POLICE
The Geography of Fear
CHICAGO HOUSING AUTHORITY POLICE STANDING OUTSIDE THE ROBERT TAYLOR HOMES BEFORE THEY WERE DEMOLISHED. PHOTO BY PATRICIA EVANS
BY JAMIE KALVEN, INVISIBLE INSTITUTE
C
hicagoans are on edge. Two years into the pandemic and emerging from a year in which there were 836 homicides in the city, civic morale is sinking. While multiple factors are no doubt in play, fear of violent crime tops the list. According to a recent poll conducted by the Chicago Index (a collaboration between the Daily Line and Crain’s Chicago Business) at the end of last year, only thirty-two percent of those polled regard the city as safe—a sharp decline since the fall of 2021 when forty-five percent said they had a “feeling of safety” in their neighborhood. This is the fourth iteration of the
Chicago Index poll. Since the beginning of 2021, it has been conducted on a quarterly basis by Polco, a Wisconsinbased firm. I asked Michelle Kobayashi, Polco’s senior vice president of innovation, to put the Chicago figures in a broader perspective. “Over the past five years,” she said, “we’ve asked the same question about perceptions of safety in surveys conducted in more than 500 cities, towns, and counties across the country. Overall, close to eighty percent of respondents say they regard their neighborhoods as safe.” She added a caveat: big cities comparable to Chicago are underrepresented in Polco’s data. That
said, among the larger cities they have surveyed, the percentage of those who perceive their neighborhoods as safe rarely falls below fifty percent. So the Chicago figures—especially the sharp decline in residents’ sense of safety over the last few months—are significant. They make it clear that fear is now a powerful gravitational force shaping the politics and civic life of the city. That fear, it can reasonably be assumed, has been aroused by recent high-profile violent incidents in middleclass neighborhoods, among them, a spike in carjackings across the city and widely reported smash-and-grab burglaries at high-end stores. Violent crime, it appears,
is spilling over into neighborhoods where, as people sometimes say, that sort of thing doesn’t happen. The corollary to the proposition that crime doesn’t belong here is that it belongs elsewhere: it’s in the wrong place. Implicit in this logic is a geography of fear deeply grounded in Chicago history. That geography is a harsh reality in plain sight. Yet at times it can become an optical illusion in which we lose our bearings. We are currently experiencing such perceptual instability. In the post-George Floyd moment of summer 2020, there was an extraordinary flowering of moral imagination: an expansive sense of community among fellow citizens. The
FEBRUARY 24, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 25
