Editorial: Learn from New York how to curb Chicago gun violence

Follow @csteditorialsWhatever New York City is doing to keep people from killing each other, it’s working, and Chicago had better start paying attention.

In 2016, murders in Chicago soared to 762, by one count, while homicides in New York — already ridiculously low by comparison — declined to 335. The difference should shame Chicago. New York, a city with three times the population, had 56 percent fewer murders.

On Wednesday, officials in New York credited their city’s most recent drop in homicides to a focused crackdown on violent gangs, which Chicago officials insist is also happening here. But if so, it ain’t working as well. Gang-related killings in New York dropped to just 79 last year, while gang-related killings in Chicago rolled up to about 460.

New York cops made about 900 “precision policing” arrests in 2016 to take down gangs, but it’s questionable whether Chicago has been as committed or focused. And while part of the aim in New York is to lock up dangerous people, the program there also includes intensive social services. Here, too, Chicago looks to be falling short.

Assisting in the New York effort is a concerted effort by local prosecutors, using the best police intelligence, to identify those people who are really causing the most mayhem in a community. By pushing “intelligence-driven prosecutions,” as the concept is called, the New York District Attorney’s Office strives to be less reactive — simply prosecuting whomever the cops pick up — and more proactive, identifying which offenders are the biggest menace to a neighborhood and making sure they don’t slip through the cracks when next arrested.

The Cook County state’s attorney’s office should do the same.

At bottom, though, the biggest explanation for the huge disparity in murder rates between New York and Chicago continues to be our very different gun laws. As Mayor Rahm Emanuel has said, every day the Illinois Legislature fails to pass a law increasing penalties for gun crimes, it is letting down Chicago and the entire state.

We strongly support a bill, expected to be introduced in this legislative session by Sen. Kwame Raoul, that would pressure judges to send repeat gun offenders off to prison for many more years. Judges who impose less than the “presumptive minimum” for repeat offenders — likely to be in the vicinity of 7 years — would be required to explain in writing why they went easy.

That guns are at the heart of Chicago’s soaring homicide rate is made clear in a new report, to be released next week, by the University of Chicago Crime Lab. While Chicago’s homicide rate from guns last year was five times higher than New York’s rate, our city’s homicide rate from weapons other than guns was just barely higher than in New York — less than one percent. Chicago is not a more violent town, that statistic suggests, but it is swimming in illegal guns. Ninety percent of all homicides involved guns.

The report also throws cold water on the argument that Chicago’s surge in homicides in 2016 can be blamed on the police pulling back after a series of scandals that called attention to the problem of police misconduct. Though the police did make fewer arrests, they made about the same number as in previous years for violent crimes.

Gun offenders in New York State are locked up for a minimum of three and a half years, but the average first-time gun offender in Illinois is detained for less than a year, and repeat offenders serve less than two years.

Do longer prison sentences for gun crimes bring down homicide rates? Yes, we believe so, based in part on findings by the Crime Lab. A threat of serious prison time can, in fact, discourage people from walking around with a gun illegally, and that can make all the difference. A great many homicides in Chicago, according to the new Crime Lab study, are “arguments that turn deadly in the moment because a gun is at hand.”

When one person feels free to carry an illegal gun, undeterred by soft criminal penalties, others feel the need to carry a gun, too. As Jens Ludwig, director of the Crime Lab, told the New York Times last May, “People carry guns in public because other people are carrying guns. It’s literally an arms race, a vicious cycle.”

We can list a dozen other explanations for Chicago’s high death toll from guns — poverty, racial and economic segregation, too few cops on the streets, unemployment, the easy flow of illegal guns from out of state, rogue suburban gun shops that will sell to anybody, philanthropists who care more about pretty downtown parks, a decline in state and city spending on social services and schools, and on and on.

But to blame everything is to blame nothing, and all explanations are not equal. So today we’ll go with this:

Chicago needs smarter policing, and we could learn from New York. Chicago needs a Cook County state’s attorney’s office that is more proactive. And Chicago needs a much bigger hammer in the form of tougher sentencing for gun crimes.

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