-------------------- Murders in Illinois jump by 10% -------------------- Chicago Tribune 30 June, 2002, Page 1 Violent crimes up in many suburbs By Eric Ferkenhoff, Darnell Little and David Mendell, Tribune staff reporters June 30, 2002
Homicides rose by 10 percent in the state, to 986 in 2001 from 898 the previous year. Chicago reported 666 of those murders, making it the country's deadliest city last year. New York had 24 fewer murders.
The news for Chicago and Illinois wasn't all bad. Chicago experienced reductions in every other major crime, according to the Illinois State Police annual "Crime in Illinois" report.
Because of its sheer size, the city led Illinois to an unprecedented seventh straight year in which fewer crimes were reported to police. "Crime in Illinois" tracks reports of eight major crimes: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault and battery, burglary, theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson.
Homicides were up last year in Cook, Lake, DuPage and McHenry Counties, while they were down in Will and stayed the same in Kane. Statewide, 29 counties reported an increase in homicides, 19 reported a decrease, and 54 had the same number of slayings as in 2000. Of the 88 additional murders tallied in Illinois, Chicago accounted for 35.
Last week, the FBI said that major crimes jumped 2 percent across the country last year, and murders rose by 3 percent.
Some criminologists and sociologists have theorized that crime is intertwined with the health of the economy, and they pointed to the economic downturn to help explain the upturn in violent crime. Many suburbs that experienced more reports of violent crime have struggled economically in recent years.
Such was the case in suburban Cook County. U.S. Census data released earlier this month showed that Cook suburbs failed to keep pace with the rest of the region economically in the 1990s, lagging behind in median household income and home values, as poverty levels inched up. Meanwhile, violent crime has risen sharply in suburban Cook, up 8.4 percent from 1999 to 2000, and up 2.4 percent in 2001.
"The city and suburban distinction with regard to crime is slowly disappearing," said Arthur Lurigio, a criminologist at Loyola University Chicago. "The suburban areas now have some of the same problems that the inner cities had 10 to 20 years ago. We now have some pockets of extreme poverty in Cook County that resemble some of the poorest and most blighted areas of the city."
In suburban Cook County, every category of violent crime except rape showed at least a slight increase from 2000 to 2001. The collar counties fared similarly, as the increase in the number of murders, rapes, robberies and assaults went up almost 3 percent.
Criminologists don't give the flagging economy sole responsibility for higher crime, however. They also posit an "all crime is local" hypothesis--that each community has its own special circumstances that can affect crime.
Wesley Skogan, a Northwestern University criminologist, said there has been an obvious shift in crime, both here and nationally, but it may be too early to pinpoint exact reasons for the change.
The long and steady drop in crime during the 1990s, which researchers have tried to explain as a result of a strong economy, more prison inmates and tougher laws, "remains one of the great mysteries of our time," Skogan said.
"This year it came apart a little bit," Skogan said. "The uniformity of the decline ... that seems to have gotten a little unhinged. It's gotten a little more disorderly."
For example, Boston and Los Angeles saw increases in nearly every major crime, but crime fell across the board in New York.
Despite the increases in violent crimes in the Chicago area, the 2001 numbers are far below their levels in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the most violent period in modern American history as the economy struggled and the crack epidemic raged.
Even Cook County suburbs that experienced a substantial increase in reported crime last year--Schaumburg was up 10 percent, for example--still had far fewer reported crimes in 2001 than in the early 1990s. The number of murders in Illinois reached 1,383 in 1994. Crime levels began falling precipitously in the mid-1990s as the economy rebounded into a period of massive growth.
Yet experts said they are concerned about the 2001 violent crime numbers, especially in the suburbs. Some theorize that suburban areas are assuming social characteristics once associated with cities as they become more densely populated, leading to an increase in violent crimes.
Some older suburbs are losing wealth as their housing stocks age and drop in value. That, in turn, attracts newcomers with lower incomes. Meanwhile, housing costs in the city are rising as neighborhoods gentrify, pushing out people of low and modest incomes.
Lurigio said the urbanization of suburbia has dampened the notion that finding safety and order is as simple as moving to the suburbs.
"Poorer people aren't moving into the city; they're moving out of the city," he said. "Affordable housing is leaving the city along with poorer people."
Still, wealth alone does not make a community safe, and experts warned against viewing all of suburbia as a monolith, especially in the diverse Chicago region.
But money can make a community more stable in a number of ways. It can result in higher performing schools and a better-educated population, and those qualities generally foster commercial growth, enhanced housing conditions and better policing.
Demographically, Chicago and its suburbs are becoming more alike than ever, some experts suggest. Just as Chicago has neighborhoods of extreme wealth, like the Gold Coast, and areas of poverty, like Englewood, the Cook County suburbs have affluent Winnetka and impoverished Ford Heights.
Taken as a whole, the gap in economic disparities and education levels between Chicago and its suburbs closed somewhat in the 1990s, according to a report released last week by demographer John Logan of the State University of New York at Albany.
The difference in per capita income between Chicago residents and suburbanites closed to about $19,000 during the 1990s, down from more than $21,000, according to Logan's research. Those results can be linked to gentrification sweeping through many city neighborhoods and professionals swarming into new high- and low-rises around downtown, demographers have said. It also bolsters the poor-being-pushed-out theory.
The 2000 U.S. Census revealed that suburban Cook County, unlike most of the region, struggled economically through the 1990s, and there's little indication that the fiscal health of this part of the region picked up in 2000 or 2001.
Many suburbs with high rates of violent crime had high poverty rates and below-average median household incomes, according to the 2000 census. Most of these were south or near west suburbs, such Ford Heights, Robbins, Riverdale, Maywood and Stone Park.
Yet there are exceptions.
In Burr Ridge, for example, violent crime went up, but so did its fiscal health in the 1990s. In Lake County's Gurnee, median household income and home values increased substantially in the 1990s, but the rate of violent crime rose to an average of 8 incidents per 1,000 people last year, up from 2.5 per 1,000 the previous year.
Looking into the near future, Northwestern's Skogan said there is cause for concern.
Not only has the economy worried investors and dropped financial markets, but many of the criminals incarcerated during the 1990s are being freed and heading back to their old haunts, he suggested.
The number of male young adults, who commit a disproportionate number of crimes, is rising as "the third echo of the Baby Boom" ages, Skogan said.
High immigration levels in the 1990s also could play a role. Skogan said the economy of the late 1990s was strong enough to easily absorb new immigrants, who he said were "swallowed without a burp." In difficult financial times, it may not be so easy to find jobs for immigrants, many of whom seek low-wage, entry-level employment.
Crime experts and law-enforcement officials caution against reading too much into crime statistics, because in small communities, a slight change in crime can skew crime rates substantially.
Officials acknowledge the numbers can sometimes be flawed. Illinois State Police officials last year said they had used inaccurate population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau to calculate crime statistics in the mid- and late 1990s, rendering them invalid. For 2001 numbers, the state police did not use population estimates and calculated rates based on 2000 census findings.
There is one statistic, however, where the cause and effect seems clear: hate crimes against Arab-Americans. In 2000, there were nine hate crimes reported in the state targeting people of Arab descent; in 2001, there were 49. The report does not indicate how many of those occurred after Sept. 11.
Copyright (c) 2002, Chicago Tribune