Murder City

American President Barack Obama worked in its slums. He was employed as a community organizer, attempting to encourage residents to become socially involved in their community. He made useful alliances with churches and with black activists and schools, but found that trying to motivate people was a long uphill struggle. He became proficient himself in avoiding confrontations whose violent outcome potential was not predictable. While recognizing the seeming futility of his self-imposed mission, he still struggled on, convinced that a difference could be made.



That was the Chicago of the 1980s. In many ways not much has changed. The murder rate most certainly has. American cities are famous -- or alternately infamously defamed -- for the prevalence of misery and violence, drugs and crime, gangs and homeless people, in mostly black-American communities. Although there is a black social elite everywhere in those same cities throughout America, a kind of social and economic aristocracy, they are far outnumbered by uneducated masses of poor blacks.

In Chicago last year there were 500 murders committed. An increase from 2011 when 431 murders took place. According to crime statistics released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Murders that took place in New York in the same period, by contrast, fell from 515 to 419. As in all other such cities most of the violent crime in Chicago is prevalent within African-American and deprived communities of the city's South Side.

Scott Olson/Getty images -- A drive-by shooting in front of a church in Chicago last month resulted in one death and five injuries

Violent turf wars proliferate in those communities. And stolen weapons abound. In the early 20th Century, Chicago had a reputation as a wild and woolly shoot-out city due to Prohibition and alcohol-running gangs involved in the bootleg alcohol business. But it was always New York City with a much higher murder rate. And then there is the reputation that Detroit has always had, for violence; for violent deaths.

Detroit now is a wrecked city. Its population has declined. Its infrastructure is in ruin. There are abandoned homes and businesses everywhere. Crime finds its place with ease in such forlorn places. Last year in Detroit, 386 people were murdered, representing one murder for every 1,832 people. In other words, a resident of Detroit is three times likelier to be murdered as is a resident of Chicago.

Which may or may not make Chicagoans feel any better about their prospects.

Still, Chicago's South Side is a dangerous place to live. Parents and special escorts walked children through specially designated "safe passage" corridors on their way to school last month, as school resumed over the summer holidays. Security officers wearing neon vests join armed police officers guarding roads running through gang boundaries, past derelict houses and weed-strewn plots as young children are escorted to school.

There are 53 new routes marked by bright yellow signs reading "safe passage", a program initiated in 2009 after the death of a 16-year-old boy who was killed after leaving his South Side high school one afternoon. Rahm Emanuel, Chicago's mayor, once President Obama's chief of staff, has ordered an increase in security in response to a number of child deaths where children have been tragically caught in the city's violence.

Not much of an endorsement for livability and quality of life in general for the United States of America with its lax gun laws and its public-social penchant for violence.