This troubling practice goes far beyond murders, documents and interviews reveal. Chicago
found dozens of other crimes, including serious felonies such as
robberies, burglaries, and assaults, that were misclassified, downgraded
to wrist-slap offenses, or made to vanish altogether. (We’ll examine
those next month in part 2 of this special report.)
Many officers of different ranks and from different parts of the city
recounted instances in which they were asked or pressured by their
superiors to reclassify their incident reports or in which their reports
were changed by some invisible hand. One detective refers to the “magic
ink”: the power to make a case disappear. Says another: “The rank and
file don’t agree with what’s going on. The powers that be are making the
changes.”
Granted, a few dozen crimes constitute a tiny percentage of the more
than 300,000 reported in Chicago last year. But sources describe a
practice that has become widespread at the same time that top police
brass have become fixated on demonstrating improvement in Chicago’s
woeful crime statistics.
And has there ever been improvement. Aside from homicides, which
soared in 2012, the drop in crime since Police Superintendent Garry
McCarthy arrived in May 2011 is unprecedented—and, some of his
detractors say, unbelievable. Crime hasn’t just fallen, it has
freefallen: across the city and across all major categories.
Take “index crimes”: the eight violent and property crimes that
virtually all U.S. cities supply to the Federal Bureau of Investigation
for its Uniform Crime Report. According to police figures, the number of
these crimes plunged by 56 percent citywide from 2010 to 2013—an
average of nearly 19 percent per year—a reduction that borders on the
miraculous. To put these numbers in perspective: From 1993, when index
crimes peaked, to 2010, the last full year under McCarthy’s predecessor,
Jody Weis, the average annual decline was less than 4 percent.
This dramatic crime reduction has been happening even as the department has been bleeding officers. (A recent Tribune
analysis listed 7,078 beat cops on the streets, 10 percent fewer than
in 2011.) Given these facts, the crime reduction “makes no sense,” says
one veteran sergeant. “And it makes absolutely no sense that people
believe it. Yet people believe it.”
The city’s inspector general, Joseph Ferguson, may not. Chicago
has learned that his office has questioned the accuracy of the police
department’s crime statistics. A spokeswoman confirmed that the office
recently finalized an audit of the police department’s 2012 crime data—though
only for assault-related crimes so far—“to determine if CPD accurately
classified [these categories of] crimes under its written guidelines and
if it reported related crime statistics correctly.” (The audit found,
among other things, that the department undercounted aggravated assaults
and batteries by more than 24 percent, based on the sample cases
reviewed.)
Meanwhile, the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil pols on Chicago’s City
Council have mostly accepted the police department’s crime numbers at
face value. So have most in the media. You can hardly turn on the news
without hearing McCarthy or Mayor Rahm Emanuel proclaiming unquestioned:
Murders down 18 percent in 2013! Overall crime down 23 percent! Twelve thousand fewer crime victims!
“These days, everything is about media and public opinion,” says one
longtime officer. “If a number makes people feel safe, then why not give
it to them?”
If you want proof of the police department’s obsession with crime
statistics, look no further than the last few days of 2012. On the night
of December 27, a 40-year-old alleged gang member named Nathaniel
Jackson was shot in the head and killed in Austin. The next morning,
newscasters proclaimed that Chicago’s murder toll for the year had hit
500—a grim milestone last reached in 2008, during the Great Recession.
By lunchtime, the police department’s spinmeisters at 35th and
Michigan had challenged the reports. The actual total, they said, was
499. A murder case earlier in the year had just been reclassified as a
death investigation.
Critics howled. The bloggers behind Second City Cop declared: “It’s a miracle! The dead have risen!!!”
By late afternoon, police had backed down; Jackson was, indeed, the
500th homicide of 2012. Chicago would end the year with 507 recorded
murders, more than in any other city in the nation.
Many inside the police force, as well as many outside criminologists,
saw the spike in violence in 2012 as a statistical anomaly. Crime tends
to go in cycles, they pointed out; the city topped 500 killings not only
in 2008 but also in 2003, 2002, and 2001, to name a few.
Still, it looked bad for Mayor Emanuel. His disapproval rating in the
polls was rising sharply, particularly among black voters. Behind closed
doors, according to a City Hall insider, Emanuel told his police chief
that the department had better not allow a repeat performance of 2012 or
McCarthy’s days in Chicago would be numbered. (Through a spokeswoman,
the mayor declined to comment for this article.)
McCarthy called 2012’s homicide total a “tragic number” and vowed that
things would be different in 2013. The mindset inside police
headquarters, recalls one officer: “Whatever you gotta do, this can’t
happen again.”
The chief felt even more pressure than his rank and file may have
realized. For the former New Yorker to prove that his policing
strategies worked in Chicago, he would need to keep the number of
murders not just below 2012’s total but also below 2011’s: 435.
“Right now I'm trying to save Chicago,” Police Superindent Garry McCarthy said in 2013 in the CNN docuseries Chicagoland. “All of it.”Photo: Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune
To do so, McCarthy leaned even more heavily on a tool that has proved
wildly successful in his hometown: CompStat. Borrowing
performance-management principles from the business world, CompStat
collects, analyzes, and maps a city’s crime data in real time. These
statistics help police track trouble spots more accurately and pinpoint
where officers are needed most. The department’s number crunchers can
slice and dice the stats all sorts of ways, spitting out reports showing
percentage changes in various crimes by neighborhood over different
time frames, for example: month to month, week to week—heck, hour to
hour.
Armed with those statistics, the police brass turn up the pressure in
weekly meetings, grilling field commanders about crime in their areas.
The statistics are widely said to make or break a career. “The only
evaluation is the numbers,” says a veteran sergeant. “God forbid your
crime is up. If you have a 20 percent reduction this month, you’d better
have a 21 percent reduction the next month.”
The homicide numbers are especially important, says one cop: “You
should see these supervisors, like cats in a room filled with rocking
chairs, afraid to classify a murder because of all the screaming they
will hear downtown.”
If the numbers are bad, the district commanders and officers get
reamed out by McCarthy and the other bosses at headquarters. These
targets frequently leave the meetings seething. Even McCarthy concedes
that such meetings can get ugly. “When I was a commander in New York, it
was full contact,” he told Chicago in 2012. “And if you weren’t careful, you could lose an eye.”
Unfortunately for all concerned, January 2013 could not have started
out worse. Five people were murdered in Chicago on New Year’s Day. The
number hit 17 by the end of the first full week. “This is too much,” Al
Wysinger, the police department’s first deputy superintendent, told the
crowd in the January 17 CompStat meeting, according to a memo
summarizing it. “Last October and November, I kept saying we have to
start 2013 off on the right foot. Wrong foot! We can’t reiterate this
much clearer.”
As the month wore on, the death toll kept rising. Among the victims
were headline grabbers Ronnie Chambers, 33, the last of his mother’s
four children to die from gun violence, and Hadiya Pendleton, 15, the
honor student who was shot in a park about a mile from President Obama’s
house.
And then there was 20-something Tiffany Jones from the South Side. (To
protect the identity of her family, we have given her a pseudonym.)
In January, Jones got into an argument with a male relative that
turned into a “serious physical fight,” according to the police report.
Her sister later told police that she saw the enraged man punch Jones in
the head. Police and paramedics arrived to find Jones’s siblings
struggling to keep him out of the family’s apartment.
Inside, Jones was sitting on the couch, gasping for breath. When
officers asked her if she wanted to press battery charges, she could
only nod yes, the police report shows. She tried to stand but collapsed
to the floor, no longer breathing. Rushed to the hospital, Jones was
soon pronounced dead.
The attending doctor noted head trauma and bleeding behind Jones’s
left eye. Seeing fresh bruises on her left cheek, left eye, and both
arms, the investigating officers were leaning toward recommending a
first-degree murder charge against the male relative, according to the
police report. First-degree murder—willfully killing or committing an
act that creates a “strong probability of death or great bodily
harm”—carries more severe penalties than any other homicide charge.
The next day, however, a pathologist with the Cook County medical
examiner’s office came to the surprising conclusion that Jones had died
from a blood clot that was unrelated to the fight. “Because of the
embolism,” the pathologist noted to detectives, according to the police
report, Jones “would have died ‘from just walking down the street.’ ”
Disagreements between police and medical examiners are rare but not
unheard of. When they do occur, the rule for police is clear. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook
expressly states that a police department’s classification of a
homicide should be based solely on a police investigation, not on the
determination of a medical examiner or prosecutor’s office.
But the officers did not ask for a lesser homicide charge, such as
involuntary manslaughter, against Jones’s relative. Nor did they even
charge him with battery. The reason, the report states: “the lack of any
complaining victim or witness to the domestic battery incident.” Never
mind that a dead victim cannot complain.
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Police sent the man on his way. And that was that. Search for this
case in the police department’s public database of 2013 crimes and you
won’t find it. It’s as if it never happened.
By the end of January, 44 people had been murdered in Chicago, more
than in any first month since 2002. That big number—and the national
attention brought by Pendleton’s killing—set off more public furor about
the inability of McCarthy and Emanuel to stem the bloodshed. A
spokesman for the Fraternal Order of Police said that their strategies
had “failed miserably.”
Even aldermen who had heaped praise on McCarthy in the past started to
criticize. “If this isn’t dealt with soon,” warned the 21st Ward
alderman Howard Brookins, chairman of the City Council’s black caucus,
“the mayor is gonna be forced to do something about McCarthy, or this
could potentially become his snow issue.” It was a reference to Mayor
Michael Bilandic’s mishandling of the Blizzard of ’79, one of the most
infamous career killers in Chicago political history.
After January 2013, the number of homicides in Chicago began falling
dramatically. February ended with just 14. March ended with 17. That
compares with 29 and 52, respectively, in 2012.
Emanuel and McCarthy were giddy. The policing changes they had made in
the past three months had worked! Those changes included, a day after
Pendleton’s death, moving 200 officers from desks to the streets and
bringing back the roving units Emanuel and McCarthy had disbanded when
they first took over. What’s more, in February, McCarthy started sending
officers into 20 “impact zones” deemed the most dangerous in the city.
In March, some 400 cops began patrolling these zones daily, racking up
about $1 million in overtime per week.
McCarthy was frustrated that the media was giving most of the credit
for the murder reduction to the cold weather rather than to his policing
strategies. The city called a news conference. “We are clearly having
an impact on the homicides,” Emanuel told reporters on April 1. He
declared that the number of murders in the first quarter of 2013 was
lower than in any other first quarter in the past 50 years.
The mayor didn’t mention that the department’s own records show that
Chicago had the exact same number of homicides in the first three months
of 2009 as it did in the first three months of 2013. Nor did he remind
his audience that Chicago’s population has shrunk by nearly 1 million
people since 1960. Look at murder rates—homicides per 100,000
people—and you get 15 today. That rate is one-third higher than in 1960.
And it’s nearly four times New York City’s current rate.
April Fool’s Day marked the unofficial start of a new city tactic:
inundate the public with crime-decline statistics, carefully choosing
time periods that demonstrated the biggest possible drops from the same
period in 2012 or beyond, whatever sounded best. “Between the time of
8:36 am 32 seconds and 8:39 am 15 seconds . . . crime went down an
amazing 89%!!! compared to the same time last year,” one wag posted on
Second City Cop.
Turns out the low March homicide numbers were made possible in part by
curious categorizations of two more deaths. One is the case of Maurice
Harris.
On March 15, the 57-year-old Harris—an older man playing a young man’s
game—teamed up with a crew selling heroin near the corner of Cicero and
Van Buren on the West Side. It was a sliver of turf that belonged to a
street gang, the Undertaker Vice Lords.
Midmorning, Harris saw about five men walking up the block. His crew
scattered. Harris got a tap on the shoulder, then a punch in the face,
according to the police report. Moments later, he was on the sidewalk,
taking repeated punches and kicks and blows to the head with a metal
pipe. When the beatdown finally ended, Harris told a witness that he
couldn’t feel his legs.
He was rushed to Loretto Hospital, then transferred to two other
hospitals—Mount Sinai and Rush—as his condition worsened. On March 19,
Harris began slurring his words, and his arms went numb. Doctors put in a
breathing tube; they also diagnosed a spinal cord injury. On March 21,
six days after the beating, Harris died.
Police recorded the Maurice Harris case as a battery, which is indisputably true. But not as a homicide.
At first, the Cook County medical examiner’s office said that an
autopsy was inconclusive. The pathologist, according to the police
report, “deferred the cause and manner of death pending further
studies.”
Eight months later, on November 13, the same pathologist made a final
ruling—a head scratcher to every police source we spoke to who reviewed
the case. Harris, the doctor determined, died from a pulmonary embolism,
diabetes, and drug abuse. The police report summarized the
pathologist’s findings: “The victim showed no significant evidence of
injuries sustained from the battery [and] that in no way did it appear
that the battery contributed to the cause of his death and therefore
ruled his death as natural.”
That’s all detectives needed to close their death investigation. But
they still had to wrap up the battery case. They declared it solved,
reporting that they knew what had happened, knew who beat up Harris, and
had enough evidence to “support an arrest, charge, and [turn] over to
the court for prosecution.” But because the victim was dead and “there
is no complaining witness to aid in the prosecution,” there was no
reason to move forward. Harris’s attackers were therefore never
apprehended.
On March 28, three weeks after Chicago filed a Freedom of
Information Act request to the Cook County medical examiner’s office
about the case of Maurice Harris, the office changed its death ruling
from “natural” to “undetermined.” The ruling cited new information from
medical records that, a spokesman for the medical examiner says, the
office had requested “some time ago” but had only just received.
The current chief medical examiner, Stephen Cina, was appointed by
Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle in July 2012. That was
shortly after previous examiner Nancy Jones retired following an
avalanche of negative publicity about bodies stacking up at the city
morgue.
It was also a few months after Preckwinkle and the county’s board of
commissioners had passed ordinances giving themselves more power over
the office—for example, imposing a five-year term limit and making it
easier to fire the medical examiner by a simple majority vote.
Previously, the medical examiner’s tenure could last a lifetime: a
Supreme Court–like term meant to insulate the position from the
political and police pressures so notorious in “Crook County.”
As the former deputy medical examiner of Broward County in famously
corrupt South Florida, Cina was plenty used to politics. “If I get an
inordinate amount of pressure, I don’t intend to buckle or break under
it,” he vowed to the Sun-Times.
Cook County chief medical examiner Stephen CinaPhoto: Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune
Cina says he has made numerous changes to the office to bring it more
in line with national standards. “We’ve rewritten every standard
operating procedure in the place,” he says. He also says that he has
“tweaked” how his office assigns the cause and manner of a death. For
example, he added the ruling “homicide by unspecified means”—the ruling
that police used to shut down the Tiara Groves homicide investigation.
“Some people may not be familiar with the term, but it’s an acceptable
cause of death,” Cina insists.
Might changes under Cina help explain the perplexing findings in other
2013 cases, such as those of Maurice Harris and Tiffany Jones? There is
no evidence that the medical examiner’s office intentionally issued
misleading or inaccurate rulings to help the city keep its homicide
count down. “I’ve never felt pressure one way or another to make my
ruling,” Cina says. “I’m pro–scientific truth more than anything.”
But knowledgeable sources who reviewed these cases for Chicago say
that the way the medical examiner’s rulings were worded gave police the
wiggle room they needed to avoid “taking a hit” on the statistics, as
one detective put it. Says a source who used to work at the medical
examiner’s office: “I can see the powers that be in the police
department saying, ‘Here’s our out.’ ”
On March 17, two days after Maurice Harris got pummeled, police were
called to the top floor of a red-brick three-flat in Pilsen. A man who
had just returned home from a trip smelled a “foul odor” coming from a
plastic air mattress in the bedroom of a roommate he hadn’t seen in
weeks. When he started pulling debris from the mattress, he saw a
grotesquely decomposed human head. The rest of the body was cocooned in
garbage.
Investigators opened the bag to find that the corpse was a woman’s,
wrapped in a blood-soaked blanket. She was wearing turquoise jogging
pants, a black camisole, a hoodie, and boots. Police identified her as
Michelle Manalansan, 29, a student at Harold Washington College. She had
last been seen at her downtown apartment on February 9. The police
report adds that investigators were told by witnesses that the absent
roommate “was the last person seen with [Michelle].”
The roommate, police learned, was wanted by the Cook County sheriff
for a probation violation. They also learned that a relative had bought
him a ticket to Los Angeles on a train that left Chicago six days after
Manalansan disappeared.
Despite the circumstances, police classified the case as a noncriminal
death investigation. A detective soon made it an even lower priority:
He suspended the case until the roommate could be “located and
interviewed.”
Manalansan’s death certificate on file with the Cook County clerk’s
office says that she died by homicide—specifically, blunt head and neck
trauma. But at presstime, her case had still not been classified as
criminal. The roommate was still at large.
With a hint of disgust, one retired veteran detective who reviewed the
cases of Michelle Manalansan, Maurice Harris, Tiffany Jones, and Tiara
Groves for Chicago called all four “counters.” That is, cases
that he believes the police should have counted as homicides. “I’m not
surprised that these cases have not come to light, based on who the
victims are,” he says. “However, it is a travesty that the cases are not
being investigated.” (While all cases are technically ongoing until
they are closed, detectives say that death investigations are much lower
priorities than homicide investigations.)
As the spring of 2013 wore on, Mother Nature delivered a blessing: a
deluge. That April would be the wettest on record and was relatively
quiet; bad weather tends to keep criminals off the streets.
Murders began ticking up again in May. And June ended with 45, only
three below 2012’s total. Still, when the Chicago Police Department
added up the homicides for the first half of the year, they got 184—a
whopping 30 percent fewer than the year-ago period. “Fewer murders than
in any year since 1965,” McCarthy told reporters.
One factor, as the Tribune first noted, was that the
department excluded from the count three homicides that occurred within
city limits but on expressways patrolled by state police. (There would
be another expressway homicide before the end of the year.) Before
McCarthy’s arrival, the department did not exclude such crimes from its
homicide total, according to longtime police sources.
The second half of the year, of course, includes the dog days of
summer, the high-crime period that really sends sweat down the backs of
police leaders. And July exploded. Over the long Independence Day
weekend alone, 13 people were killed and more than 70 were shot in
Chicago. The ensuing days weren’t much better. “It’s mayhem,” declared
one state lawmaker, Monique Davis, of the South Side. She called on
Governor Pat Quinn to send the Illinois National Guard and the state
police to Chicago to help keep the peace. By month’s end, the murder
count had hit 53, versus 50 in July 2012.
In August—typically Chicago’s hottest month—the stress inside Chicago
Police Department headquarters was palpable. That’s when several police
insiders first told Chicago about what they called “the panel.”
Said to be made up of a small group of very high-level officers, the
panel allegedly began scrutinizing death cases in which the victims
didn’t die immediately or where the circumstances that led to the deaths
couldn’t be immediately determined, sources say. Panel members were
looking for anything that could be delayed, keeping it off the books for
a week, a month, maybe a year. “Whatever the case may be, it had to
wait until it came back from the panel,” says a well-placed police
insider. “All this was to hide the murder numbers, that’s all they are
doing.” (How many cases did get delayed, if any, is unknown.)
By the end of August the department had counted 286 homicides since January—80 fewer than in 2012.
With the summer all but behind them, the police brass pretty much knew
that, barring some extraordinary crime wave, the year’s homicide count
would not eclipse 2012’s. But 2013’s total this far was still eight more
than recorded during the same period in 2011. For McCarthy, beating the
2011 number was starting to look like an elusive goal.
On September 19, two gun-toting gangbangers opened fire on a crowded
pickup basketball game in Cornell Park, in the Back of the Yards
neighborhood. One of them used an AK-47. When the bullets stopped
flying, 13 people had been wounded, including a three-year-old boy. But
no one died. A “miracle,” McCarthy said. (In the stats book, the
shootings counted as only one “shooting incident” in CompStat. Read more
about that in part 2 of this story.)
Two days after gunfire lit up Cornell Park, an extra-alarm fire
erupted in a three-story apartment building at 112th Street and King
Drive, in the Roseland neighborhood. When firefighters arrived just
before 2 a.m., much of the building and the stairwell was engulfed in
flames.
Inside, they found Millicent Brown-Johnson, 28, in a purple nightgown,
her body covered in black soot, unconscious on the floor of her
third-floor apartment. Her eight-year-old son, Jovan Perkins, was passed
out in the stairwell, ravaged by second- and third-degree burns,
according to the police report.
Ambulances rushed them to the hospital. Brown-Johnson, who had been
working at the American Girl Place store on Michigan Avenue as she
pursued a degree in physical therapy, did not survive. Perkins, a second
grader, died later that night.
Firefighters and police immediately determined the fire to be
suspicious. The next day they found a plastic gas container inside a
garbage can in Palmer Park, across the street from the charred building.
On September 28, the medical examiner’s office ruled that both mother
and son had died of smoke inhalation and that, based on the police and
fire department investigations, their deaths were homicides.
However, the case was classified as a death investigation, not a
murder investigation, and the police did not include the two deaths in
their year-end homicide count. Nor have police caught the arsonist. “How
will I ever get justice if the case is not even categorized the right
way?” asks Austin Perkins, the boy’s father, a truck driver from
Hammond, Indiana.
Excluding Brown-Johnson and Perkins from Chicago’s homicide statistics
helped the September numbers clock in at 42 rather than 44. At this
point, the 2011 numbers were actually beginning to look beatable.
Through the first nine months of 2013, the department’s murder tally was
322, versus 317 for the same period two years before.
The breakthrough happened in October. On the last day of the month,
the 2013 year-to-date total was 352, versus 353 in 2011, by the
department’s count. McCarthy had edged out 2011 by just one number.
October 31 also marked Superintendent McCarthy’s annual budget hearing
before the Chicago City Council. He positioned himself in front of
three giant charts: a set of blue bars illustrating how murders had
dropped 20 percent over the past 10 months; a fever line plunging toward
“40-year lows” in index crimes, particularly murders; and another blue
bar chart highlighting a 15 percent drop in overall crime for 2013,
again labeled the “lowest level in 40 years.”
Aldermen, some wearing Halloween costumes, gave these numbers about as
much scrutiny as they had the epically disastrous parking meter deal.
The daylong session was essentially a love fest. “You’ve done excellent
work, and those charts say it all,” cheered Ariel Reboyras, alderman of
the 30th Ward, on the city’s Northwest Side. “I say, numbers don’t lie.”
Latasha Thomas, of the 17th Ward, which includes high-crime Englewood
on the South Side, encouraged McCarthy to dial up the good news. “I just
think your PR needs to be a lot better,” she said. “We need to be
shouting about what you are doing and not just throwing up these stats.”
“No doubt about it,” McCarthy replied.
But it wasn’t until the end of November that police leaders could
breathe more easily. The official year-to-date homicide count was now
376. With just one month of 2013 remaining, it now seemed a safe bet
that the total wouldn’t top 2011’s count of 435.
But why settle there? According to police insiders, McCarthy and his
deputies now hungered to reach a new goal: to keep 2013’s number of
homicides below 400, the lowest level since before Americans first
landed on the moon. “They wanted to really have the big headline,” says a
detective. Every homicide mattered. Including Patrick Walker’s.
Just after 5 a.m. on November 29, the day after Thanksgiving, a 2012
Chevy sedan with four men inside sped along a residential street in the
Pill Hill neighborhood on the city’s Far South Side. Driving conditions
were good: clear, no ice, no snow. Yet the car suddenly veered off the
road near the intersection of 93rd and Constance, sliding into the
opposite lane, clipping a parked vehicle, sailing over the curb, and
bashing into a light pole. It stopped only after hitting a tree.
When police got to the car, they found that the three passengers had
suffered only minor injuries. However, the driver, a 22-year-old named
Patrick Walker, was unresponsive, according to the police report.
Officers assumed that he had suffered serious head trauma in the
accident. An early case report from the medical examiner’s office said
that “brain matter” was found on the steering wheel.
The young man was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where he died two hours later. Police told the Tribune that “alcohol was suspected as a factor in the crash.”
Later that day, however, an autopsy showed that Walker had not died
from the accident. He had been killed by a single gunshot to his right
temple.
Interestingly, the Sun-Times had already reported that police
found one of Walker’s passengers, Ivery Isom, 22, with a loaded Glock 9
mm and a 20-round ammunition clip at the accident scene. Police also
found a bullet shell in the back seat, according to the police report.
(Isom was charged with two counts of aggravated unlawful use of a
weapon. He pled not guilty; at presstime, his next court appearance was
scheduled for April 28.)
On November 30, a pathologist deferred the cause and manner of
Walker’s death “pending police investigation.” That means the autopsy is
inconclusive until the police further investigate the circumstances of
his death.
Walker’s death certificate, filed with the Cook County clerk’s office,
says that he was murdered. No one disputes that he died from a bullet
in his brain. But at presstime—four months after the shooting—the public
record shows Walker’s case inexplicably classified not as a homicide
but as a death investigation.
That means, according to the department’s own records, Walker’s killing is not included in the city’s 2013 homicide total.
In mid-December, McCarthy and Emanuel called a news conference to
highlight the release of a report from a professor at Yale University.
It had found that Chicago was on track to have its lowest homicide rate
since 1967 and its lowest violent crime rate for nearly as long. “This
is not just 2013 against 2012,” Emanuel told the Sun-Times. “This is 2013 against the last 40 years. That is what is significant.”
Standing in front of a poster-size map showing the drops in overall
crime in all of the city’s 22 police districts, the mayor and the
superintendent then took questions.
“Have you changed the way you measure statistics?” one reporter asked.
“I don’t buy the premise of the question,” Emanuel answered and quickly moved on.
The reporter persisted: “Has the police department changed the way they measure it?”
“The answer is no,” McCarthy jumped in. “There’s something called a
Uniform Crime Report, which is the national standard by which we record
crime. So that’s the answer, no.”
Well . . . not exactly. Two weeks earlier, in fact, various media
outlets had reported details of an odd change in how Chicago’s police
department was counting “delayed homicides”—those in which there is a
time lag between injury and death. “To meet federal and state
guidelines,” the Sun-Times said, police reviewed all murders in
2013 and 2012. “Under those guidelines, a murder should be classified
in the year the person was injured, and not in the year the person
died.”
Huh? There were never any changes to federal guidelines, a FBI spokesman told Chicago.
The standards of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program make it
crystal clear that a homicide should be reported in the year of the
victim’s death.
Next we called the Illinois Uniform Crime Report—a one-person office
within the state police department that collects statistics from law
enforcement agencies in Illinois—to check whether the state rule on
delayed homicides had changed in 2013. The staffer told us that it
hadn’t; that delayed homicides in Illinois have always been counted in the year of injury.
Confused? So were we. So we e-mailed Adam Collins, the director of
news affairs for the Chicago Police Department. He e-mailed back: “In
late 2013 . . . CPD began working to bring the city into stricter
adherence with federal reporting standards. The Unified Crime Reporting
System dictates each agency follow their state reporting procedures for
federal reporting. According to Illinois reporting procedures, murders
where the injury and death occurred in different years are to be tracked
to the year of the incident, and CPD had for years been including these
incidents in the wrong year.”
However, every Chicago police leader, officer, and administrator with
whom we spoke says that hasn’t been the department’s practice. It’s not a
murder until the injured person dies, they point out. Before then, it’s
an aggravated battery. “CPD is interpreting the state guidelines
incorrectly,” says an expert source on Chicago Police Department
statistics. “It’s a numbers game.”
Welcome to the Dali-esque world of Chicago crime reporting.
No matter who you believe, it’s clear that the department did change
the way in which it counts delayed homicides—but only for the years in
which McCarthy has been in charge. It subtracted four murders from the
2013 total, according to Collins. And it subtracted seven murders from
2012, five in which the injuries occurred in 2011.
Did the department add back those five murders to 2011? It doesn’t
appear so. Remember that there were 435 homicides in 2011, according to
the 2012 year-end CompStat report. But at presstime, the City of
Chicago’s own public data portal listed only 434 homicides in 2011.
How is it fair to compare 2013’s homicide totals with those of years
before the department changed the rules of the game? It’s not, according
to John Eterno, a former NYPD cop and CompStat expert, now a professor
of criminal justice at Molloy College in Long Island. “You can’t compare
over the years when you do things like that,” he says.
All of this creative number crunching, former police officials say, is
a radical departure from past practices. Veteran members of the force
blame McCarthy. Muddling murder statistics “benefits no one but the
superintendent,” says the retired high-level detective. “Not the
citizens, not the investigators. It only benefits him.”
It certainly doesn’t benefit the victims’ families. “I cry many days
and many nights,” says Alice Groves, whose daughter Tiara has been dead
for eight months. “It makes me feel like they are trying to sweep this
under the covers. They want to look good. They want the city to look
good. But they ain’t thinking about the family who lost their loved
one.”
New Year’s revelry was still in full swing on January 1, 2014, when
the Chicago Police Department sent out an e-mail blast just after 2 a.m.
The subject line: “Chicago Ends 2013 at Historic Lows in Crime and
Violence, More Work Remains.”
Despite the measured tone of that last phrase, the chest thumping was
deafening: “fewest murders since 1965”; “lowest murder rate since 1966”;
“lowest overall crime rate since 1972”; “fewest robberies, burglaries,
motor vehicle thefts and arsons in recorded history.” And on and on,
percentage after percentage, statistic after statistic after statistic.
But try this: Add back the 10 cases Chicago found that, if
classified as sources say they should have been, would have counted as
homicides. (There may be more.) Add back the four homicides that
occurred on Chicago’s expressways. Add, too, the four delayed homicides
that the department had stripped out in December. What you get is not
414 murders in 2013, but at least 432.
What you also get is the kind of public record that every Chicagoan
deserves. Not to mention the knowledge that police are doing their jobs.
The killers of Tiara Groves, Tiffany Jones, Maurice Harris, Michelle
Manalansan, Millicent Brown-Johnson, Jovan Perkins, and Patrick Walker
may remain on the streets. As long as their deaths are not considered
homicides, that’s unlikely to change, detectives say.
Saddest of all, perhaps, the victims’ grieving families and friends
are left with the belief that the system is profoundly unjust. “I wake
up every day and I know my son and my son’s mom were murdered,” says
Austin Perkins, Jovan’s father. “I just don’t understand how police can
categorize it the way they are categorizing it. I just want answers. I
just want justice.
“You can’t go around setting buildings on fire and killing people and not be held accountable.”
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