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This past Sunday in Chicago, a 32 year old man killed three people. What made this much more notable than the typical Chicago weekend killings:
The man was caught on video (extreme violence warning) executing his victims in cold blood at close quarters.
The victims didn't seem to be gangbangers, but rather family and friends of a 25 year old girl celebrating her birthday at a nearby bar where the dispute took place. One unscientific hint: the moment gunshots rang out, the victims' instinct wasn't to run or hide, but to attend to the earlier victims, gesture disbelief, and generally show no survival instincts.
The suspect was recently paroled after just 4 years in prison from a 2009 double murder in a home invasion. My quick search seemed to suggest that the 2009 case had some issues, either because he wasn't the one who pulled the trigger, or there was insufficient evidence to prove that he did. So he was allowed to plead down to home invasion and was sentenced for just 8 years.
The judge who sentenced the suspect for the 2009 case himself resigned in 2020 over allegations of sexual harassment. The linked article contains bonus culture war fodder, like how the ex-judge claimed that his "[unwanted] gestures of physical affection" were "part of his Colombian heritage".
IL's SAFE-T Act goes into effect Jan 1, 2023, and among other provisions, eliminates cash bail.
I'm curious how much national attention this will receive. My guess is not much. Chicago has had 660+ murders so far in 2022, or 13+ per week, so one man killing three isn't by itself remarkable. The aggravating factors above should light a match, but that they also go against the narrative will probably douse it instead. And now that we're just done with the 2022 midterms, there is no immediate political urgency to act.
My main point though is that I think society will trend toward more law-and-order as video surveillance becomes ever more ubiquitous. If this video didn't exist, no one outside of the victims' families will think twice about it. But because it does, it will surface and resurface across social media until the end of time, and no amount of narrative from academics and pundits will compete with the visceral viewer reaction that some people are simply evil and need to be locked up for life or executed. Perhaps one day we'll all be effectively wearing body cams if/when AR glasses become mainstream. I believe that future will spell a permanent end to the political expediency of criminal justice reform, at least in the way that opponents label it as being weak on crime.
Most Chicago gun violence has nothing to do with drugs. Even the gangbanger stuff is mostly because some guy talked shit about some guy on a rap video posted to YouTube.
My sense is that drug dealing doesn't usually involve shooting; it never gets to the point where someone owes 100k in drugs and someone needs to be shot.
Drug use, however, leads to lots of bad decisions. Alcohol is probably the worst in aggregate when it comes to escalating violence.
I think The Wire was accurate for Baltimore and back in the day their were wars over corners. I barely ever see a news story now that is something like that. It’s not like people don’t do drugs in NYC yet much lower murder rate than chi. And Miami obviously had some drug wars. And Mexico still has drug wars for turf.
Yeah, "The Wire" portrays the drug market structure of the period when David Simon was a beat reporter and not in the period it's actually set in. Control of "corners" is less relevant in the cell phone era when dealers can set meets with customers in a variety of locations rather than needing to hold down a single location to maintain contact. There was an interesting paper on this which relates cell phone tower density to murder rates and finds a strong correlation.
Do you have a link to the paper? I want to know if they controlled for population density, which I imagine would be a major confounder.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25883/w25883.pdf
I think I misspoke in the original post, they find that cell phone towers reduce murders. They're correlating murders per capita with a measure of antenna density for each county. They use the 1970's as a kind of "placebo" because cell towers were being constructed, with obvious non random relationship to population density, in preparation for cell service being offered but cell service wasn't being offered so it wouldn't have an effect on murder rates yet. They break the data down by decade in Table 4 and find no significant relationship in the 70's, a negative relationship that isn't borderline significant in the 80's, a negative coefficient that is significant in the 90's and a coefficient approaching 0 in the 2000's, which maps on to the theory of cell phone adoption altering the structure of the drug market significantly in the 80's and 90's and reaching saturation in the 2000's.
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