Will 2014's 'Bloody Easter' weekend supplant the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago lore? Blood on the Streets of Chicago... Mayor Rahm Emanuel -- and other city officials including the police chief -- continues to manipulate crime (and especially murder) data
What is starting as a bloody week in Chicago as at least 23 people have been shot since Monday, April 28, 2014. Those shot included a 14 year old girl murdered over a Facebook posting. In now what has become a public record of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s manipulation of crime data (as was exposed by the Chicago Inspector General and Chicago Magazine) the mayor continues media manipulation and playing with statistics. Substance News has taken a quick look at the Chicago Tribune’s website documenting homicides in Chicago and found that homicides are actually trending up from January 2014 to April 2014.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (left) and his police chief Garry McCarthy (right) claimed in the first month of 2014 that because of their work the murder rate in Chicago was "down." During each of the next three months it went up again, despite attempts by city officials (and the Hollywood propaganda film "Chicagoland") to claim that Rahm had made Chicago safer.Some readers may recall that in January 2014, Mayor Rahm Emanuel took to the podium to declare that murders had gone down, and standing with Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy took credit for it. But a quick look at the statistics for the first four months of 2014 shows that January was the only month that had fewer murders than 2013. In other words, Chicago murders in 2014 are trending up -- not down.
April may have turned out to be one of the cruelest months in Chicago history as far as gun crime is concerned. On the last day of the month, readers of the Chicago Tribune learned that the gun used to murder a 14-year-old girl on the city's South Side was brought to the murdered, another young girl, by a relative who was in a wheelchair because he, too had been shot. And Easter Weekend was dubbed "Bloody Easter" by some in the press.
Homicides Chicago
Jan 2013 (44) Jan 2014 (24) => 45% decrease
Feb 2013 (14) Feb 2014 (22) => 57% increase
March 2013 (19) March 2014 (25) => 24% increase
April 2013 (24) April 2014 (30) => 25% increase
(http://crime.chicagotribune.com/chicago/homicides)
Despite the statistics as recently as Sunday, April 27, the Chicago political spin team was still saying homicides were down. Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy told WGN Radio this week that Chicago's homicide rate is "still ahead of where we were last year, which was a record." The city's homicide rate is still trending downward, according to the police chief. (Murder Rate is Down, CNN, 4/25/14). It also looks as if CNN is going to continue presenting Rahm's version of the news as fact. See the story at the very bottom of this article to get the official version of Chicago's murders from the same people who brought you "Chicagoland."
Looking at the Tribunes’ Homicide reports they did not include Monday’s murder of 14 year old Endia Martin. This begs the question of not only official reporting malfeasance, but media mendacity and manipulation of crime statistics.
References
The Truth about Chicago’s Crime Rates (2014) David Bernstein AND Noah Isakson. Retrieved 1 May 2014, from http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/May-2014/Chicago-crime-rates/
Chicago Police Department Assault-Related Crime Statistics Classification and Reporting Audit (2014) City of Chicago Office of Inspector General. Retrieved 1 May 2014, from http://chicagoinspectorgeneral.org/uncategorized/chicago-police-department-assault-related-crime-statistics-classification-and-reporting-audit/
Fudging Chicago Crime Numbers (2014) Chicago Tonight, WTTW, Retrieved 1 May 2014, from http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2014/04/07/fudging-chicago-crime-numbers
Despite bloody weekend, Chicago's murder rate is down, police chief says (2014) Escobedo, Tricia. CNN, Retrieved 1 May 2014, from http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/24/us/chicago-violence
14-Year-Old Girl Charged With Murder in Fatal Shooting of Chicago Teen (2014) Winograd, D. TIME.com. Retrieved 1 May 2014, from http://time.com/81126/chicago-teen-murder
http://heyjackass.com
http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com
CNN VERSION OF MURDER STORY AS APRIL 2014 ENDS.
(CNN) -- If you read the headlines out of Chicago this past Easter weekend -- more than 40 shot, including nine killed -- you might be surprised to learn that the city's homicide rate is still trending downward, according to the police chief.
Yes, that's right: Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy told WGN Radio this week that Chicago's homicide rate is "still ahead of where we were last year, which was a record." The number of homicides in Chicago last year dropped to 415, compared to 503 in 2012, an 18% drop. That lower level hasn't been seen since 1965.
"A week doesn't wipe out two years of progress," McCarthy told WGN Radio's Steve Cochran in an interview Monday. "We always knew that we're going to have good days and we're going to have bad days, we've just got to make sure we're having more good days than bad."
But does a lower murder rate really matter in Chicago, where such rampant gun violence has earned the city the nickname "Chiraq"?
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"People always say, 'I don't feel much better, even though shootings might be down by 40%,'" McCarthy told CNN. "Well, the reason for that is kind of simple. If you have 10 shootings in your neighborhood last year, and you have six shootings in your neighborhood this year, do you feel 40% better? Absolutely not."
There are some Chicago neighborhoods -- poorer, less educated, predominantly African-American and infested with gangs -- that have murder rates 10 times higher than other Chicago areas.
McCarthy says the news coverage of shooting incidents like the ones that took place last weekend doesn't paint a complete picture of the police response.
"We are getting out in front of a lot of shootings," the police chief told CNN. "It's hard to see success sometimes when you have a spate of shootings."
Chicago's gun violence typically heats up as the temperature rises, so the police department has banked some overtime to deploy more officers to the city's trouble spots.
In the meantime, McCarthy is using the unwanted attention around the bloody Easter weekend to push legislators to pass gun control laws that he says will help police turn things around in Chicago.
"It's just insanity that there's such a proliferation of firearms that they're so easy to get your hands on," McCarthy told WGN Radio on Monday. "The studies show when there's more restrictive gun laws, there's less gun violence. It's not brain surgery, it's really really simple.
"It's going to take us a while to fix poverty and the break-up of the family units and education and jobs. But we can do something about gun laws today and we're just not doing it."
That may be an uphill climb: In February, a federal judge struck down Chicago's ban on gun sales, saying it went "too far in outright banning legal buyers and legal dealers from engaging in lawful acquisitions." And in 2010, the Supreme Court declared Chicago's 28-year-old handgun ban unconstitutional.
Making it even more difficult, last year, Illinois became the 50th state to allow its residents to carry concealed weapons after a veto from its governor failed to kill the legislation.
McCarthy may get some limited help from the feds at least in keeping repeat criminals off the street: the office of newly appointed U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon announced Monday the creation of a violent crimes section to focus on how to more effectively use federal statues to prosecute those behind Chicago's gun violence, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Shortly after Rahm Emanuel took over as Chicago's mayor in early 2011, he brought in McCarthy, who had previously led the police force in Newark, New Jersey. A year into McCarthy's term, he was hailed as a hero.
Then, the city's homicide rate skyrocketed at end of 2012 and there were calls for McCarthy's resignation.
As the murder rate started to drop, those calls abated -- but Chicago's police and city leaders, particularly Rahm Emanuel, still face a lot of criticism for not doing enough.
Opinion: It's not Emanuel's fault that Chicago is divided
McCarthy, a regular on CNN's original series "Chicagoland," has admitted that the city "has one of the worst, most difficult, most intractable gang violence problems in the country."
And he's made it clear that his top priority is "dealing with gangs, guns and the press."
"The media, they keep talking about the rising toll of gun violence in Chicago while the numbers are going in the other direction," McCarthy said last year.
CNN's George Howell and Jen Christensen contributed to this report.
