“Crime is up in Chicago,” reports Center Square. But rather than hiring more police to fight crime, the city is spending $180 million on youth programs and “violence interrupters” (violence interrupters are often ex-inmates, some of whom go on to commit more crimes, or “ex-gang members who still” have “ties to current gang members.” They promote largely useless things like “restorative justice”). The progressive programs the city is spending money on are not cutting crime:
Republican state Rep. John Cabello said Chicago’s rising crime rate amounts to an indictment of the state’s present legal system and all its recent changes.
New data shows robbery, aggravated assault and aggravated battery cases across the city are all at five-year highs over the 12 months as the number of violent crimes overall have jumped by 7.2%.
“When criminals know that they’re probably not going to be held in jail because of the SAFE-T ACT [passed by Illinois’ progressive legislature] they’re going to be a little bit more brave in what they do,” Cabello told The Center Square. “The arrests are down because the police are too afraid to do their jobs. They need to get rid of the SAFE-T ACT, no cash bail but for low level offenses and go back to what we were.”
With arrests coming in just 1-in-18 cases over the last year, robberies, including coordinated attacks where specific businesses are targeted, also topped the list of most common violent crime at 36%. At the same time, batteries and assaults combined for an additional 57% of all such cases.
Overall, residents in the city reported 30,375 violent crimes from August 2023 through July 2024, as the felony arrest rate for such offenses dipped to just 12.8%, or the second lowest arrest levels over the last five years.
Chicago’s welfare and social spending won’t cut crime. Violent crime more than quadrupled in the United States from 1960 to the early 1990s, as welfare programs expanded, the social safety net grew, and black poverty declined sharply. Increasing someone’s income through government handouts doesn’t cut the violent crime rate at all. Conversely, crime often falls during recessions, when people get poorer. As the Manhattan Institute’s Rafael Mangual notes, “In New York, for example, the poverty rate in 1989 — the year before homicides hit a record-high 2,262 — was actually slightly lower than it was in 2016, the year before Big Apple homicides hit a record-low 292. And during the Great Recession, the national homicide rate actually declined by 15%, going from 5.7 per 100,000 in 2007 to 4.8 per 100,000 in 2010 — a period in which the civilian unemployment rate rose from 4.6 to 9.3 percent.”
Instead of spending money on handouts, Chicago should be improving and expanding policing to catch more violent criminals. Many criminals commit crimes with impunity in Chicago. Chicago solves only 47 percent of cases when a murder victim is white, 33 percent when a victim is Hispanic, and a wretched 22 percent of cases when the victim is black, according to NPR (a “no-snitching” mentality makes it harder to catch killers in some heavily black neighborhoods, where many of Chicago’s murders occur). By contrast, more than 90 percent of all murders are solved in Germany, which has a fairly low crime rate.
Thanks to crime havens like Chicago, the U.S. solves only about half of all murders. As a result of low clearance rates, “America incarcerates fewer people per homicide than countries like Australia, Japan, Switzerland, and Austria,” according data provided by Professor Justin Nix. America needs to incarcerate more killers and violent criminals.
As Joe Friday notes at DC Crime Facts, “One of the most basic and consistent findings in criminology research is that increasing the certainty that a criminal is caught is by far the most effective way to deter criminals for committing more crimes.” But low rates of catching criminals in the U.S. make punishment seem unlikely and uncertain, emboldening offenders to commit crimes in the belief that they will probably get away with it.
To catch more criminals, America may need to spend more on its police. Europe spends more of its economy on its police than the U.S. does (it also has a lower murder rate, less than half of America’s). As Daniel Bier notes, “As a share of GDP, the EU [European Union] spends 33% more than the US on police.” “European countries almost uniformly spend a much larger share on police than US states, though just how much larger varies wildly.”
Catching criminals and keeping them in jail lowers the crime rate, by keeping repeat offenders locked up where they can’t commit more crimes. The typical state prison inmate has five prior offenses, and they commit more crimes after you let them out: 81.9% of state prison inmates released in 2008 were arrested again within a decade. Letting inmates out early increases the murder rate: Most murders in Baltimore are committed by people who previously were convicted of a serious crime, but didn’t serve a lengthy sentence for that crime.
A peer-reviewed 2014 study in the American Economic Journal found that incarceration reduces crime through incapacitation. Studies also find that longer sentences also deter crime better.
When El Salvador increased its incarceration rate, its murder rate fell dramatically, and violence and crime fell enormously. Jailing more criminals saved thousands of lives in El Salvador.
