Mayor Lori Lightfoot has two issues to deal with simultaneously and urgently when it comes to what transpired over the lousy past weekend downtown in Millennium Park, where a 16-year-old boy was fatally shot near the sculpture colloquially known as The Bean.
One issue is the aching reality of the loss of life of a 16-year-old Chicagoan and the moral obligation to prevent further killings of young people. The other is the growing perception of violence in downtown Chicago and its impact on how people feel about their downtown and how willing they are to spend time and money there.
Reality and perception are not always the same thing. But they are related. Even if the perception of danger doesn’t match the data, as some like to point out, the rolling tides of perception empty the streets of law-abiding citizens in the evenings, making downtown feel less safe and increasing the opportunity for crime. That cascading chain is like a giant snowball rolling down a hill, getting bigger and bigger as it gains energy.
Perception that the city is careening out of control is why it’s becoming clear that the post-COVID-19 recovery in Chicago is lagging that of other major U.S. visitor and business destinations, as the heads of two major hotel chains noted Monday.
Take, for example, what many people saw when they came out of the theater or their restaurant Saturday night: a great intertwined line of police officers engaged in a kind of riot control. Many people took to social media with that sight, indicative of their unease even if it was, arguably, effective police action against what was unfolding in Millennium Park.
To put the issue bluntly, Lightfoot’s problem now is making downtown actually safe while also simultaneously soothing stakeholders and fighting the business-killing perception that it is unsafe.
The symbolism of where this homicide took place only adds to Lightfoot’s problems. Both the free-to-enter park and the touch-friendly Anish Kapoor sculpture are places of immense cultural pride for Chicagoans who see their beautiful city as a cultural and artistic mecca, filled with wonderful free attractions for summer tourists and local residents alike. Not long ago, we were writing about the summer pleasures of splashing in the Crown Fountain. We’re aware now that many readers would not want to take that risk with their kids.
One thing that the late John Bryan and the other benefactors who came together to create this great family park in 2004 did not anticipate was Monday’s prevailing online headline shorthand: “Millennium Park shooting: …”
On Sunday night, Lightfoot announced that she was banning unaccompanied teenagers in Millennium Park on weekend evenings, prompting wise heads to note that such a blanket move would probably do little more than move the so-called “large group events” elsewhere, such as to North Avenue Beach or Michigan Avenue. That, at least, was the lesson of a similar tactic put into place at the Water Tower shopping mall, a move that wasn’t good at all for the health of the now-ailing mall.
By Monday, Lightfoot also had moved up the evening curfew for Chicago’s teenagers from 11 p.m. to 10 p.m., presumably as a tactic to give police further justification to get kids causing trouble off the street. The implication of these moves, of course, is that parents should be taking greater responsibility for knowing whether or not their kids are at home.
There is some truth to that and also any number of issues with both decisions. One is the sweeping nature of the regulations, punishing an entire demographic for the actions of a few, making it technically illegal for, say, two 17-year-old girls to go see the musical “Six” together and then linger over a post-show ice cream on a bench.
That is ridiculous in a city that seemingly has abandoned trying to keep 17-year-olds out of 21-and-over bars, and it would be nearly impossible to enforce. That inevitable lack of widespread enforcement, of which teenagers are well aware, makes the move all the more absurd. Unless it is to be applied to all teens, which is hardly fair, it will merely be a discriminatory tool. Most teenagers do not go out at night intending to commit crimes and that includes the majority of the teens who were in Millennium Park on Saturday night.
But when it comes to gang-affiliated teens, the story changes. Well over half of homicides in Chicago are gang-related. If you employ the term “gang-adjacent,” meaning criminal acts that aren’t a direct consequence of gang activity but are somehow related to gangs, that figure rises even higher. Those two statistics are the core of the problem that Chicago now faces.
We are reaping the consequences of our collective failure to stem gang membership and to prevent young people from committing heinous crimes as a consequence of that activity. That has been going on for a long time. What appears to have changed this spring is the variety of neighborhoods being affected has grown.
And that means those who are frustrated with the difficulty of solving this problem can turn to the much easier task of arguing over which neighborhoods matter most, as if that will have a long-term impact on anything. This is not a zero-sum game; the city’s future is at stake. The gangbangers have to be defeated.
At an event held by the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab last week, a retired police officer noted the difficulty of stopping the first homicide in an altercation, but also the far better chance of using effective policing strategy to stop the second. And the third. And maybe even the fourth.
We’ve written many times about the various things that have to happen to reduce violent crime: better arrest clearance rates, which means greater trust of police within communities; the arrest and prosecution of violent offenders and their removal from the streets; fresh policing ideas that are smart, nimble and rooted in service; more supervision for teens; providing a sense of hope for the future that can wean away gang members from a life all too likely to end in death.
Somehow, at the same time, Chicago police have to radiate a sense of safety for those spending a summer evening downtown, without making the Loop appear to be in crisis or under siege. That means friendly cops on foot, conversation, a sense of calm and control.
As we now are seeing, effecting that change in perception is near-impossible to pull off when the reality is as bad as it currently appears to be.
But that’s the dual task ahead of our mayor and her struggling police superintendent.
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