INTRODUCTION
The politics of race and crime in Chicago and its present mayor and former congressional representative, Rahm Emanuel, are topics of extensive attention and discussion in the American news media. Much less attention is currently paid to the impact of the previous twenty-two year tenure of former Mayor Richard M. Daley. Emanuel was a protégé of Daley prior to his election to congress, where he led the successful passage of President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. In the period from 1989 to 2011, Richard M. Daley built “the new Daley machine” that was the successor to the regime of his father, Richard J. Daley, which spanned more than twenty years, from 1955 to 1976. There were predictable similarities in the political machines of the two Daleys, but important differences as well; both remain essential to understanding the contemporary linkage of race and crime problems in Chicago.
The politics of race and criminal law enforcement in Chicago are not unique to the city or to the Daley regimes; yet, the links over several decades between the Daleys, Emanuel, Clinton and others suggest the importance of Chicago to understanding crime in America more broadly. Examining the racial dynamics of the second Daley machine, and its record of drug law enforcement, provides an opportunity to explore the roles of race linked attitudes, most notably involving legal cynicism, and their place in the politics of police-community relations. By developing an understanding of the racial politics of legal cynicism and drug law enforcement in Chicago, we hope to contribute to an improved understanding of other urban American settings.
THE POLITICS OF RACE AND CRIME
We begin with two premises: 1) Chicago is riven by racial/ethnic divisions in ways that map on to American society more broadly, and 2) these divisions are strongly reflected in attitudes, voting, and crime control in Chicago (Moore Reference Moore2016). These premises have a number of sociological foundations: Herbert Blumer’s (1958; also see Blumer and Duster, Reference Blumer and Duster1980) theory of prejudice; Lawrence Bobo and colleague’s (e.g., Bobo and Hutchings, Reference Bobo and Hutchings1996; Bobo and Tuan, Reference Bobo and Tuan2006) perspective on racial alienation; Zoltan Hajnal’s (e.g., 2009) work on racial inequality and voting; Robert Sampson and William J. Wilson’s (Reference Sampson, Wilson, Hagan and Peterson1995) structural approach to the study of poverty and crime; Sampson and others’ use of the concept of legal cynicism to explain variation in crime (e.g., Berg et al., Reference Berg, Stewart, Intravia, Warrren and Simons2016; Kirk and Papachristos, Reference Kirk and Papachristos2011; Sampson and Bartusch, Reference Sampson and Bartusch1998); and the recent call by Robert Vargas (Reference Vargas2016) for a new political ecology of race and crime.
Blumer’s theory of prejudice focuses on racial alienation and the profound sense of grievance and disenfranchisement felt by members of subordinate racial groups (Bobo and Hutchings, Reference Bobo and Hutchings1996). This perspective sees alienation and its connected grievances as forming a dimension of collective memory grounded in personal, familial, community, and group experiences of racial differentiation, inequality, and discrimination. However, as Bobo and Vincent Hutchings (1996) emphasize, subordinated racial and ethnic groups do not experience alienation and grievances equally. Instead, “members of more recent (and voluntarily incorporated) subordinate groups will feel less alienated than will members of long-term (and involuntarily incorporated) subordinate groups” (p. 956). This hypothesis has special importance in Chicago, as in many other parts of the United States, where African Americans have longer term experiences of differentiation, inequality, and discrimination than, for example, Latinos, who, as a group, arrived in large numbers more recently and mostly voluntarily.
Hajnal (Reference Hajnal2009) argues that data on electoral influence and defeat provide a means of testing the kind of argument made by Bobo and Hutchings. This approach involves counting how many voters from different groups vote for a candidate. Hajnal’s research reveals that, as he predicts, White voters are much more likely to experience triumph than defeat, while African American voters are at the other end of the win/loss continuum. Indeed, Hajnal finds that the Black community is the racial/ethnic group that has most consistently wound up on “the losing side of democracy” (p. 54).
This brings us to the specific experience of race, politics, and their connections to crime and law enforcement in Chicago. Sampson and Wilson’s (Reference Sampson, Wilson, Hagan and Peterson1995) development of a structural theory of crime begins with a focus on the roles of race and concentrated poverty. A central premise of their work is that a macrosociological perspective provides the best purchase for understanding the link between race and crime. Sampson and Wilson argue that the field of criminology has too often discounted the insights of aggregate neighborhood and community-level research by raising issues of ecological validity. As a result, criminologists have often unwittingly committed an “individualistic fallacy,” which can lead, for example, to a focus on race as a microlevel variable that obscures its macrolevel connection to the concentration of poverty. Sampson and Wilson’s thesis is that macrosocial patterns of residential inequality give rise to social isolation and ecological concentrations of the truly disadvantaged in ghetto communities. This in turn leads to structural barriers and cultural adaptations that undermine collective life and hence the control of crime.
Sampson and DawnBartusch (1998) further conceptualize barriers and adaptations associated with concentrated disadvantage as “cognitive landscapes” grounded in cultural schemas. In America, these landscapes have segregated contours of racial composition and disadvantage that form structural boundaries of community identity and associated cultural schemas. Two cultural schemas, collective efficacy and legal cynicism, are central to drug law enforcement and police-community relations in Chicago—the topic of this paper.
Sampson argues that collective efficacy is a cultural orientation that involves neighborhood social trust and willingness to intervene in crime situations. Collective efficacy may, therefore, decrease reliance on police assistance. There is, however, a “darker side of human nature” reflected in what Sampson (Reference Sampson2012) calls “moral cynicism” (p. 225). David Kirk and Andrew Papachristos (2011) follow Sampson and emphasize that moral cynicism has two components: legal cynicism and a tolerance for deviant behavior. Legal cynicism reflects a fearful skepticism about the responsiveness and effectiveness of the police, even though the police are often the only source of possible assistance in dire situations (Bell Reference Bell2016). As Kirk and Papachristos (Reference Kirk and Papachristos2011) note, legal cynicism reflects a view that the law and the legal system are “illegitimate, unresponsive, and ill equipped to ensure public safety” (p. 1191).
As we show in our analysis below, legal cynicism is high in disadvantaged African American neighborhoods; yet African American residents of these communities often have little choice but to rely on the police. Lacking alternatives and confronted with the urgency of crime victimization, citizens often resort to calls for police assistance, which they hope—even in the face of past disappointments—will bring preventive and protective results. In general, the cultural schemas of legal cynicism and collective efficacy likely operate in opposing ways, forming motives for strategic responses (Lamont and Small, Reference Lamont, Small, Lin and Harris2008) that are at the center of police-community relations.
A final development relevant to our analysis is Vargas’ (2016) call for a new political ecology of crime. Vargas argues that variation in outcomes of political turf wars between White, African American, and Latino political groups helps explain racial/ethnic differences in crime rates in American cities. He demonstrates the usefulness of this approach in an analysis of Chicago Latino neighborhoods and the politics of funding the kinds of protection and prevention whose absence contributes to neighborhood legal cynicism. He finds that differences in access to prevention programs can explain variation in the extent to which neighborhood residents rely on 911 emergency calls to police in response to crime problems.
Vargas’ (2016) work illuminates the important connections between political influence, legal cynicism, and collective efficacy. The political ecology perspective he advances suggests that political influence and access to the police play important roles in explaining neighborhood variation in legal cynicism as well as collective efficacy: in places where political influence is limited or absent, legal cynicism about the police will rise, and collective efficacy in community crime control will decline. Bobo and Hutchings’ research (1996) suggests that these patterns will be even more evident in Chicago’s African American neighborhoods than in the Latino settings that Vargas studied.
Sampson’s concept of legal cynicism is the conceptual linchpin that connects the above approaches to the study of race/ethnicity, politics, and crime. As we see in the following account of the Daley political machine in Chicago, and as anticipated in the work of Vargas, legal cynicism animated opposition to political domination and intensified calls for police protection and prevention of drug related crime. Especially in Chicago’s African American neighborhoods, the resulting police interventions were more punitive than protective and preventative. Blumer’s, Bobo’s, and Hajnal’s analyses locate the deeper background of this punitive experience in the differences in political power that play out in drug law enforcement across the African American, Latino, and White neighborhoods of Chicago.
THE NEW DALEY CRIME MACHINE
In Chicago, widespread racial alienation among African Americans and resulting legal cynicism escalated in the early twentieth century during the Great Migration to Chicago’s segregated south side “Black Belt” (Moore Reference Moore2016; Wilkerson Reference Wilkerson2010). The political machine that Richard J. Daley led until his death in 1976 contributed to this alienation and cynicism by allowing—if not facilitating—events such as the police shooting of the young Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and the torture practices of police commander Jon Burge that coerced confessions from more than 200 Black suspects. Litigation in both cases lasted for years, and while the officers in the Hampton case were acquitted, the victims of police torture subsequently were awarded a seven figure financial settlement. Burge was eventually convicted and sentenced to prison, and the city paid nearly 100 million dollars in settlements and court costs. The long lingering effects of these cases are a stubborn legacy of racial alienation and legal cynicism (City of Chicago 2016).
The Burge case also inextricably linked Richard J. and Richard M. Daley’s political careers: Burge’s employment in the Chicago Police Department began during Richard J. Daley’s time as mayor. Richard M. Daley ignored revelations of Burge’s activities as the Cook County prosecutor and during his tenure as mayor (Moore Reference Moore2016). Burge was not fired until 1993 and attention to this case persisted throughout Richard M. Daley’s three-decade tenure as Cook County state’s attorney and then mayor.
The Daleys are linked in other ways: both were graduates of DePaul University Law School and their first elected positions were in the state legislature. Richard M. Daley was widely known in the legislature for blocking legislation opposed by his father’s Chicago machine. However, his next step up the electoral ladder was not to the clerkship of Cook County that his father had occupied; instead, he ran successfully in 1980 for the office of states’ attorney in Cook County.
Richard M. Daley was not inclined to radical reform of the deeply entrenched culture and enforcement practices of the Chicago police department that dated at least to his father’s regime. Thus in February, 1982, when the Chicago police chief wrote state’s attorney Daley to report that a doctor had examined a murder suspect who showed signs of having been tortured, Daley did not react in any publically revealed way. Indeed, Daley never officially responded to the police chief and instead referred the report to his Special Prosecutions Unit. This led to a several decade delay in prosecution and settlement of the Burge case. In the end, Daley justified his behavior by saying, “I was not the mayor. I was not the police chief. I did not promote this man” (Osnos Reference Osnos2010). This evasive approach to scandals has a long history in Chicago.
Still, as Cook County state’s attorney, there were notable differences in the ways the son and his father “governed through crime” (Simon Reference Simon2007). Richard J. Daley relied on the implicit discretion long granted to police officers to interpret and enforce the law, whereas Richard M. Daley worked proactively to make discretion an enacted part of the criminal law and of a rigidly organized criminal justice bureaucratic machine. His explicit goal was to increase arrests and convictions.
The Chicago journalist David Jackson (1988) offered this sweeping description of Daley’s impact as state’s attorney:
He’s … one of the toughest prosecutors in the country. He has completely revamped the bureaucracy of his office—creating new units and tightening the chains of command—and left his stamp on large chunks of the Illinois criminal code: Laws written by Daley and his staff now dictate every facet of life in the criminal courts, from the way crimes are charged to the way judges mete out sentences.
This “tightening of the chains of command” is a key component of what John Hagan (Reference Hagan1989) and Katherine Beckett and Bruce Western (2001) have conceptualized as the “tight coupling” characteristic of modern, racially focused penal regimes.
In Daley’s first term as state’s attorney for Cook County, investigative reporting revealed that the Chicago Police Department was making about 150,000 disorderly conduct arrests a year (City of Chicago 2016). These arrests were overwhelmingly in minority neighborhoods, with more than three times as many Blacks and Latinos arrested as Whites. According to a recent City of Chicago Task Force Report these arrests, “constituted almost half of all arrests by CPD and therefore became one of the primary ways police interacted with minority communities” (2016, p. 34).
Over time, Daley’s prosecutorial zeal increasingly focused on drug law enforcement. The year before he came into office, a little more than 900 defendants were prosecuted for drug-related felonies. Four years later, in 1984, Daley could boast the prosecution of approximately 4,500 drug-related felonies (Jackson Reference Jackson1988). He regarded this as evidence of both justice and efficiency, and he was especially proud of the way in which he had mobilized the law for this purpose.
According to David Jackson (Reference Jackson1988), Daley reorganized the state’s attorney office into a “veritable legislation mill” based on his experience and contacts in the state legislature. Daley quadrupled the size of the appeals division in his office and put lawyers to work drafting “legislative concepts” that resulted in as many as fifty or more bills per year. One of these bills, an “automatic transfer act,” stipulated that any fifteen- or sixteen-year-old accused of possession of more than fifteen grams of cocaine could be transferred automatically—without judicial authorization—to the adult court system. Daley also sharply increased penalty provisions. Fifteen grams of cocaine carried a mandatory minimum of six years imprisonment with no possibility of probation.
Jackson’s (1988) interview with a former chief of felony review under Daley offered the following account of the reality of these kinds of prosecutions.
You’re not getting the hard-core dealers … You’re getting the kid who has never been in trouble before. The narcotics officer buys a little bit from the kid, and keeps buying until finally he talks the kid into distributing a ‘Class X’ amount. Now the kid who has never been in trouble before is facing six years in jail. The dealer is still sitting in his house. He’s never had one contact with the narc officer. He just finds another mope to peddle it for him (also see Van Cleve 2016).
Thus, even Daley’s administrative aides expressed a sense of cynicism about the enforcement tactics of his penal regime.
Jackson concluded, “[t]he complaints about Daley, in one sense, all boil down to this: He is using the office for a steppingstone to the fifth floor of City Hall.” More specifically, the complaint from the south side Black neighborhoods in Chicago was that Daley was using his role as Cook County state’s attorney to prosecute young Black males for specious charges that would pave the way to the Chicago mayor’s office.
THE NEW DALEY POLITICAL MACHINE
Daley’s ambition to the mayor’s office long occupied by his father became fully apparent in 1982, during his first term as state’s attorney. However, this early interest in becoming mayor reflected a serious misreading of the city’s changing politics. South side voters were already supporting a charismatic change candidate, Harold Washington. Elected to congress with a landslide victory, Washington sensed the possibilities of a historic political moment: the prospect of being the first Black mayor of Chicago (Moore Reference Moore2016). The prospects were enhanced by the fact that the Democratic party’s African American voting population had grown to more than a half million persons.
Washington explicitly identified the persistence of the first Daley machine and its place- holding mayor, Jane Byrne, as his opposition, saying, “Chicago is a city where citizens are treated unequally and unfairly … Since 1955, women, Latinos, Blacks, youth and progressive whites have been left out of the Chicago government” (Koeneman Reference Koeneman2013, p. 89). The latter groups formed a base of legal cynicism about Chicago politics around which Washington could build a new constituency.
Daley found himself competing against Byrne and Washington in the Democratic primary for the 1983 party nomination. He lost this primary fight, which Byrne predictably won, but Daley nonetheless took his campaign into the general election. Daley’s biographer, Keith Koeneman summed up the result that led to Washington’s election as Chicago’s first Black mayor: “Byrne versus Daley for the white vote. Washington versus Byrne for the support of African Americans” (2013, p. 91). Hajnal (Reference Hajnal2009) would not be surprised by Koeneman’s observation that “white politicians and voters would later blame Daley for running against a sitting white mayor and dividing the white electorate” (2013, p. 91).
Daley kept his political prospects alive in 1984 by winning a second term as state’s attorney, and when Harold Washington unexpectedly died of a heart attack in 1987, Daley resumed his quest for the mayor’s office. He brought to this campaign the level of organization that he developed in the state’s attorney’s office. And in this campaign, Daley worked hard to blunt legal cynicism among minorities and progressive groups about his crime fighting record against “guns, gangs, and drugs.”
In announcing his first successful campaign for mayor in 1988, Daley argued, “fighting crime is not a white issue or a [B]lack issue,” and insisted that “I fought gangs and drugs as state’s attorney. I’m very progressive” (Koeneman Reference Koeneman2013, pp. 112–113). Daley understood that he needed to counter opposition to his candidacy, especially in the Black community. As part of this effort, he hired as his spokesperson Avis LaVelle, a respected Black radio reporter.
This time Daley won the Democratic primary nomination, running against the African American Eugene Sawyer, who city council had appointed mayor following Harold Washington’s death. Although Sawyer held on to Harold Washington’s Black base in the primary, Daley took the traditional White working-class wards, the White lake front vote, and swept the Hispanic wards. Legal cynicism about Daley and his crime fighting tactics were concentrated among African American voters.
The new Daley machine took form during the general campaign. A sign of things to come was Daley’s enlistment of Rahm Emanuel to expand his fundraising base. The campaign attracted an unprecedented seven million dollars in contributions. As in the earlier Daley years, contributors included party workers, private sector businesses, and labor unions. But, as the Chicago political scientist Richard Simpson and colleagues (2004) note, a new and growing source of funds further emerged: the business class of the global economy, including financial firms, securities traders, corporate law firms, bankers, and international manufacturers.
Two other key additions to the emerging machine were Richard Daley’s brother, Bill Daley, who went on to play a parallel role as strategist in William Clinton’s presidential campaigns and administrations, and David Axelrod, who took on the challenge of making over Richard M. Daley into an electable candidate. Bill Daley and David Axelrod developed a straightforward strategy that capitalized on Richard M. Daley’s instinctual appeal to less educated middle-class voters, cooptation of the business class, and their poll-tested calculation that, absent the charismatic Harold Washington, the African American working-class vote could be marginalized.
Two Black candidates opposed Daley in the general election, the then-current Mayor Eugene Sawyer, and a more popular former ally of Mayor Washington, Tim Evans; Ed Vrdolyak was the unlikely and unlikable Republican opponent. The 1989 mayoral election wound up being a racialized reversal of the circumstances that had gained Harold Washington his unprecedented election six years earlier: “Rich Daley—a tough, veteran white candidate—would essentially battle two African Americans, Sawyer and Evans. The black voting public in Chicago became critically split, and the political demographics in 1989 ended up as the mirror image of Harold Washington’s 1983 victory” (Koeneman Reference Koeneman2013, p. 117).
As Hajnal (Reference Hajnal2009) would have predicted, 1983 was the exception rather than the rule, and the lessons of this election served Richard M. Daley well in building the new machine that prevailed in 1989 and the next five mayoral campaigns. The prosecution of drug crime continued to grow in importance as a central theme of the new Daley machine, even though the machine could claim no particular success in providing police protection from or prevention of drug-related crime. This failure was particularly apparent in Chicago’s African American neighborhoods, where it continued to be a source of legal cynicism and opposition to Daley.
GOVERNING THROUGH RACE, POLITICS, AND CRIME
During the first decade of Daley’s time in the mayor’s office, Chicago assumed a leading role among the nation’s cities in the policing and prosecution of drug crime. Wesley Skogan (2007) describes this period:
[T]here was a tremendous over-all increase in the number of drug-related arrests over this period. Between 1991 and 1998 the number of drug arrests in the city rose from 21,450 to 58,500, a 173 percent increase. After stabilizing, the drug arrest total rose a bit more, exceeding 59,000 by 2004. The growth in number of arrests is particularly startling in light of the declining number of arrests in many other categories, reflecting the drop in crime (p. 16).
Koeneman (Reference Koeneman2013) conveys just how crowded the Cook County courthouse had become by the 1990s, and the extent to which this involved drug cases on a daily basis:
During Daley’s early years as mayor, the courthouse was almost always teeming with defendants, witnesses, lawyers, judges, and clerks. On a typical day, the courts dealt with fourteen hundred cases and bond hearings. Half of these cases involved drugs (p. 150).
Koeneman further describes the machine-like nature of Cook County’s tightly organized court, noting that, “the criminal courthouse in Chicago was like a huge, bureaucratic factory that constantly manufactured prisoners” (p. 151).
Skogan (2007) adds to this picture, highlighting how racially concentrated drug arrests had become in this bureaucratic machine. He notes that nearly all the new arrests, approaching 80% during this period, were of African Americans. The actual numbers rose from less than 28,000 in 1991 to over 46,000 in 2004. Skogan points out that multiplying these arrest numbers by the racially disproportionate prosecution, sentencing and incarceration that characterized the Chicago justice system explains how Illinois became one of the most racially disproportionate prison systems in the nation.
The new Daley machine went on to develop a highly publicized gang loitering ordinance. With Mayor Daley’s support, City Council passed the ordinance in 1992. Council made clear that the intent of the ordinance was to increase police activity in predominately minority neighborhoods with the use of “dispersal orders” and arrests. From 1992 to 1995, police issued almost 90,000 dispersal orders and arrested more than 40,000 overwhelmingly minority persons (City of Chicago 2016, p. 35). In 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the ordinance unconstitutional on grounds that it violated due process rights, was excessively vague, and granted too much discretion to police. City Council, at Mayor Daley’s urging, then drafted a new and more specific ordinance that continued to be enforced almost entirely in minority neighborhoods.
The gang loitering ordinance is one of a succession of laws that Mayor Daley’s machine, first through the state’s attorney’s office and then through the mayor’s office, used to enable police discretionary law enforcement in minority neighborhoods, overwhelmingly against African American youth. These practices were among the most enduring legacies of the Daley machine. For example, in 2014, nearly 85% of dispersal orders issued under the new gang ordinance involved African Americans.
The gang loitering ordinance is therefore a particularly useful illustration of how law enforcement in Mayor Daley’s Chicago was racialized with profound impacts in increasing legal cynicism. With the passage and enforcement of this ordinance, the new Daley machine governed minority neighborhoods, with a constant emphasis on “gangs, guns, and drugs.” This governing approach produced, in a broad community, a deep sense of legal cynicism.
Dorothy Roberts (Reference Roberts1999) notes that the gang loitering ordinance emerged as a form of “order maintenance policing” that was justified as offering protection to neighborhood residents (p. 790; see also Harcourt Reference Harcourt1998) The argument was that crimes such as drug dealing are difficult for the police to intercept, and therefore require a vaguely framed statutory authority for enforcement. Evidence that the ordinance actually disrupted or deterred drug crime is uncertain at best. The most persuasive claim involves data on robberies (Skogan 1990), but this evidence is questioned in Bernard Harcourt’s (1998) reanalysis, and in Roberts’ (1999) broad ranging evaluation of the Chicago experience with the gang loitering ordinance.
The heart of Roberts’ (1999) critique involves the assumption that the police can accurately distinguish “visibly lawless people” from those who are lawful. Roberts observes that this distinction incorporates “racist social norms that perpetuate stereotypes of Black criminality” (p. 803). She contends that gang loitering enforcement through dispersal orders and arrests actually helped to create—through its behavioral vagueness and concentration on minorities—the racialized categories of lawlessness it claimed to disrupt and deter.
Roberts’ argument helps explain why and how order maintenance policing—from disorderly conduct charges, through gang loitering arrests, to stop and frisk practices, all of which were prioritized in Mayor Daley’s new law enforcement machinery and applied in drug law enforcement—became popular in neighborhoods populated by White voters, but notably less so in Chicago’s African American neighborhoods where legal cynicism was common.
As noted above, advocates of the original 1992 gang loitering ordinance promoted its protective potential for disrupting and deterring drug crimes. Roberts (Reference Roberts1999) is careful to note that academics, activists, and residents from a variety of backgrounds supported the ordinance; however, she also emphasizes that the level of the debate and opposition from within the African American community was intense. In the end, only six of eighteen Black council members voted for passage of the original gang loitering law.
Alderman John Steele grounded his opposition explicitly in its racial implications, asserting that the law was “drafted to protect the downtown area and the White community at the expense of innocent blacks” (cited in Roberts Reference Roberts1999, p. 824). A group of organizations filed an amicus brief claiming that the ordinance was the product of a neighborhood federation based in a predominately White section of the city and was drafted by several White council members and endorsed by the mayor (Roberts Reference Roberts1999).
The gang loitering ordinance specifically, and order maintenance policing more generally, exacerbated legal cynicism in many minority neighborhoods. Legal cynicism (Kirk and Papachristos, Reference Kirk and Papachristos2011; Sampson and Bartusch, Reference Sampson and Bartusch1998) includes within its meaning a plea for police protection and prevention of crime; yet there is little evidence that order maintenance policing is widely seen as protective and preventive in the African American community. Instead, as Roberts (Reference Roberts1999) concludes, “a more realistic view of the political process [in Chicago] suggests that white support for tougher police supervision of Blacks helped to guarantee the law’s passage, despite vehement opposition by many Black representatives” (p. 828).
RESULTING HYPOTHESES ABOUT CHICAGO DRUG LAW ENFORCEMENT
The forgoing suggests a series of hypotheses about how the politics of race and legal cynicism guided the order maintenance policing of drug law enforcement in Chicago during the two-decade regime of Richard M. Daley. Our analysis focuses on legal cynicism, electoral support for Mayor Daley, and resident and police reports of drug crimes. Policy analysts and the police often claim that drug crimes are difficult to monitor and intercept and that this has a considerable impact on dealing with the drug problem. Thus, the police often rely on and obtain knowledge about drug crimes from 911 calls for assistance. Indeed, 911 calls are the most common mechanism through which residents initiate police-community relations (Desmond et al., Reference Desmond, Papachristos and Kirk2016). In turn, what the public knows about drug activity in general follows from the translation of these calls into official police reports of crimes.
Our first hypothesis is that legal cynicism was higher in African American neighborhoods compared to White neighborhoods, net of other factors such as economic disadvantage that also contribute to this cynicism. Second, we hypothesize that opposition to Mayor Daley was also higher in African American communities and was associated with the higher levels of legal cynicism that characterized them. That is, legal cynicism was a key mechanism that additively animated political opposition to the dominance of the Daley machine in these Chicago communities.
This opposition to the Daley machine had law enforcement consequences. As noted earlier, Vargas (Reference Vargas2016) finds that Latino neighborhoods favored by the Daley regime were rewarded with crime prevention programs that reduced reliance on 911 emergency calls for police assistance and resulting arrests. Our third hypothesis is that African American neighborhoods, and areas with higher legal cynicism that were less supportive of Mayor Daley, lacked this kind of access to prevention programming and were left to rely on 911 calls that resulted in heightened police reports of drug crime. Our fourth hypothesis is that these relationships were independent of important factors such as home foreclosures and incarceration that also spiked in African American neighborhoods during the second Daley regime.
DATA, MEASURES AND METHODS
Our analysis is at the census tract level and utilizes data from a number of sources: 1) 911 call records and official Chicago police reports of drug crimes; 2) the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhood (PHDCN) Community Survey; 3) Chicago election records; 4) the 1990 U.S. Census; the Chicago Community Adult Health Study (CCAHS); and 5) privately collected data on incarceration and residential foreclosures. Conducted in 1994–1995, the PHDCN cross-sectional Community Survey involved a probability sample of 8,782 adult household residents (i.e., aged eighteen and older) selected from Chicago’s 847 populated census tracts (Sampson Reference Sampson2012). The CCAHS was administered between 2001 and 2003 (House et al., Reference House, Kaplan, Morenoff, Raudenbush, Williams and Young2011). It drew on the PHDCN design, replicated many of its measures, and gathered face-to-face interview data from adults. However, it has a smaller sample size of 3,105, from 675 Chicago census tracts, with an average of 4.6 respondents per census tract. Using these two sources, rather than just the PHDCN, allows us to separate more clearly the contribution of our key variables (e.g.., legal cynicism) from controls (e.g., collective efficacy; as well, the items we use to measure legal cynicism are available in the PHDCN but not the CCAHS). We drop forty-eight census tracts (from 675 in the CCAHS) because they had no voting data (we lose another six tracts due to missing information on other variables).
Dependent Variables
Our study focuses on four dependent variables that, depending on the analysis, we also treat as independent variables. Our first analysis examines predictors of legal cynicism. Scholars have used a diverse set of measures of legal cynicism (compare, for example, Berg et al., Reference Berg, Stewart, Intravia, Warrren and Simons2016; Hagan et al., Reference Hagan, Kaiser and Hanson2016; Kirk 2016; Kirk and Matsuda, Reference Kirk and Matsuda2011; Sampson and Bartusch, Reference Sampson and Bartusch1998). Our measure is from the PHDCN cross-sectional Community Survey conducted in 1994–1995 (Sampson Reference Sampson2012). We follow Kirk and Papachristos (Reference Kirk and Papachristos2011) and use an index based on three Likert scaled statements (1=strongly disagree … 5=strongly agree). The statements measure agreement that law and law enforcement efforts fail to achieve three goals: a just rule of law (“laws are made to be broken”), prevention (“the police are not doing a good job in preventing crime in this neighborhood”), and protection (“the police are not able to maintain order on the streets and sidewalks in the neighborhood”). This scale reflects the average level of legal cynicism in the mid-1990s, during Daley’s second term, across residents of each census tract.Footnote 1
Our second analysis examines electoral support for Mayor Richard M. Daley in one election, his most successful campaign for the office of mayor in 2003. Our measure is the percentage of votes cast for Daley in each census tract. We constructed this measure from two sources. The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners (2017) provides data on the percentage of votes cast for each candidate. However, these data are at the ward level and some census tracts cross ward boundaries. We addressed this with data on the 2000 election voting tabulation districts for Chicago census tracts from the Missouri Census Data Center (2010). These data divide wards into their various census tracts and appropriate the percentage of ward votes to their respective census tracts. We used this data set to assign the percentage of votes in each census tract for Mayor Daley.
Our third and fourth analyses focus on time-varying measures of drug crimes from 2006 through 2008. We first examine 911 calls. Our data include the universe of all census-tract level citizen calls about drug offenses, including possession, manufacturing, or distributing banned substances during each quarter (three-month period) from 2006 to 2008 (twelve quarters in total). These 911 data contain information on the address of the event, the caller’s address, and the date of the call. They allow precise counts of citizen reported drug crimes, per census tract, per quarter (we divide the data into twelve quarters for the three years studied because of the time restrictions of one of our independent variables, foreclosures [described below]).
Our final analysis examines official police reports of drug offenses from the Chicago Police Department. Each police record includes the date and address of the incident; we geocoded the latter, located the matching census tract, and summed the events for each tract and quarter. The correlation between census tract police reports of drug crime and 911 calls is sizable (r = .763), but reflects a clear difference between the variables. The difference arises from several factors, including the failure of police to respond to an unknown percentage of 911 calls, their discretion in deciding which 911 events they will define as crimes, and their generation of crime reports for events for which there were no 911 calls. As well, 911 calls may indicate the extent to which residents’ concerns about crime are distinct from police reports (Desmond and Valdez, Reference Desmond and Valdez2013). Examining both 911 calls and police reports as dependent variables—and including each as a control variable in relation to the other—allows us to assess the extent to which our variables of interest differentially influence these two outcomes.
Independent Variables
Our key independent variable is the distribution of African Americans across census tracts. We use 1990 census data to construct this exogenous measure. The distribution for this variable is highly skewed and so we divide it into quartiles. In the first quartile (the comparison group) are census tracts in which, in 1990, just under 0.67% of residents was Black. The second quartile includes census tracts in which between 0.68% and 12.52% of residents was African American. Census tracts in the third quartile had a Black population of between 12.53% and 97.60%, while those in the fourth quartile were more than 96.60% African American. These census data were collected early in Daley’s first term as Mayor.
Our analyses include a number of time-invariant and time varying controls that could be associated with the outcomes we study. We use census data for three time-invariant variables first emphasized by Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay (1969): poverty, transiency, and population heterogeneity. We follow Sampson and colleagues (1997) and use their revised measures of concentrated disadvantage, residential stability, and immigrant concentration. Concentrated disadvantage is based on five items: 1) the number of children under 18; 2) the percent of residents below the poverty line; 3) the percent receiving public assistance; 4) the percent living in a female-headed household; and 5) the percent unemployed. Two items constitute the residential stability scale: percent of houses owner occupied, and percent of residents with housing tenure of five or more years. We divide Sampson and colleagues’ immigrant concentration into two distinct measures, percent foreign born and percent Hispanic. Percent foreign born and percent Hispanic are correlated at the tract level (r = .704) but are not collinear (square root of variance inflation factor scores <1.75), reflecting the diversity of Chicago’s immigrant population. We include two additional census variables to control for population size: total number of residents and number of residential addresses receiving mail.
Our next set of time-invariant control variables are from the CCAHS and focus on tract level attitudes. The three CCAHS variables we use include a replication of the ten-item scale Sampson and colleagues (1997) originally used to measure collective efficacy. These items assess community social control, cohesion, and trust. One item asked respondents about their willingness to do something if a local fire station was threatened with budget cuts (1=very unlikely … 5=very likely). Four items questioned whether they would intervene if a fight broke out, or if they saw children skipping school and hanging out on a street corner, spray painting graffiti on a local building, or showing disrespect to an adult. The remaining five items indicated respondents’ agreement with statements about the extent to which their neighborhood was close-knit and that people in their community were willing to help their neighbors, could be trusted, generally get along with each other, and share the same values (1=strongly disagree … 5=strongly agree). The second CCAHS variable, community level tolerance for deviance, replicates a scale Sampson and Bartusch (Reference Sampson and Bartusch1998) included in their work on legal cynicism. The four items in this scale asked respondents how wrong they thought it was for a thirteen-year-old to smoke cigarettes, use marijuana, drink alcohol, or get into fistfights (1=extremely wrong … 5=not wrong at all)
Our last CCAHS variable concerns Tom Tyler’s (2017) procedural justice theory. This theory suggests that police can be trained to act in ways that will stimulate citizen deference to police, compliance with law, and cooperation in combating crime, including reporting crime to the police. The CCAHS provides two measures that Kirk (2016) argues tap into procedural justice and perceptions of the police: “the police are fair to all people regardless of their background” and “police in your local community can be trusted” (1=strongly agree … 4=strongly disagree). We coded these items to indicate the converse of procedural justice, procedural injustice. Procedural injustice is only modestly correlated with legal cynicism at the tract level (r = .405) and the two variables are not collinear (square root of variance inflation factor scores <1.55), a pattern which supports our assumption that these two concepts are distinct.
Our analysis also includes two time-varying variables for the years 2006 through 2008, a period that included Daley’s election to his final term as mayor. The first, incarceration, is a count of the number of people incarcerated in each census tract during each of the twelve quarters under study. Daniel Cooper and Ryan Lugalia-Hollon developed these data for the Chicago Justice Project and used them to map Chicago’s “Million Dollar Blocks.”Footnote 2 Our analysis uses information on the number of convicted offenders who received a custodial sentence (i.e., jail, boot camp, or prison). Our second time-varying variable, residential foreclosures, reflects the housing crisis that precipitated and was exacerbated by the Great Recession that began in 2007 when Mayor Daley was in his sixth and final term. Our measure of foreclosure repossessions uses data from a private collection company, Record Information Services (RIS). We have information for the universe of all single-family repossessions in each quarter of 2006 through 2008.Footnote 3 In these years, the most vulnerable houses, those purchased with sub-prime mortgages, dominated the foreclosure crisis (Ferreira and Gyourko, Reference Ferreira and Gyourko2015). We include original metric and quadratic measures of repossessions because of the possibility that any positive association between foreclosure repossessions and 911 calls may have an upper limit: at some point, repossessions may leave too few people behind to observe and respond to drug crimes.
Analytic Methods
Our analysis uses ordinary least squares and multilevel mixed effects negative binomial regression. We use the former to examine predictors of legal cynicism and the vote for Mayor Daley and the latter to examine determinants of counts of 911 calls and police reports of drug crimes. Our negative binomial models have two levels: time and census tracts. The mixed effects component allows for the estimation of fixed effects for both our time invariant (e.g., legal cynicism) and time-varying (e.g., foreclosures) variables and includes random intercepts to address clustering at the census tract level. All of the models include fixed effects for time (i.e., eleven quarter-year dummy variables). We estimate negative binomial models because the 911 call and police reported count data are overdispersed (i.e., the variance is greater than the mean).
RESULTS
Richard M. Daley won his first successful campaign for mayor in 1989 with 55% of the vote, in 2003 he won with 78%, and in his final race for mayor in 2007 he received 71%. In 2011, Daley announced he would not seek another term, in large part because opposition to his political machine was gaining momentum. However, the signs of the end of Daley’s remarkable run as mayor were already beginning to emerge in his triumphant 2003 campaign. This is evident in the descriptive statistics we present in Table 1. The table is organized within quartiles of census tract levels of the African American population.
Table 1. Descriptive Statistics by 1990 Tract Level Percent African American Quartiles
+ time varying
Several descriptive patterns stand out in Table 1. The most striking one involves the racial distribution of the vote for mayor in 2003. In the quartile of tracts with the smallest proportion of Black voters (less than 1%), more than 80% of the votes were for Richard M. Daley (87%). However, support declined in a step like gradient with each successive quartile increase in the African American population. A bare majority of 55% supported Daley in the tracts with the largest proportion of Black voters (more than 96%). In these tracts, opposition to Daley was substantial.
Table 1 also shows a comparable increase across quartiles of African American population in legal cynicism. This standardized variable is negative (-.34) in the first two quartiles but positive in the third and fourth ones, approximately doubling in size (from .14 to .29) between the third and fourth quartiles. The standardized measure of perceived procedural injustice rises in a similar way, from -.38 in the first quartile to .38 in the fourth. Meanwhile, the standardized measure of collective efficacy drops from .17 in the first quartile to -.11 in the fourth.
There are further clues to the sources of increasing legal cynicism and perceived procedural injustice in Table 1. The standardized concentrated disadvantage measure more than quadruples between the third and fourth quartiles (from .17 to .81), while the measure of incarcerated residents within tracts also more than quadruples between the second and fourth quartiles (from 3.5 to 12.8). Residential foreclosures more than doubled between the first and fourth quartiles, from an average of .72 to an average of 1.7 per tract.
These quartile differences are matched by increases in 911 calls about and police reports of drug crimes. These increase between the lower and higher quartiles from single to double digits, with the average number of 911 calls about drug crimes nearing eighty per tract in the highest quartile of Black residents, and with more than twenty-seven police reports of drug crimes per tract in this quartile.
Table 1 suggests the likelihood of strong relationships between race, legal cynicism, and voting behavior in the 2003 election. We further explore this in Table 2. We first estimated an equation of predictors of legal cynicism, as measured in Chicago in 1994–1995 (see column one). Consistent with our first hypothesis, the relative concentration of the African American population across census tracts is a striking predictor of legal cynicism. While in the second quartile the predicted African American effect is not statistically significant, in the third and fourth quartiles this effect is increasingly strong and significant (b = .41 and .57, p<.001). The percent Hispanic population in a tract is also a positive predictor of legal cynicism (b = .008, p<.001). These effects are net of other predictors of legal cynicism, most notably concentrated disadvantage, which, as expected, predicts an increase in legal cynicism (b = .19, p<.001).
Table 2. OLS Regression, Legal Cynicism 1994–1995, Votes for Mayor Daley, 2003
*** p < .001; **p < .01; *p < .05
Table 2 also presents two equations for the 2003 Daley electoral vote. As predicted in our second hypothesis, the African American quartile tract effects again increase in a step-like gradient, with the third and fourth quartile effects especially strongly negative and significant (respectively b = -23.0 and -28.3, p<.001; see equation 1), as are the effects of concentrated disadvantage and residential stability (b = -1.6; b = -1.3, p<.01, respectively). Consistent with our second hypothesis, tract level legal cynicism has a strong, negative association with the Daly vote, even though it was measured eight years before the election (b = -4.7, p<.001; see equation 2). Introducing legal cynicism also reduces somewhat the effects for percent African American and concentrated disadvantage and reveals two notable suppressor effects. In our second equation, the percent Hispanic is now positive and significant (b = .06, p<.01), while the effect of collective efficacy is negative and significant (b = -2.2, p = .05). Our findings indicate that Mayor Daley, even at the point of his greatest electoral support in 2003 from the citizens of Chicago, had considerably less support, and by implication substantial political opposition, in the areas of the city with the most concentrated African American and economically disadvantaged populations, the latter through its relationship with legal cynicism.
In the next part of our analysis, we explore the links between the politics of race, concentrated disadvantage, legal cynicism and the reporting of drug crime by citizens and the police during Mayor Daley’s regime. Consistent with our third hypothesis, the results in Table 3 show consistently positive effects of legal cynicism on 911 calls for police assistance (e.g., b = .69, p<.001 in equation 3.1) as well as consistently negative effects of voter support in 2003 for Mayor Daley (e.g., b = -.02, p<.001). Recall that legal cynicism involves complaints that the police are ineffective in providing protection from crime and crime prevention. Our interpretation is that prevention and protection rather than simple police reporting is what citizens phoning 911 about drug activity were seeking, and that this was not what they perceived Mayor Daley’s machine as providing in 2003. The Daley voter support measure implies that it was opponents of this regime who were more frequently calling 911.
Table 3. Multilevel Negative Binomial Regression, 911 Reports of Drug Crime, 2006–2008
*** p < .001; **p < .01; *p < .05
The results in Table 3 also show that perceptions of procedural injustice significantly increase 911 reports by citizens of drug crime to the police. This significant effect of perceived injustice is reduced by about 20% but remains significant in column three, when police reports of drug crime are entered into equation 3.3 (i.e., from b = .202 to .163, p<.01 to p<.05). This implies that although citizens want the police to respond when they call for assistance, official police reporting of these drug activities may not specifically or even primarily be what citizens are seeking when they call 911.
There is further indication of opposition to the Daley machine’s response to drug crime in Table 3. This evidence involves mediation and suppression effects observed with the introduction of the incarceration measure in equation 3.2 (b = .01, p<.001). The mediation and suppression effects are indicated in the decrease between equations 3.1 and 3.2 in the effect of legal cynicism (from b = .69 to .56) and the increase in the previously suppressed opposition effect to Mayor Daley in 2003 (from b = -.017 to -.021). The reduction of the former and the increase in the latter suggests that residents were seeking crime prevention and protection, and that voters did not believe that the increase in incarceration that characterized Daley’s years was effective in achieving these goals.
The results reported in Table 3 further indicate the impact on 911 calls of living in disadvantaged and minority communities. Across all three columns, the step-like increase in quartile of African American population increases these calls for assistance, as does the percent Hispanic population. Collective efficacy and to a lesser extent tolerance for deviance reduce calls of police assistance, while residential stability increases these calls. Interestingly, the residential foreclosures term only approaches significance in its positive main effect (b = .017, se = .009, p<.10), and the quadratic from of this variable is significantly negative (b = -.002 and -.001, p<.01 and .05). This suggests that when residential foreclosures become quite common there are too few residents left to make many calls for assistance. As anticipated in our fourth hypothesis, neither neighborhood foreclosures nor incarceration levels notably reduce the race and legal cynicism effects on calls for police assistance.
Table 4 presents results for equations predicting police reports of drug crimes. The pattern of effects is quite similar to that in Table 3, with the exceptions that the percent Hispanic effect is no longer statistically significant and that the other significant effects in Table 4 are smaller than in Table 3. There is also a significant effect of 911 calls for police assistance on police reported crimes (b = .002, p<.001). The nonsignificance of the percent Hispanic effect and the steep gradient of the African American quartile effect independent of the effect for 911 calls are consistent with Bobo and Hutchings’ (1996) hypothesis that in cities such as Chicago stronger effects prevail for the latter group because of African Americans’ longer experiences of inequality and discrimination when compared to Latinos.
Table 4. Multilevel Negative Binomial Regression, Police Reports of Drug Crime, 2006–2008
*** p < .001; **p < .01; *p < .05
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
Social scientists have long recognized that police work in America is disproportionately a reactively organized process of responding to calls for assistance from citizens (see, for example, Reiss Reference Reiss1971). Yet accounts of policing frequently underestimate the urgency of what this reactivity involves in terms of citizen needs for crime prevention and protection.
During his six terms as mayor, Richard M. Daley mobilized the massive machinery of the Chicago Police Department, the Cook County Court, and the state prison system in a punitive response to citizen calls about drug crime. We have argued that what was lost in the historical experience of this tightly organized penal experiment in drug law enforcement was the sense of desperate need—especially in African American neighborhoods—for crime prevention and protection rather than punishment.
The measurement and analysis of the concept of legal cynicism provides a means of revealing the misunderstanding involved in the punitive response of the Daley regime to drug crime in Chicago. Using official and unofficial data spanning two decades, we have analyzed how the concentration of legal cynicism about law enforcement in Chicago’s African American neighborhoods played a prominent and insufficiently understood role in opposition to Mayor Daley’s political machine. The more punitive than preventative and protective approach of the Daley machine to drug crime set a foundation and contributed to the legacy that foreshadowed the growing and ultimately explosive demands—especially from the African American community—for new mechanisms of police accountability in Chicago.
The Daley machine understood, however, the importance of nurturing political support in Chicago’s Latino community. This understanding is reflected in the positive tract-level effect of percentage Hispanic population on the 2003 vote for Mayor Daley. As political scientist Melvin Holli (Reference Holli, Green and Holli2005) noted, Daley’s strength centered on his rock solid electoral base of Whites, “ethnics, Lakefronters, and Hispanics” (p. 227). In predominately Hispanic wards, Daley received 60% or more of the vote. Thus the second Daley machine that grew out of the aftermath of Daley’s 1983 loss to Chicago’s first African American mayor, Harold Washington, built on its success with Latino voters.
Vargas (Reference Vargas2016) reports that in some Latino neighborhoods in Chicago, citizens found the city supportive of community efforts to resolve crime problems without heavy reliance on police arrests. This is reflected in the Little Village area of Chicago where Vargas (Reference Vargas2016) notes that west side residents had a strong relationship with their alderman. This council member was able to direct city-funded resources to crime prevention. Consistent with Bobo and Hutching’s hypothesis and the political ecology approach advanced by Vargas, this access to resources facilitated community-based prevention and protection efforts in some politically favored Latino neighborhoods where it reduced reliance on more coercive and counterproductive police tactics. As Vargas also demonstrates, not all Latino neighborhoods were so fortunate.
The long span of the father and son Daley regimes in Chicago provides a unique opportunity to see how a self-reinforcing and tightly coupled system of crime control can serially amass punishment. The ways in which this serially amassed punishment was concentrated in African American neighborhoods of Chicago through the Daley years and persists in the Emanuel era underlies the importance of attending to race in American crime theory. There is little or no convincing evidence that successive disorderly conduct arrests, automatic transfers of juveniles to adult court, or gang loitering ordinance enforcement demonstrably improved drug crime prevention or provided protection from drug crime activity in Chicago. Instead, these legislative innovations likely contributed to legal cynicism in African American and Latino neighborhoods.
We have seen that the concept of legal cynicism has an important race connected role to play in the development of American crime theory. However, the persistence of strong race effects even when legal cynicism is included in our models involving the second Daley regime indicates the need for further elaboration of this theory. This elaboration will likely need to address ways in which racialized roots of what Sampson has called “cognitive landscapes” and “cognitive schemas” have developed historically and operate in contemporary settings. In particular, we need to understand more fully the historically and culturally driven cognitive processes that explain the resort to calls for police assistance in America’s African American communities.
Citizen 911 calls for police assistance unintentionally contributed to the punitive response to drug law enforcement in Chicago. The result was a rising need to protect increasing numbers of minority youth from a self-reinforcing and unyielding politics of punishment. Chicago does not exist in isolation and instead is more likely an illustration of why and how a rising call for political accountability is being voiced in many African American neighborhoods across the United States.
