Homicides and street violence are up all over the United States. Nationwide, homicides numbers increased by 30 percent in 2020, according to the FBI, the largest increase since national record-keeping began in 1960. And numbers appear to be up in 2021 as well.
But Illinois is in another universe. Chicago reported 836 homicides last year, its highest number in 25 years. By comparison New York City had 485 murders and Los Angeles had 397.
As we know too well, homicides and shooting incidents in Champaign-Urbana were off the charts in 2021. Champaign reported 16 deaths and 259 reports of shots fired. Urbana had 10 deaths and 115 confirmed shootings. Just 10 years ago such numbers were unthinkable.
And Champaign-Urbana isn’t the only downstate community gushing insane gunfire numbers. Peoria’s 34 homicides last year, a local record, were more than twice as many as Champaign, which is about three-quarters the population of Peoria.
Springfield had “only” a dozen homicides last year — slightly above its five-year average — but it had 68 victims of gunfire and an astonishing 308 reports of “shots fired.” That was after the Gun Violence Task Force, an aggressive effort to recover illegal firearms, swept up 421 guns in Springfield, an increase from the 269 retrieved in 2020.
Rockford had 24 homicides last year, down from a record 36 in 2020. Danville had six gun homicides — but 37 victims of gun violence. Still, that was an improvement from the 55 shootings in 2019. Decatur had eight homicides — but 179 shootings, more than three times the number just five years earlier.
Although individual police departments are undertaking all sorts of efforts to control the explosion in street crime and gunfire — adding officers, engaging community groups, consolidating officers into gun violence task forces — the problem persists. Too many lives of too many young people in Illinois are being taken in unimaginable, inexplicable violence.
Although obviously a statewide problem, Illinois political leaders have been slow to respond. House Speaker Chris Welch, D-Hillside, last week spoke vaguely to Chicago radio station WBEZ about “some action on an anti-crime package” of legislation during this spring’s abbreviated session.
“One of the messages that we’re going to send out loud and clear this session is that we believe that if you do the crime, you should do the time,” Welch said. “We believe that police should be properly funded and trained and educated. But it’s going to take us all working together to make sure that we bring this violence down.”
Who would argue with any of that? Illinois needs something more thoughtful, more concrete, more substantial than that. And it needs it quickly before more guns flood into the state, more young people lose their lives and more older people flee Illinois.
In Chicago, according to a survey conducted for Crain’s Chicago Business, only about one-third of residents say they feel safe in their neighborhood. I suspect you’d find similar numbers in Peoria, Champaign and Springfield too.
This crisis has built at an inopportune time for Illinois Democrats, who figuratively have everything to lose in the November general election: every statewide office, control of the Illinois Senate and Illinois House and the Illinois Supreme Court. Losing all of those is out of the question but the times seem not unlike the 1970s when “law and order” was the unofficial Republican Party motto and the late Jim Thompson — builder of prisons and innovator of Class X felonies — started his record 14 years as governor.
Today, Democrats own all the corners of state government, which means they own all of Illinois’ problems too. This one is serious, widespread and focused in the urban areas where Democratic voters live. Those voters want to hear how guns will be taken off their streets, young people can go to school safely and neighborhoods will be freed from the threat of violence.
Tom Kacich’s column appears on Sundays in The News-Gazette. He can be reached at kacich@news-gazette.com.
