Ludwig offered a number of possible explanations, rejecting them one by one. It’s not that winters have been warmer, or that there’s been a sudden decrease in spending on social services, Ludwig explained. Indiana hasn’t gotten any closer to Chicago, so there’s no reason to suspect a sudden increase in the flow of illegal guns to the city. A decline in arrests? No, because while drug-related arrests have fallen, gun-related arrests haven’t. CPD pulling back on stop-and-frisk tactics in light of looming civil rights lawsuits? That doesn’t seem likely either, Ludwig said, given that New York has also scaled back such “proactive policing” yet hasn’t seen an accompanying rise in gun crimes. Ultimately, Ludwig concluded, researchers don’t really know what’s been causing this rise in shootings since December 2015, but he warned that we should be skeptical of too-simple explanations.
During the “Solutions From Social Services” panel, former U.S. Secretary of Education and Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan touted his work with the Emerson Collective to create jobs for at-risk youth, alongside Autry Phillips, who works on street-level violence intervention on the south and west sides, and Anuj Shah, a behavioral scientist from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Here too, there was a strange disconnect. No one asked Duncan whether he thought the city’s mass school closure of 2013—a strategy he pioneered in the early 2000s—had anything to do with the violence, even though community organizers throughout the city have repeatedly pointed to the closures as a serious contributing factor to neighborhood instability and gang feuding.
“Events like this are great, but the only way it will actually make a change is if the potential at-risk men were here,” he said looking around at the crowd—mostly older and white, the men in tailored suits and expensive loafers, the women holding designer purses. “I feel like that’s the only way we can see a change and some progress—if we invite the potential at-risk youth, the guys going through this stuff daily, who have to watch their back in their neighborhood.”
