Steve Gates has spent the last two years making Chicago's Roseland community safer through his nonprofit street outreach group. He worries the progress could be lost after a grant runs out in January. “It’s like an inflection point,” he says of his clients. “They are attentive and usually they want change. If we’re not able to do that, then I fear retaliatory shootings. I fear regression. I fear hopelessness resurfacing.” Gates’ nonprofit Reimagining Roseland Community Collective is one of several small violence prevention groups funded by federal grants issued during the COVID-19 pandemic. As that grant money dries up, Gates and other nonprofits worry about how they will continue their work amid signs of progress. The city may end this year with under 600 homicides for the first time since 2019. Murders have decreased 29% compared with 2021, and most types of other violent crime also continue to fall. “We’ve now had two once-in-a-lifetime homicides spikes in Chicago” in 2016 and 2021, says Kim Smith of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. “We can’t take for granted we’ll continue to experience decreases, especially after we had two historical increases.”
Shootings and murders are down 7% compared to 2023, according the Chicago Police Department. That’s less than the national average murder decrease of between 10% and 15% over the past year. Riverdale on the Far South Side hasn’t logged a murder all year, a significant improvement in an area targeted by violence prevention outreach. Not all neighborhoods are seeing progress. Little Village and some North Side neighborhoods have seen a dramatic increase in violent crime, which Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling attributes to an increase in gang conflict and shifting crime patterns. Snelling, wrapping up his first full year as superintendent, hopes to increase the downward trend by giving more autonomy to district commanders to fight crime specific to their neighborhoods — where many outreach groups are already active.
“There is no one-size-fits-all strategy in the city of Chicago,” Snelling said. “Our commanders have been stepping up and coming up with these strategies to deal with these problems, and they’ve been effective.” The biggest takeaway is that the “sky did not fall” as some critics of the Pretrial Fairness Act predicted, said Loyola University Prof. David Olson. His research has shown the law increased the time judges are taking to consider whether to hold someone in jail pending the outcome of their criminal court case. The Cook County Jail population has risen slightly after bottoming out at the beginning of 2024, and the number of people being held on home electronic monitoring has fallen since the law was implemented.
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