Max Schanzenbach: In debate over ShotSpotter and police in schools, remember victimization

Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson want more gun control to reduce violent crime. But attempts to address gun violence through law enforcement regularly meet with allegations of racism. Without question, gun sting operations, officer stops, foot pursuits and enhanced penalties for gun crime have a disproportionate impact on Black and Hispanic residents. When these disparities are highlighted, politicians push back on enforcement. It is a vicious cycle. Criminal law requires enforcement. But enforcement’s disproportionate impact on minority communities generates a backlash.

This cycle is playing out in Chicago right now. The city is about to drop two policies largely based on allegations of disproportionate racial impact. Having police in schools, the Chicago Board of Education recently decided, leads to racially disparate outcomes. Thus, the police must go, even if parents and teachers at an individual school want them to stay. ShotSpotter, a passive surveillance technology that identifies the location of shootings acoustically, leads to more interventions in minority neighborhoods. Johnson has said ShotSpotter must go, despite the objections of his chosen police superintendent.

Looking at the racially disproportionate costs of enforcement is only half the picture. To assess racial disparities in enforcement, we must also understand racial disparities victimization. In Cook County and Chicago, racial disparities in victimization are truly astonishing.

Who dies a violent death in Cook County? The raw numbers are readily available in public use format from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s death certificate data. Between 2020 and 2022, “assault” was listed as the underlying cause of 2,889 deaths in Cook County, and Black and Hispanic residents made up about 95% of those deaths. Compared with these totals, there were 20 deaths in the same period resulting from “law enforcement action.” Serious nonfatal assaults are likewise racially lopsided. In the pandemic years, Chicago averaged more than 3,000 nonfatal shootings a year, declining last year toward a more “normal” 2,400. About 97% of the victims of these firearm assaults are Black or Hispanic.

Violent crime is highly concentrated among prime-aged males, ages 15 to 45, so it is worth looking at their experience in Cook County. Doing so reveals a very grim picture. Between 2020 and 2022, the death rate from assault for non-Hispanic white prime-aged men was 5 per 100,000. For prime-aged Black men, it was 263 per 100,000. The 2023 CDC data is too preliminary at this point to be definitive, but fortunately, Cook County homicides may have declined by about 15% last year from the prior year.

The years 2020 through 2022 were truly awful years for violent crime. But even if Cook County homicides should decline to the 2019 rate, a Black 15-year-old boy in Cook County would have more than a 5% chance of dying from violence before his 45th birthday. The comparable pre-pandemic risk for a white 15-year-old boy in Cook County is around 0.10%. I am aware of no other racial disparity that is as dramatic as these differences in victimization.

Who gets punished in Chicago? The glib answer is very few. The arrest rate for all serious violent crimes, including nonfatal shootings, hovers around 10%. For shootings when someone is actually killed, the Chicago Police Department claims a clearance rate of 50%, but in recent years, charges are approved in only about 25% of homicides, according to a Sun-Times analysis published in 2022. The awful fact is that the vast majority of serious violent crime in Chicago goes unpunished.

It has long been known that serious violent crime is committed within racially homogeneous social networks. The uncomfortable truth is that disparities in enforcement and disparities in victimization are simply two sides of the same coin. Better enforcement will reduce victimization disparities. Indeed, last year, the National Academy of Sciences commission on reducing intergenerational poverty assessed the best evidence on law enforcement and recommended more police in violent neighborhoods, tougher gun penalties and community policing strategies as part of a broad set of policies to reduce disparities in violent crime.

Our community does not have to be like this. Some large urban areas, including New York City and Los Angeles, have far lower victimization rates than that of Chicago.

I completely agree that pernicious racial disparities in law enforcement exist in Cook County and Chicago. The Chicago Police Department has a problem with bad officers who are not effectively disciplined or removed from the force. They can do a lot of damage that falls on Black and Hispanic communities. Police collective bargaining agreements allow seniority preferences in assignment. The result is that the most experienced police officers patrol Lincoln Park and other relatively safe neighborhoods while the least experienced police officers — and hence the least effective and most mistake-prone — are in high-crime neighborhoods. I applaud Johnson and the City Council’s pushback on the most recent collective bargaining proposal. But abandoning ShotSpotter and school police does nothing to address the lack of police accountability, which is rooted in Illinois’ public sector employment laws.

There are technical challenges and critiques of ShotSpotter. But in light of the astonishing levels of violence I’ve discussed here, I would defer to the CPD superintendent who believes it is a valuable tool and should be kept. I understand that having police in schools comes with costs and benefits. For that reason, I’d defer to the wishes of local communities dealing with high levels of violence. But abandoning a policy, especially a passive detection system such as ShotSpotter, on the grounds that it produces or exacerbates racial disparities in enforcement can be grounds for abandoning any intervention.

Almost any effective enforcement policy results in group differences in arrest and prosecution rates. But any effective enforcement policy will disproportionately benefit those same groups.

Max Schanzenbach is the Seigle Family professor of law at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law.

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