By Mark Konkol and Frank Main
SunTimes Media
CHICAGO — Over a 72-hour span on Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, gunfire claimed the lives of a dozen people. Another 45 were shot and wounded.
It was another in what’s become a steady stream of violent weekends in Chicago. The figures are startling: Through June, the number of murders was up 37 percent over the same period last year.
Police Supt. Garry McCarthy is on the hot seat. His key strategy — putting more cops back on the beat — has been called a failure by some.
Now, McCarthy is preparing to roll out a new tactic. Social scientists who have studied murder say they’ve gotten to where they can predict who is most likely to become a homicide victim. McCarthy wants to take that further, with plans to have his officers study criminals’ social networks to identify likely killers before they kill.
“It’s going to change the way we do police work,” McCarthy said.
There’s no single cause for the spike in murders, experts say. Over the Memorial Day weekend, the people who died were killed for a wide range of reasons, a Chicago Sun-Times examination found. A common thread, though, was that some victims had criminal records or were related to people who do.
Andrew Papachristos, who teaches sociology at Yale University, returned to Chicago, his hometown, to do the research McCarthy has embraced. Papachristos looked at murders that occurred between 2005 and 2010 in West Garfield Park and North Lawndale, two low-income, West Side neighborhoods. Over that period, Papachristos found that 191 people in those neighborhoods were killed.
Murder occasionally is random, but, more often, he found, the victims have links either to their killers or to others linked to the killers. Seventy percent of the killings he studied occurred within what Papachristos determined was a social network of only about 1,600 people - out of a population in those neighborhoods of about 80,000.
For those inside the network, the risk of being murdered, Papachristos found, was about 30 out of 1,000. The risk of getting killed for others in those neighborhoods was less than one in 1,000.
“It thus appears that murder in these communities occurs in a very small world where the victims are just a few handshakes away from each other,” he wrote in a paper last year titled “The Coming of a Networked Criminology.”
McCarthy wants to tap the same social networking analysis techniques to identify potential killers.
Police brass will cross-reference murder victims and killers with their known associates — the people projected as most likely to be involved in future shootings.
“Hot people,” McCarthy calls them.
Those deemed most likely to commit violence will be targeted first: parolees and people with outstanding arrest warrants. McCarthy said his staff estimates there are 26,000 “hot people” living in Chicago.
“That means there are about two of those bad guys for every one of our officers,” he said. “So take that concept of ‘hot people’ policing, and drop that on top of ‘hot spot’ policing, which we’re already doing.”
It hasn’t been tried before.
“We have to keep trying new things to stay ahead of the bad guys,” McCarthy said.
Copyright 2012 SouthtownStar