Chicago Votes for Crime

Bad news from the Windy City. Joe Barrett reports for the WSJ:

Brandon Johnson, a Cook County Board commissioner with strong backing from the Chicago Teachers Union, pulled off an upset victory over former schools chief Paul Vallas to become mayor of the country’s third-largest city after a contentious race focused on public safety.

The Associated Press called the race with 99% of precincts reporting. Mr. Johnson was ahead 51.4% to 48.6%, a margin of nearly 16,000 votes.

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The two runoff election candidates sketched out starkly different visions for how to restore public safety in a city where crime surged during the Covid-19 pandemic and the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020. Even as the murder rate declined last year, other crime rates continued to rise, bedeviling [outgoing Mayor Lori] Lightfoot’s re-election campaign.

Mr. Johnson, who also had support from other public-sector unions, wants to hire or promote 200 detectives and focus on addressing the root causes of crime. Mr. Vallas, who was backed by police and firefighters unions and the business community, had pledged to fill more than 1,000 police vacancies to get more officers on the street.

“Addressing the root causes” is a mirage, but it is one that people continue to fall for time after time. The promise that government anti-poverty programs would reduce crime via root causes was used to sell America on President Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s. Among the wonderful, crime-reducing innovations was to clear out privately owned tenements and replace them with massive government-run housing projects. It was a catastrophic failure, as “the projects” became more intensely crime-ridden than what they replaced. Crime rates soared in the two decades that followed. See this post for links to articles on this subject.

The evil twin to the “root cause” mirage is the rehabilitation mirage. Rehabilitation programs can help at the margin. Most prisoners convicted of serious crimes will either go straight or return to crime (mostly the latter) regardless, but I do not doubt that a few on the fence may be helped by properly conceived and well-run programs. But anyone who thinks that massive changes in recidivism rates will result from programs is dreaming. Corrections officials have been questing for this Holy Grail since the Quakers invented the penitentiary nearly two and half centuries ago, and it hasn’t been done yet. See Elizabeth Berger’s post on the CCJ report, under the heading Recommendation 11, for a summary of the current state of the research contrasted with the wildly optimistic claims being made.

The government policies with the most direct and substantial effect on crime rates are (1) effective law enforcement that increases the probability of getting caught, (2) “broken windows” policing according to its original vision and not the zero-tolerance perversion of it, and (3) adequate punishment of those who commit major crimes, providing deterrence and incapacitation. The long-term solution to achieve a low-crime society is to build a culture of personal responsibility with respect for the law and the rights of others. Government alone cannot do that.

There was cause for hope when Chicago voters dumped Mayor Lightfoot, but those hopes are now dashed. The city is in for more of the same, wrapped in a better package perhaps but with little difference in substance.