40,000 homicides: Retracing 63 years of murder in Chicago

1960s Chicago was marked by turbulent change with the number of homicides nearly doubling from the start of the decade to its end.

Population declined for the first time in the city's history. Some civil rights protests turned violent as the city's fraught racial history was on full display.

Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrated on Aug. 5, 1966, with 700 people on behalf of open housing. After being hit in the neck with a rock, King said, "I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I've seen here today."

On Dec. 4, 1969, at 4:45 a.m., Sgt. Daniel Groth knocked on the front door of a tattered two-flat on Chicago's West Side. Another six officers were at the back door. Inside, nine people slept in the first-floor apartment, where 19 guns and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition were stored. This apartment, at 2337 W. Monroe St., was a stronghold of the Illinois Black Panther Party, a branch of a national group known for revolutionary politics and for killing cops.

When there was no answer, Groth knocked with his gun. The next seven minutes of gunfire became one of the most hotly disputed incidents of the turbulent 1960s. After the shooting stopped, Illinois Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, 21, and a party leader from Peoria, Mark Clark, 22, were dead.

In the angry controversy after the raid, police maintained they were justified in opening fire, but the Panthers saw the raid as a pretext for killing Hampton. The Tribune became part of the uproar when it published a photograph showing holes in a door jamb that it identified as coming from bullets fired from inside the apartment. They proved to be nail heads.

Months later, a federal investigation showed that only one shot was fired by the Panthers, although that number remained in dispute. Police fired 82 to 99 shots.

Mayor Richard J. Daley's plans for expressways and high-rise public housing uprooted black families from their homes in the 1950s-60s promoted segregation. Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko's 1971 biography of Daley, "Boss," claimed the route of the Dan Ryan Expressway was shifted to reinforce the border between Daley's native Bridgeport and primarily black neighborhoods to the east.

Due to an increase in gang violence, the Chicago Police Department youth unit started a gang intelligence unit in 1967. The decade saw a spread in drug abuse and easy access to handguns, Watkins said.

Growing joblessness also was becoming an issue, Hagedorn said. Along with the population decline, factory jobs had begun to level off. Following 1963, the number of homicides climbed each year until 1969 at 716.

1974 remains the city's deadliest year in six decades with 970 homicides. The year was marked with sensational headlines from the start.

On Jan. 3, an 81-year-old man suffering from dementia shot and wounded an officer before police returned fire and killed him. Less than two weeks later, a school principal was killed, allegedly by the 14-year-old son of a policeman. The boy, who was upset about being transferred, also allegedly shot and wounded three others. In early February, Chicago police Officer James Campbell was shot in a robbery attempt. The father of five died eight days later. In mid-March, three elderly people were killed in an apartment in an apparent burglary in the 1900 block of North Clark Street. A sergeant on the scene called it, "the cowardliest sort of crime." In early June, a North Side doctor was stabbed to death, allegedly by his 50-year-old son, and that same week police hunted an ex-convict suspected in a triple slaying in the 5700 block of North Winthrop Avenue.

What was going on? The nation's social net appeared to be tearing apart. The Tribune published a three-part series on the homicides in January 1975 that found, in part: "Police and criminologists express chagrin at what they see as a change in the nature of homicide, long thought to be something that mostly happens indoors among people who know each other, and on hot summer nights."

"There are more senseless, irrational killings," First Deputy Police Superintendent Michael Spiotto told the Tribune for the series. "There are more cases of murder for which we can't determine any motive."

Today, experts point to many factors for the homicide epidemic. The nation was in the middle of a recession in 1974, but that could only have exacerbated a murder rate that had jumped before the economic malaise hit. Unemployment remained a problem, Watkins said, as the drug problem grew. He said police attempted to increase staffing and training but low pay was a problem.

In terms of street violence, "super gangs" were competing with one another citywide over colors and drug markets, not just on local corners, Hagedorn said. Gang-related homicides grew over the second half of the decade. More high-ranking gang members were sent to prison, causing them to form alliances for protection: Most street gangs belonged to one of two broad alliances, the "Folks" and the "People."

Though homicides fell after 1974, they remained around 800 a year through the end of the decade.

"There were killings in the '60s," Chicago Police Department Cmdr. Edward Pleines told the Tribune in 1984, "but gangs at that time were not as violent overall. There is more killing today over a larger area."

Pleines' quote came in a Tribune story that detailed 97 gang homicides of young people ages 11 to 20. The Tribune's coverage was under the headline "Year of slaughter on city streets." Those 97 contributed to 748 homicides that year. The total dropped slightly from the 1970s but remained high.

The city passed a strict new handgun freeze in 1982 banning further sale and registration in the city. The shootings of Pope John Paul II and then President Ronald Reagan contributed to anti-handgun efforts in the city and suburbs.

The emergence of crack cocaine added to the volatile mix. Meanwhile, the Folks and People coalitions broke up, Hagedorn said, and gang conflicts were about to send homicide numbers soaring.

Homicides soared to 920 in 1992, the highest number since 1973.

"I think that it is not a coincidence that crack cocaine came at the same time that our homicide numbers shot up," Chicago police spokesman Kevin Morison told the Tribune in 1998.

Another expert told the Tribune that same year: "The increase in homicides can be explained by an unstable drug market. There was a lot of competition for the crack market from the late '80s to the 1990s in the inner city community, and that led to a large number of homicides," said Arthur Lurigio, then chairman of the criminal justice department at Loyola University Chicago.

Territory was a major driver of gang violence in the 1990s.

As the city began to demolish its high-rise public housing projects, people -- including gang members -- were displaced. This meant drug-selling gang members were forced to live in areas already claimed by other gangs, which caused conflicts. In the early 1990s, gangs battled not just each other over territory, but in-fighting among members also occurred, according to a 1996 report by the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority.

The violence spread wide. Sixty-two children were killed in gang violence in 1993 -- including 7-year-old Dantrell Davis, who was shot by a sniper while walking to school with his mother.

Homicides began to decline in the later part of the decade. With gang leaders isolated in supermax prisons, their control was taken away. Hagedorn says the turn from a high-profit crack market to a lower-profit marijuana market also played a role.

Chicago had the highest number of homicides in the country in the early part of the decade, though the turn of the millennium saw numbers continue to fall from highs in 1990s.

In 2004, the number of homicides fell below 500, the first time in 40 years. "There are still too many shootings, there are still too many murders," then Police Superintendent Philip Cline told the Tribune in 2004. "But I never dreamed we'd be this low this year."

However, in pockets of the city, the violence didn't let up. One of the drivers of the violence, CPD's chief at the time told the Tribune in 2007, was coping with tens of thousands of ex-convicts who were paroled back to the city every year and rejoined the narcotics trade.

The techniques police used were evolving -- using data to fight crime. In 2003, Chicago changed its approach to fighting violence, adopting a model similar to New York's CompStat program, which analyzes crime statistics to help determine where officers are needed most. Another approach was the department's Targeted Response Unit, which migrated from neighborhood to neighborhood, taking over gang turf where conflicts were flaring to reduce crime. In 2006, Chicago police lead an effort to improve the underlying social conditions in communities with at-risk youth -- a novel public safety tactic. In Englewood, community leaders were praised for unifying neighbors through block parties, meetings and other gatherings.

Following several high-profile police scandals, Jody Weis -- an FBI veteran who became the first outsider named to head the tradition-bound department in more than 40 years -- was hired as Chicago police superintendent in 2008.

A troubling rise in homicide in 2008 was followed by a drop in 2009. "I said at the end of the year that 2008 was the year of transition," Weis said at the time. "I (expected) 2009 to be the year of results."

The early 2010s saw some of the lowest homicide totals in decades, but violence exploded in 2016. The city exceeded 760 killings in 2016. The number of homicides in 2017 was lower, but still historically high and 2018 saw the decline continue.

In a 2016 interview, Superintendent Eddie Johnson and First Deputy Superintendent Kevin Navarro, speculated on the rise in homicides. They blamed, in part, a perceived willingness by criminals to settle disputes with guns, and what they said is a failure on the part of the justice system to hold them accountable.

"We used to respond to gang fights in progress ... now we respond to shots fired," Navarro said. "People fought. Now everyone picks up the gun. Just like that."

Many factors are behind the spike, including access to guns, the fracturing and factioning of street gangs, and poverty and disinvestment in the most effected communities.

The decade was also chaotic and controversial for the Chicago Police Department. Police tactics and leadership changed dramatically. With Rahm Emanuel's election in 2011, Garry McCarthy took over as superintendent and disbanded the Mobile Strike Force and the Targeted Response Unit over concerns that their aggressive styles further divided police and minority communities. The officers moved to beat patrols amid hopes of improving interactions with residents. But that strategy appeared to backfire when homicides again exceeded 500 in 2012, leading McCarthy to reverse course by bolstering roving saturation teams and sharply boosting overtime pay so hundreds more officers could work the most dangerous neighborhoods.

For more than a year, Emanuel fought the release of the video showing white police Officer Jason Van Dyke repeatedly shooting black teenager Laquan McDonald as he lay motionless in the street in October 2014. The release of the video in 2015 sparked widespread protests and exposed long-simmering grievances over policing in the city, particularly in minority communities. McDonald's killing prompted a U.S. Justice Department investigation. Emanuel fired McCarthy on Dec. 1, 2015, and later chose Eddie Johnson to lead the department.

In January 2017 -- in perhaps the most damning, sweeping critique ever of the Chicago Police Department -- the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that the city's police officers are poorly trained and quick to turn to excessive and even deadly force, most often against blacks and Latino residents, without facing consequences.

Emanuel agreed to enter into a court-enforced consent decree with President Barack Obama's Justice Department, but plans fell apart after Donald Trump took office. An out-of-court agreement with the Trump administration was attempted, and later Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan sued City Hall to enforce a consent decree. In January 2019 a federal judge approved a decree, requiring the Chicago Police Department to implement changes over the next five years. Officer training, supervision and discipline will be affected, among other areas.

The number of homicides has fallen since the 2016 spike, with double-digit decreases in both 2017 and 2018. In 2019 Lori Lightfoot, former president of the Chicago Police Board and head of the Police Accountability Task Force, took over as Chicago Mayor. 2019 saw police chief Eddie Johnson fired and replaced by interim chief Charlie Beck, formerly of Los Angeles Police Department while homicide totals for the year were at the lowest since 2015.