Symposium Introduction: This Violent City? Urban Violence in Chicago and Beyond
To many, the city of Chicago conjures up a specter of unremitting urban violence. In 2014, the city was labeled the "murder capital" of the United States. The following year, a video of the police shooting Laquan McDonald became a cynosure of public concern. Commentators as disparate as Sp...
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| Published in: | The University of Chicago law review 2022-03, Vol.89 (2), p.303-322 |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | To many, the city of Chicago conjures up a specter of unremitting urban violence. In 2014, the city was labeled the "murder capital" of the United States. The following year, a video of the police shooting Laquan McDonald became a cynosure of public concern. Commentators as disparate as Spike Lee and President Donald Trump agree: Chicago is uniquely bloody. Predictably, the empirical data about Chicago's crime and policing trends belie the most dramatic of these claims. Yet if Chicago is not as violent as either Lee or Trump makes it out to be, the city's experience nonetheless provides a fruitful lens through which to consider the causes, dynamics, and optics of urban violence and the array of potential legal and policy responses. Our home city's centrality to traditions of urban sociology, its rich tapestries of racial and ethnic diversity, the durability of its residential segregation and economic stratification, and its role in both police reform and retrenchment-all these provide fertile ground for seeding discussion about the legal and policy problematics of urban violence. |
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| ISSN: | 0041-9494 1939-859X |