Last month, I expressed some skepticism about a new study cited by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that blames something called the “ACLU effect” for the 2016 spike in homicides in Chicago. The theory is that an agreement between the city and the civil liberties organization resulted in fewer stops and stop-and-frisks by Chicago police, which caused an increase in violence. You can read the post to see why I don’t find that convincing.
So what did cause the increase? And why hasn’t crime dropped in Chicago the way it has in, say, New York?
One interesting difference between the two cities is that New York doesn’t have anywhere near the gang violence that Chicago does. About a decade ago, a study by the Justice Policy Institute offered a reason for that. The interventionist, public-health-based approach adopted by New York in the 1970s and 1980s was simply more effective than the heavy-handed suppression approach in cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles. “The evidence that punitive responses to youth crime do not effectively increase public safety mounts,” the authors concluded. They recommended “implementation of evidence-based practices to treat young people who are in conflict with the law” and urged that “funding for such programs should be routed through the health and human services system, where they have been proven to be more effective than in the criminal justice system.”
[For more on this story by Radley Balko, go to https://www.washingtonpost.com...m_term=.add8c2504641]
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