Tag: crime

By Mike Koetting November 25, 2025

Today’s post focuses on fighting gun violence in Chicago, although the issues have national resonance.

The good news is that Chicago gun homicides have decreased significantly since their recent peak in 2021. This is true in most of the nation, but Chicago’s rate of decline was greater than the national average. This is not, of course, due to Operation Midway Blitz, as the Trump administration has ridiculously claimed. It was under way well before then and links in part to specific actions taken in the city and state.

It is still too high. The loss of life and disruption to the community is, and should be, unacceptable. It is also a political problem because ”crime” is a major issue for many voters, even if they aren’t keen on the Trump approach

Accordingly, we need to better understand what is happening.

Larger Environment of Gun Violence

Ludwig Jens is a U of Chicago professor who has studied gun violence extensively. I think he is basically right when he says most gun violence is not as a result of any rational calculation, but stems from ill-thought out, emotional reactions. Stricter punishment laws are not likely to make a difference. Rather, the degree of gun violence is a function of factors that operate together—the availability of guns, the overall stress of poverty, and various deterrent factors.

Availability of guns in Chicago is a mixed bag. On the one hand, Illinois has adopted relatively stringent laws to narrow the availability of guns—requiring reporting from private sellers; banning ghost guns, assault weapons and high-capacity magazines; and strengthening red flag laws. It is likely that these have made a difference in gun availability. On the other hand, there are already a very large number of guns in circulation. It will take a long time for this supply to diminish significantly. Moreover, Illinois is an island surrounded by states with very loose gun laws. A significant percentage of recovered crime guns were purchased out of state.

Jens is understandably pessimistic that America will actually adopt meaningful gun reform on a national basis, so the effect of individual state laws will always be compromised to some extent. He is likewise pessimistic that America has the wherewithal to really make major dents in poverty, and, even if the will and politics were present, it would take a long time for the consequences to be reflected in street-level behavior.

All of which underscores the importance of deterrence efforts. Two major efforts in Chicago have contributed to the overall decline in homicides. A third possibility, economic development to get more people on the street, a correlate of reducing crime, has not yet had as much impact.

Violence Interruption

The first of these efforts, which get most of the most attention, is the substantial investment in violence interrupters. Violence interrupters are people with “street cred”—often former gang-members or ex-convicts—who patrol hot-spot neighborhoods and insert themselves to prevent emotional reactions and retaliations from boiling over into violence. Chicago was one of the early proponents of this process, starting more than 20 years ago. (Some of the early work has been reflected in a moving documentary from 2011, The Interrupters.) Over the years the investment has increased, both from government and from private sources, most strikingly a recent $100 million commitment from a group of civic leaders.

As a consequence of these investments, there are several organizations that either have substantial networks or serve as an umbrella for smaller organizations providing these services. Overall, they are now observing more than 200 hotspots around the city and close-in suburbs. This also includes monitoring social media since some of this violence has roots in social media spats.

There are many accounts of how this works. A Northwestern University study found violence dropped 41% in hotspots targeted by peacekeepers and 31% in neighborhoods they patrolled over the past two years. It is hard to ascertain how much of this drop is specifically due to interrupters as opposed to other factors, but all observers are comfortable they are part of the solution.

Additionally, there are organizations that work with victims of violence. These include some of the same groups that sponsor interrupters and some more specialized groups, such as Chicago Survivors that coordinates with police to respond to all homicides in Chicago. This entails working with families of victims and helping with grief—and with immediate needs for this difficult period. They also provide clinical services for children and youth who have been traumatized by the murder of a family member or friend.

Improved Policing

This has not necessarily involved more draconian policing. It has focused, instead, on coordination and information.

The centerpiece of this effort is a joint task force that brings together 11 law enforcement agencies including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Chicago Police, the Cook County State’s Attorney, the FBI, DEA, and others. The task force meets every day and reviews information on all guns used in crime in Chicago. Assigned personnel analyze access multiple databases to establish connections to other gun crimes and patterns of use. This information is used to assist in ongoing criminal investigations or prosecutions, establish patterns of gun trafficking and related crimes, and ensure the data is getting incorporated into national data bases to feed into other efforts. This has resulted in numerous arrests, such as the recent arrest of 41 people and recovery of a large number of guns.

John Schmidt, a former Associate US Attorney General who oversaw implementation of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, and remains active in violence prevention work, says this is a level of coordination and activity that Chicago has never previously experienced. Not to overstate the obvious, but this daily, fine-grained work is diametrically opposite to the blunt, bravado induced PR stunts of the Trump administration.

Another Problem—Switches

In the middle of this progress, a new problem is emerging—“switches.” Switches, as many of you know, are small devices—about the size of an ice cube—that can be inserted in Glock handguns to turn the gun into a virtual machine gun. The results are lethal. Not only can a Glock with a switch fire 100 rounds in 5 seconds, the rapidity of the fire destroys the accuracy of the gun. For instance, a shooting outside a Chicago night club in July resulted in hundreds of rounds, four deaths, and wounding of 14 others, many of whom were not involved in the feud between two rappers that seems to have sparked the shooting.

Although technically outlawed as machine guns, they are widely available. It is apparently possible to order them through the internet. (Simply entering “buy switch for gun” in Google yielded several sites that said they would sell switches. I didn’t pursue it any further, so they may have been “switch bait”—so to speak.) Because they are easily hidden and transported, they are available on the street. When the 41 people were swept up in the investigation described above, authorities also confiscated 64 switches.

Glock has responded to the swirl of law suits and bad PR by creating a new line that it claimed would not accommodate switches. It is too early to tell for sure, but internet chatter suggests that the while the new design makes it marginally more difficult to install a switch, it is far from impossible, as the manufacturer originally claimed.

In short

There is definite progress on reducing gun violence in Chicago. This is encouraging. But much remains to be done. Not only is the absolute level unacceptable, but it also remains high relative to, say, New York or Los Angeles. My guess is that continuing to improve policing, particularly the coordination of policing and prosecuting resources, will yield the most short-term gains.

Longer term, economic development is critical. I also think that working with young people to help them develop coping mechanisms other than violence is a good investment.

It is unfortunate that America remains so wedded to guns. Part of this is an ideological obsession that is tied into all kinds of other issues. Part of it is a classic arms race problem—”the other guy isn’t disarming”. The latter is particularly thorny because there are already so many guns in circulation and they do not wear out quickly. All of this is made worse because the gun industry is a non-trivial part of the American economy, generating over $90 billion in revenue and perhaps as many as 400,000 jobs.

Regrettably, the American fascination with guns is not likely to go away. So we will have to continue to play “whack a mole” as old issues remain and new ones, like switches, emerge. We are never going to get the violence rate down to comparable countries, but we have seen we can do better. We simply have to do more.