Violence was already claiming more than its fair share of lives in parts of Chicago with large African-American populations. Then came Covid-19


On a recent Saturday morning at Springfield Avenue and Wilcox Street, residents wearing masks walked dogs past blooming red tulips.
A family stepped onto their porch with laundry bags stuffed with clothes to start a day of chores, just as a neighbour across the street arrived home with sacks of groceries.
Even with a blue and white Chicago police squad car idling nearby, it was hard to tell in that still, quiet moment that the neighbourhood is at the crossroads of two massive public health crises.
By the end of April, gun violence and the Covid-19 pandemic had claimed nearly the same number of lives in this part of town.
Eight men and one teenage boy had been shot and killed, while 11 others, mostly men, had suffered deaths blamed on the coronavirus.
A Chicago Tribune analysis of crime and Covid-19 infection data by zip code over roughly a month showed the highest rates of infection are happening in communities that also have high rates of crime and violence, such as Garfield Park, Austin, West Englewood and Lawndale.
“It’s prostitution. It’s drugs. Gun violence, and it’s the Covid-19,” said West Garfield Park resident Sylvia Hardy, who during 28 years has lost all of her three sons to violence and, recently, a 15-year-old grandson, who was shot and killed in April.
“If that don’t take out a community,” she said, her voice trailing off. “I mean, you looking the devil in the eye when you see all this. A person don’t have a chance.”
The spread of the virus, of course, launched a sweeping public health response: Social distancing and stay-at-home requirements were imposed.
Masks were distributed, along with public information flyers on how people could protect themselves.
Politicians, academics and experts describing violence as a preventable disease is hardly a new concept in Chicago, and perhaps to some the overlapping of zip codes was tragically predictable.
But some are hopeful that the efforts to protect Chicago from a global pandemic can also spark a similar public health response in the city around violence.
“Chicago needs to take a public health approach to the problem of violent crime,” former interim police superintendent Charlie Beck wrote last month, amid the Covid-19 emergency.
“Just as we universally sought to halt the progression of Covid-19, the people of Chicago should take the same approach to ending the gunfire that plagues too many of its neighbourhoods.
Violence in Chicago is everyone’s problem, just as Covid-19 is not just the concern of the elderly or the sick.”
Within a month of the pandemic’s onset, a troubling fact quickly emerged: Infection in Chicago’s African-American communities was disproportionately higher than it was for white residents, with a death rate that was six times greater.
And for anyone who follows Chicago’s struggles with violence, the story had a familiar ring to it.
These same communities have, for years, born the brunt of the city’s problem with gun violence.
The Tribune examination of both Covid-19 cases and crime data found a handful of communities that are fighting high rates of both the new virus and persistent violence, including homicides, robberies and shootings.
The analysis included Illinois Department of Public Health infection data, Chicago police crime data, and census records, all broken down by zip code.
The newspaper looked at the correlation between the data sets two times, once in early April and once in the first week of May.
The 60624 zip code, primarily the Garfield Park communities, for example, ranked third in the rate of infections among the city’s roughly 50 most-populated ZIP codes as the coronavirus was emerging.
It also has Chicago’s highest violent crime rate of 6.2 per 1,000 residents.
The zip code containing much of Austin, which ranked fourth in infection rate during the period examined, also had the fourth highest violent-crime rate of 4.0 incidents.
The zip code for much of West Englewood has a violent crime rate of 4.2, while ranking sixth for its infection rate.
The data also showed that the 60624 zip code has a high narcotics crime rate of 11.1 incidents per 1,000 residents.
The second highest, Austin, had a rate of 3.2.
As Chicago has come to grips with the reality that the coronavirus is taking its greatest toll in minority neighbourhoods, officials have attributed the disparity in infections to decades-old inequities in jobs and healthcare, leaving black Chicagoans with higher baseline rates of the underlying conditions that make the virus more deadly.
And some of the same realities affect the rates at which neighbourhoods suffer with gun violence, experts told the Tribune.
Young people growing up in extreme poverty and unstable housing, who lack healthcare, education and access to jobs, become vulnerable at an early age to being swept up in street violence.
“This is what inaccessibility to gainful employment and quality education means,” said David Stovall, a professor of African-American Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“If you have someone who has been historically dispossessed [of jobs, housing or education)], most crimes are done for survival. Often the narrative is they are bad people. We don’t take into account, this is a bad situation.” 
The focus on the belief that neighbourhoods are full of bad people, Stovall said, steers solutions away from solving underlying problems and too far toward law enforcement.
In Chicago, he said, that has led to overpolicing and civil rights abuses in these areas.
Beck, a nationally respected police leader credited with helping reduce crime dramatically in Los Angeles, bluntly acknowledged Chicago’s history of segregation and its economic fallout in his assessment of the city.
“The racial and economic divide in Chicago is staggering,” he wrote in a Tribune essay.”This leads to an enforcement and victimisation rate in communities of colour that eclipses their more well-off neighbours by a factor that should concern us all.”
Leaders going back to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr have warned against systemic injustice for years, said the Reverend Marshall Hatch, who himself has watched from his pulpit at New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church in West Garfield Park as generations fell victim to the violence and addiction.
And now he is seeing the newest threat, Covid-19, take hold.
With it has come a further cycling downward.
Job losses, a lack of adequate housing during stay-at-home directives, and the loss of loved ones, will likely make it worse, he said.
“We were already under stress,” said Hatch, who lost his sister to the pandemic. “We were already quarantined socioeconomically. This just adds another layer of anxiety. All of us are bracing for a potentially long, long, hot, hot summer.”
Like all Chicagoans, West Garfield Park resident Sylvia Hardy has adjusted to a new normal, staying at home to stay safe and, sadly, grieving the loss of friends to Covid-19.
Hardy’s loss to violence has happened far more slowly, unfolding over three decades.
“All my children died, as a matter of fact, in the order that they were born,” she explained to the Tribune in a phone interview.
Hardy’s first loss was in 1992 when her oldest son, Demetrius, 20, was shot while he was getting something out of a car.
Then, Hardy’s middle son, Lavelle, 30, was fatally stabbed in 2010 in a domestic incident.
In 2013, another son, Dennis, 28, was gunned down in front of her home in the 700 block of South Kilbourn Avenue.
Then, last month, Lavelle’s 15-year-old son, also named Demetrius, was shot and killed on her porch, again in front of her.
“I felt the pain of all three of my children again,” said Hardy, who is retired from work as a recovery specialist. “I don’t know if you ever experienced like, you have a wound that hasn’t healed.
And someone takes a nail, and just hit that wound, and hit it, and hit, and hit it, you know?”
While African-American men are dying from Covid-19 complications at higher rates than any other group in Chicago, gun violence poses a particular threat to young black males in Chicago.
Between 2014 and 2019, three out of four gun-related homicide victims in Chicago was an African-American male, and most of them were 23, according to data from the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
Their average age was 28.
Garen Wintemute, an epidemiologist and emergency room physician who runs the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California at Davis, said about 90% of all firearm deaths among African American men are from homicide — one of the most concentrated public health problems he has ever seen.
That disturbing fact, however, points to solutions, Wintemute said, saying evidence-based policies and programs need to be considered.
“The risk is very tightly concentrated, which means we can focus immense resources on a small population and make an immense difference,” he said.
Ulysses Polk, 66, ambled down the front stairs of his apartment near Springfield and Wilcox to clear out the back of his car.
It was a gray, blustery day, but the drug sellers were active over on Adams Street, waving to passing cars.
One vehicle ripped through the neighbourhood in front of Polk, the tires screeching.
“That’s what they do,” said Polk, a retiree and lifelong West Side resident. “The younger generation, they don’t care.
They figure in their mind they’re dying anyway.”
Polk said he thinks society and families need to be a little more strict with kids when they are younger.
He doesn’t understand why some as young as 11 and 13 are out late at night.
And while he appreciates the Chicago police squad car that typically is posted at the corner, he knows it just pushes the trouble to other blocks.
For years Chicago has been chasing its crime problem around the same neighbourhoods, never quite able to get a grip on it, like other large cities have.
And in the meantime, corners such as Springfield and Wilcox have remained problem spots for decades.
That’s why some say the inequities the pandemic is exposing should spur change and new visions.
“This is the moment to rebuild and infuse these neighbourhoods — that have constantly been on the losing end — with bold, audacious plans,”
said Rami Nashashibi, founder of the Inner-Muslim Action Network, a South-west Side community organisation that runs a health centre and also provides housing and jail and prison reentry services.
It reminded him of another time ambitious plans were undertaken. “This is a moment for a Marshall Plan investment.”
Though Chicago is still battling high rates of violence, the ground game on reduction already has changed in the past four years.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot created both an Office of Violence Prevention and an Office of Equity and Racial Justice, putting a new focus on both crime and disparities across the city.
A citywide violence-reduction strategy that now covers some 20 neighbourhoods was developed in a partnership between a network of nonprofit social service organisations, with key funding provided by the city’s philanthropic leaders.
The effort includes victim support, jobs and cognitive behavioural therapy.
It also put 165 full-time outreach workers on the street to do direct intervention with gang members, with part-time workers added in the summer to cover the city’s hot spots.
And in fact, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, it was street outreach teams who were among the first to respond, mixing hand sanitiser and working sources to find PPE to pass out to residents, along with food boxes and information flyers about the virus.
Deputy Mayor of Public Safety Susan Lee said the pandemic forced city agencies, along with civic and community groups, to spring into action quickly to address the outbreak, momentum she’d like to see continue with violence reduction.
“Even as somebody who is as immersed in violence reduction as I am, I wasn’t as persuasive in making that public health argument until Covid hit,” Lee said. “The emergency nature of this virus and the spread globally put us into crisis mode. We have not thought of crime as an emergency or a crisis. We have kind of become numb to the level of violence in Chicago, as if it normalised. My hope is the lessons from fighting Covid carry over.”  – TCA/DPA