Progress Illinois

Speaking off the cuff, then-State Senate President Emil Jones said back in 2006 that "dropping out of high school was an apprenticeship for prison.” A Chicago-based education organization commissioned some research on the claim. And after combing through recent census data, the Alternative Schools Network (ASN) reports (PDF) that youth who dropout of high school are actually 63 times more likely to end up behind bars or in a state institution than their peers who graduate from college. Not surprisingly, young black male dropouts between the ages of 16 and 24 are disproportionately affected -- a stunning 23 percent wind up in prison, compared with between 6 to 7 percent for Asians, Hispanics, and whites.

We've highlighted report after report about Illinois' growing student achievement gap, which has become one of the worst in the nation. The high school dropout problem is an equally disturbing trend. In Chicago, for example, more African-American males leave school (55 percent) than graduate (40 percent). Statewide, the dropout rate hovers around 30 percent. As ASN's Jack Wuest told WBEZ, this is contributing to the youth violent that has been making headlines as of late:

If you look at the people who don't commit violence who are young people, they're the ones who are engulfed in the good schools and relatively good communities, those kind of conditions help prevent youth violence and we need to build the communities with decent jobs for the adults.

By continually failing to reach even basic school funding targets, Illinois lawmakers have contributed to the problem.

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An ad circulating online could be one of the nastiest slams against Barack Obama yet to surface. Run by the conservative National Campaign Fund, it attempts to blame the one-time Illinois state senator -- who supported Chicago's handgun ban and denounced the state's capital punishment procedures -- for three 2001 Chicago murders. The ad then asks: "Can a man so weak in the war on gangs be trusted in the war on terror?" (Video after the jump.)

The allegation of causality in these ads is ludicrous, to say the least. For one, the evidence that capital punishment is a deterrent to violent crime is shaky at best. And in Illinois, the state's death penalty laws were notoriously fraught, which Obama himself helped reform while in the statehouse. Thirteen people were released from death row because evidence had turned up that proved they were innocent or that their convictions had been tainted, leading to a justifiable moratorium that still stands.

Secondly, Chicago's murder rate actually declined while Obama was in Springfield, dropping from 789 homicides per 100,000 residents in 1996 to 448 in 2004. Attributing the drop to Obama's legislative efforts doesn't tell the whole story, of course; but the policies he and his colleagues pushed certainly didn't hurt.

Of course, this ad wasn't designed to present a rigorous analytic argument. It was created by Floyd Brown, the man responsible for the reprehensible "Willie Horton" ad against Michael Dukakis in 1988.

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Yesterday's "Tuesday Commentary" on WTTW's Chicago Tonight went toTribune columnist Dawn Turner Trice, who voiced her hope that Chicago police will "step up" in the face of the city's rising violence without resorting to brutality. She also took aim at Mayor Richard Daley's ridiculous statement last week that fear of unfair media coverage has made officers timid, calling this suggestion "nothing short of shameful." Watch it:

Also of note, in a Sun-Times op-ed last Sunday, Chicago activist and journalist Jamie Kalven (full disclosure: he's my father) responded to Daley's remarks:

It is a first principle of our democracy that public officials in whom we vest substantial power must be subject to public scrutiny. This principle applies every bit as much to the police officer on the street as to the high government official.

We give the police great powers -- to arrest and detain, to use force, and, under certain circumstances, to kill -- and we allow them considerable discretion in performing their duties. Public scrutiny is the necessary antidote to abuses of those powers.

For Daley to suggest that officers must be sheltered from core democratic principles in order to show up for work is a diservice to both the police and the communities they serve.

During his marathon session before a City Council committee yesterday, Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis suggested that many of his officers were not doing their jobs properly in part because of intimidation:

"I have heard from many officers that there is a degree of timidness -- that people are not maybe as engaged as they should be because of fears of lawsuits, fears of [complaints registered] being put against them by criminals and by other folks who are just trying to impugn their integrity," the superintendent said.

Mayor Richard Daley came to Weis' defense today, unleashing a nasty rant directed at local media for sensationalizing poor police conduct. Here's an excerpt:

“Remember how long you kept beating the police? That affects them. They’re human beings. They can’t take it." [...]

“This is a very difficult, challenging job and they’re always afraid of beefs because, once they get a beef, you [reporters] write about it. [You say], ‘He has 25 C.R. numbers [complaints registered], all unfounded.’ You say, ‘Why? This fella must be a problem’. And you find out most of them are gangbangers and dope dealers [who] filed charges. And they didn't show up in court or adminstrative hearings. [Yet] you write about it….You beat em up pretty good. Now, you want to be their friend.”

But while Daley's remarks suggest that reporters have ready access to the "C.R. numbers," this isn't the case at all. In fact, the only way the press or citizens can gain access to a specific officer's record of complaints is if a case works its way through the criminal courts and this information is offered as evidence. That is the entire point of the effort by 29 aldermen to gain access to a list of 662 officers with over 10 citizen complaints, which the city is fighting to keep private.

So Daley appears to be railing against a level of transparency that doesn't actually exist.

But that's not to say it shouldn't exist. Indeed, this ongoing lack of oversight sends an awful signal to Chicago citizens that the CPD and other leading city officials don't have their backs, particularly after years of neglecting to address the humans rights abuses taking place right under their noses.

UPDATE: WBEZ has the audio of Daley's press conference. 

As a young teenager, Jeone Thadison used to sneak out and shoot dice with local drug slingers to help his mother pay the bills. These days, the 19-year-old is playing it straight, having landed a job at a local Boys and Girls Club. But as Chicago Public Radio's Eilee Heikenen-Weiss detailed yesterday, many young Chicagoans aren't having the same luck securing summer employment:

THADISON: Everybody filled out the KIDSTART application, but everybody didn’t get a job.

Although the city’s KidStart budget has increased through the years, the program will still turn down the majority of applicants this summer. Mary Ellen Caron is the commissioner of the Department of Children and Youth Services.

CARON: 40,000 young people applied, and in our program, there are 18,000 jobs. So there will be 22,000 who applied that will not have a job through our program.

Andy Sum, the Director of Northeastern’s Center for Labor Market Studies, estimates the figures nationwide are at a historic nadir. Only 34 percent of the nation's teens will be able to obtain some type of employment during the June-August period, the lowest summer employment rate in the last 60 years.

Unfortunately, a proposal by congressional Democrats to create 1 million new summer jobs for young people has stalled. Meanwhile, Gov. Blagojevich's plan to spend $30 million on a summer jobs program aimed at employing young people between the ages of 15 and 22 hinges on the adoption of a capital bill, which looks unlikely for the time being.

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Eight Chicagoans and one suburbanite lost their lives to gun violence this weekend -- depressing news on a holiday weekend. But for some inspiring reading on the topic of violence prevention, check out Don Terry's moving profile in the Chicago Tribune Magazine of Diane Latiker.

Miss Diane, as she's called, has turned her house on the border of Chicago's Roseland and West Pullman neighborhoods into an after-school community center called Kids Off the Block for at-risk youth or beyond risk teenagers:

Five years ago, Miss Diane, a former construction worker and hairdresser, decided to do whatever she could to help keep Roseland's teenagers alive.

What she did was remarkable. She opened her heart and her front door to other people's children whether they were on the honor roll or hardcore gang members who had dropped out of school. It is the latter that she is particularly committed to reaching. Explaining this focus, she says: "No one is interested in working with the shooters, the so-called bad kids. Their minds are wired for the streets. We're talking about kids who don't even trust the ground they walk on."

She turned the living and dining rooms of her modest home on the first floor of the family two-flat into KOB. She, her husband and their 17-year-old daughter, Aisha, live in the back of the house. The KOB members and Miss Diane's family share the bathroom.

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In the third installment of his five-part series, Tracy Siska of the Chicago Justice Project takes a look at the recent local media coverage of the anti-violence program CeaseFire. He concludes that the "public has been denied a serious and rigorous discussion" on the issue of whether to reinstate CeaseFire's state funding:

It is very important for the media to be ever vigilant about the so-called “effectiveness” of programs. We live in a city where just about every program has been bastardized or corrupted entirely. The media has a responsibility to seek out alternative voices to check what officials are telling them about the program is correct. Skogan and the researchers at Northwestern are famous for their pro-police and official program biases. Does this automatically invalidate any research done by the authors, maybe not. What it should do is force journalists to treat the results skeptically and seek out alternative ways to validate their results. It is pretty clear that along with [Tribune columnist] Eric Zorn and [journalist Alex] Kotlowitz both of the major dailies’ editorial boards also drank the cool-aid.

The supporters of Ceasefire were looking for validation in the way of the “independent study” from Northwestern and they gobbled up the results. The problem is that the study did not come down from the heavens but instead was authored out of Northwestern. This is the same group of authors that repeatedly validated the CAPS program, Chicago’s Alternative Policing Strategy.

The public has been denied a serious and rigorous discussion about the issues surrounding reinstituting the funding for Ceasefire because media failed to do its job.

The Chicago Justice Project's Tracy Siska has published the second installment of his five-part examination of the anti-violence program CeaseFire. In this post, he scrutinizes the federally-funded report by Northwestern University's Institute for Policy Studies which found that CeaseFire significantly reduced the number of shootings in six of seven Chicago neighborhoods.

Siska critiques both the report's methodology and the decision to make the results public without first being peer-reviewed:

This report made no attempts to control for the impact of external issues on the level of violence. The Chicago Police Department and Ceasefire are mutually claiming influence for the crime drops in the areas that Ceasefire worked in. Maybe they both had an impact, maybe just one did, or maybe the crime reduction, (if there is one), is due to a still undetermined extraneous variable that the academics, the police, and Ceasefire administrators have missed. Other agencies have been involved also, including the US Attorney’s Office and their Project Safe Neighborhood. [...]

This evaluation is loaded with assumptions that have not even been close to validated by this study or any other study. This is why researchers should not release research to the general public before the social science community gets a chance to assess its credibility.

Read the whole thing. Also, check out our previous posts on the CeaseFire debate here.

In several posts this month, we've highlighted the growing interest in the Chicago-based anti-violence program CeaseFire. The renewed attention on the program is the result of several factors: a study released by Northwestern University examining its efficacy, a New York Times Magazine article on its tactics, and of course, the bloodshed on Chicago streets. All this recently culminated in state lawmakers taking up the program's cause in Springfield.

Yesterday, in the first of a three-part series scrutinizing CeaseFire, Criminal Justice Project President Tracy Siska countered the hype with a look at the state audit that led Gov. Blagojevich to strip the program's funding in 2006. Siska makes clear at the outset that he is not critiquing the premise of CeaseFire, which employs former gang members to act as on-the-ground intermediaries in violent neighborhoods. Rather, his criticism is aimed at the dysfunctional administration of the program and the media's failure to examine that factor properly:

One of the goals of the Chicago Justice Project is to enhance public discourse on issues where an open public discussion has been lacking or on issues where the discussion requires a greater degree of factual evidence. Nowhere is this more needed than in the discussion to re-fund the antiviolence program Ceasefire. [...]

In today’s installment I will dig into the results of the state audit and discuss why the findings are serious enough to prohibit future funding of the project with the current administrators of the program in place. My critiques of the program that are contained in this series are not in any way meant to be an attack on the notion of hiring former gang members. Those that have survived the urban gang experience have much to contribute to any solution that communities will find to gang violence. My critiques are also not aimed at the belief that local community driven agencies are not to some degree part of the solution. Rather, I argue that centralizing the funding through the Ceasefire program may not be the best way to get antiviolence funding to these communities.

(Click "Read More" to continue ...)

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The Economist swoops into Chicago and analyzes the region's lackluster response to the city's recent spat of gun-related violence:

April's violence has inspired new plans, some more helpful than others. The ineffectual governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, announced on May 6th a $150m scheme for which there is no $150m. Chicago's police chief intends to make residents feel safer by sending out SWAT teams in full battle gear. More promisingly, Mr Daley wants to keep pools and parks open late and offer more teenagers summer jobs. This will help keep more children busy and out of harm. But it will have little effect on the most violent.

What's the best course of action? John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor David Kennedy tells the magazine that the most effective deterrence plans combine outreach to gang members (alerting them of available services) and severe disincentives for violence. Project Safe Neighborhoods, run through the Department of Justice, is one such program:

Chicago's PSN includes tough gun policing, federal prosecutions and—most important, or so researchers found—meetings with former felons to deter them from returning to crime. Over PSN's first two years, the districts it targeted saw a 37% drop in quarterly homicide rates.

But while the Tribune praised PSN in a 2005 editorial and a 2007 research paper found it to be successful at stymieing murders, it's remained largely underutilized, only operating in six of the city's 25 police districts. Sens. Durbin and Obama are pushing for increased federal funding and other legislators at the state and federal level serious about reducing street violence should join their call to broaden the plan's scope.

(h/t Beachwood Reporter)