GreyCitySpring2012

May 25, 2012 The Chicago Maroon’s Quarterly Magazine

CRIME & SAFETY Pot and Prejudice

A Brief History of the UCPD

Q&A with Gary Becker

» Page 6

» Page 11

» Page 18

EDITORS’ NOTE The Grey City Journal first ran as a weekly supplement to the Chicago Maroon from 1968 to 1993. With its name shortened to Grey City and a new quarterly schedule, the magazine started up again in the spring of 2008.

We now strive to present longer, more in-depth pieces on the University community. With our 13th issue, we decided on the theme of crime and safety.

Crime is a central element of life in Hyde Park, and it plays countless roles in everyday life: your walk home, the likelihood you’ll be arrested, and even your weekend plans. From its economics to its manifestations, crime influences our community and how we interact with it. It’s not often realized, but there are deep and complex issues behind the information we receive in security alerts and updates.

We hope this issue leaves you with a greater understanding of how crime works, and a desire to learn more about problems affecting the University, Hyde Park, and Chicago. As students and citizens, we have a responsibility to be aware of the policies and practices at work in our community, be they wise or unjust.

—Editors Hayley Lamberson, Jordan Larson, and Sharan Shetty

STAFF H AYLEY L AMBERSON J ORDAN L ARSON S HARAN S HETTY C OLIN B RADLEY D OUGLAS E VERSON, J R. S YDNEY C OMBS S AM L EVINE J AMIE M ANLEY N ICHOLAS S HATAN T IFFANY T AN A LICE B UCKNELL J EN X IA

E DI TO R S

MA N AGI NG E DITO R DE S I GN P H OTO

I L LU ST R AT IO N CO PY E DI TO R

T HE C HIC AG O M A R OON 12 12 EAST 59 t h ST R EET C HIC AG O, IL 6 0 615 7 73 .8 3 4 .1611 e ditor@ ch icagomaroon .com C HIC AG OM A R OON .COM

A Matter of Life and Death: Investigating the ongoing protests for an adult Level 1 trauma center on the South Side » Page 2

Pot and Prejudice: Marijuana arrests pressure racial tensions and city budget » Page 6

A Brief History of the UCPD: A look inside the second-largest private police force in nation » Page 11

The Strong Arm of the Law: Fourth-year Crystal Tsoi shares the story of her arrest and trial » Page 14

Q & A: Nobel-Prize winning economist Gary Becker speaks on crime and drug legalization » Page 18 sydney combs

| the chicago maroon

A Matter by Sam Levine of Life and Death Early on the morning of August 15, 2010, Earlenese Morris was walking to the bus stop near the corner of East 61st Street and South Cottage Grove Avenue when he heard seven shots ring out nearby. It wasn’t until Morris got home and checked his Facebook page that he realized that the shots he heard had hit his close friend Damian Turner. After calling Turner’s mother, Morris learned that his friend had died at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

Around 12:45 that morning, Turner, 18, was shot on the corner of East 61st Street and South Cottage Grove Avenue by two men who his friends say mistook him for someone else. After the shooting, Morris learned that Turner was not taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC), just three blocks away from where he was shot, because the hospital did not have an adult level-one trauma center to treat his injury. In fact, Morris learned, the South Side had no adult level-one trauma centers, which are staffed around the clock by doctors trained to treat victims of gunshot and stab wounds, car accidents, and other violent injuries.

Northwestern, which is approximately 10 miles north of the intersection where Turner was shot, was one of the closest hospitals capable of providing the care Turner needed.

Shortly after Turner’s death, Morris joined Fearless Leading by the Youth (FLY), a youth activist group cofounded

by Turner in 2007. While FLY has worked on campaigns to improve the city’s juvenile detention centers and preserve affordable housing in Woodlawn, since Turner’s death, the group has made getting a trauma center at the UCMC one of its top priorities.

That campaign has evolved into a larger back-andforth between activists and UCMC officials on how the hospital should serve the community s u r ro u n d i n g it.

Recently, that dialogue has come to a stalemate shaped by a community emotionally charged by Turner’s death *distance (in miles) to trauma centers refusing to back down in from the University of Chicago

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14

10

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10

University of Chicago

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its demands for a trauma center, and a hospital that says that is a costly and infeasible solution for the South Side’s broken health care system.

The UCMC opened its level-one adult trauma center in 1986 and closed it in 1988, saying that it drained hospital resources and took away from other vital health care services. While the UCMC’s Comer Children’s Hospital continues to operate a pediatric trauma center for children under 16, hospital officials still say that the resources required to sustain a trauma center would jeopardize its burn unit, neonatal intensive care unit, and emergency helicopter response service—care which almost no other hospital in Chicago provides.

“Prior to 1988, when our adult trauma center closed, the leaders here had to choose how to spend on care. You can’t choose to do everything, particularly when it comes to programs that are heavily subsidized,” said Lorna Wong, the UCMC’s Assistant Director for Media and Social Media. “If we lose enough money, this whole hospital would close down. A closed hospital serves no one.”

When the UCMC closed its trauma center, Michael Reese Hospital and Christ Hospital and Medical Center in Oak Lawn, south of the city, remained open as close options that could provide South Side residents with trauma care. FLY member Veronica Morris-Moore, 19, said that the UCMC’s decision to close its adult level-one trauma center set off a “domino effect” that caused Reese to pull out of the city’s trauma network the next year. In 1989, Reese administrators told the Chicago Tribune that the UCMC’s decision to opt out of the trauma network put a significant financial strain on the hospital, and projected a $2 million loss over the next fiscal year if it kept its trauma center open.

While Christ Hospital continues to treat trauma victims, there are only four hospitals in city limits that can provide level-one adult trauma care: Northwestern and Advocate Illinois Masonic Hospital on the North Side, and Mount Sinai Hospital Medical Center and John H. Stroger Hospital of Cook County on the West Side. Activists say that leaves the South Side underserved by the city’s trauma network.

Third-year Olivia Woollam, a member of the group Students for Health Equity (SHE), which has partnered with FLY in the trauma center campaign, said that the UCMC already has many of the resources required for a trauma center in place, and that the hospital has not been transparent about the feasibility of hosting a trauma center.

“The thing that kills me about this is that nobody knows what’s actually going on. Nobody knows if the UCMC can finance a trauma center or not because they haven’t released the data,” Woollam said. “Give us the data. That’s why we’ve been asking for a feasibility study.”

FLY staged its first protest on September 28, 2010, the day that would have been Turner’s 19th birthday. Since then, the group has staged several provocative protests to put pressure on the UCMC, including “die-ins” on the main quad where participants mimicked getting shot, and a mockfuneral during a 2011 event commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The campaign reached a critical point this fall when UCMC administrators agreed to publicly meet face-to-face

Grey City | 3 sydney combs

| the chicago maroon

The forefront of medicine is in our backyard, and there’s nothing they can do for traumatic injuries.

with activists at an open forum hosted by Student Government. Stephen Weber, the hospital’s Chief Medical Officer, and Donald Liu, Surgeon-in-Chief and director of the pediatric trauma center at Comer Children’s Hospital, did not promise to support a request for a feasibility study on the trauma center, but said they would be willing to continue a dialogue with activists.

But in the six months since the open forum, FLY has been unable to schedule a single meeting with the UCMC, Morris-Moore said.

Darrius Lightfoot, 20, a FLY cofounder, said that the lack of communication between FLY and UCMC officials has left him feeling “brushed off.”

“We’ve been asking and asking and asking, and they say, ‘Sure, we can meet,’ but they never give an exact specific date,” he said. “I would like to see them put some effort into getting this trauma center. We can at least meet and figure out alternatives if they don’t want to host a level-one trauma center there.”

While Morris-Moore said the first public meeting marked an important step in the campaign, she understands why hospital administrators might be hesitant to meet with activists.

“They have to take time out of what they’re already busy doing and planning to do to address this community and these people that we’ve mobilized, that we’ve organized, and are fired up about this issue,” she said.

Woollam said that both the UCMC and FLY had become “entities” to one another, and that a face-toface meeting would help both sides better understand each other.

“You can’t learn anything from sound bites. You can barely learn what someone ostensibly thinks about something, let alone what someone really thinks of something,” she said. “I think the only way to do that is to talk about controversial questions in as nonemotional a way as possible.”

Cheryl Reed, the UCMC’s Director of Strategic Communications, said that most of the conversation around the trauma center had been “emotional,” and that activists needed to come to the table with data to show UCMC administrators that the hospital needed a trauma center. Reed added that the hospital was taking steps to address gun violence on the South Side. In February, the UCMC announced a partnership with CeaseFire Chicago, a nonprofit organization that works with community leaders to reduce violence in at-risk neighborhoods. The hospital will spend $120,000 over the next three years to fund a professionally trained “violence interrupter” to work with community members to prevent disputes from turning into violent incidents. FLY, she said, had not

University of Chicago Medical Center closes its adult level-one trauma center

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expressed an interest in working with the hospital on its anti-violence campaign.

FLY member Corey Mason said that the group’s trauma center campaign itself has raised awareness about gun violence. Second-year Michael McCown, a SHE member who also worked at FLY last summer through the University Community Service Center’s Summer Links program, said that the UCMC and FLY took different approaches to reducing violence on the South Side.

“The idea is to recognize that violence doesn’t occur in a vacuum but in the context of racial and economic oppression,” McCown wrote in an e-mail. “Rather than address violence qua violence, FLY is addressing it in terms of politics, and qua violence more internally, to understand how it keeps people apart and from working on the real root causes of the system that is producing the violence,” he added, clarifying that he was not speaking as a spokesperson for FLY. For Morris-Moore, it simply doesn’t make sense that the UCMC cannot treat victims like Turner who are injured just blocks from the hospital.“The forefront of medicine is in our backyard, and there’s nothing that they can do for traumatic injuries,” she said.

A 2011 analysis by radio station WBEZ 91.5 showed that trauma victims in southeast neighborhoods of the city, like Woodlawn and Hyde Park, have to spend 50 percent longer on average in an ambulance than residents in other parts of the city before they receive care. However, UCMC officials say that that statistic is insignificant, citing a 2010 national study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, which found that the time a trauma victim spends in an ambulance is unrelated to her chance of survival. That conclusion was confirmed by Lee Friedman, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, who found that differences in transport times for trauma victims in Olympia Fields, a Chicago suburb, did not affect mortality rates.

A forthcoming study by Dr. Marie Crandall, an associate professor of surgery at Northwestern, could challenge those results. The study, which has not yet been published, suggests that patients, like most South Side residents, living more than five miles away from an adult level-one trauma center in Chicago are less likely to survive a gunshot wound. Crandall declined to comment on her research because it has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Lightfoot felt the effects of the South Side’s dysfunctional trauma network firsthand when he was shot twice in the ankle on East 63rd Street and South Cottage Grove Avenue as a 16-year-old. He said that he waited between 10 and 15 minutes before an ambulance came to take him to Provident Hospital near Washington Park. Lightfoot said that he waited

Michael Reese closes its level-one trauma center, the last on the South Side, unable to sustain the added pressure after UCMC left the trauma network

1989

Fearless Leading by the Youth (FLY) founded by Damian Turner

2007

Students and South Side residents demonstrate at the UCMC in November 2011. sydney combs the chicago maroon

at Provident for two hours before he was taken to John H. Stroger Hospital of Cook County where the bullets were removed.

Lightfoot believes that if the UCMC had a trauma center, the hospital would be obligated to take care of those individuals with the most life-threatening injuries, regardless if they could pay for care.

“They don’t want these black, poor, unprivileged folks coming into their hospital, using their Medicaid and Medicare and being uninsured,” said Lightfoot, who has lived in Woodlawn since 2005 and is frequently woken up in the middle of the night by gunshots. “It’s heartbreaking to see that folks really don’t care about you.”

Reed said that the hospital was one of the leading hospitals in the city for patients eligible for Medicaid.

The hospital provided $138.4 million in Medicare and Medicaid coverage and spent nearly $237.1 million in community benefits in fiscal year 2011, according to the UCMC’s 2011 Community Benefit Report.

But second-year and SHE member Gabrielle Newell says that it is difficult to determine exactly how the UCMC, which receives tax breaks as a nonprofit institution, allocates funds to the community.

“Given the resources available to us, given our tax breaks, I think we do have a responsibility to serve the people surrounding us, and I don’t think that we’re doing enough,” she said.

In 2008, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) investigated the services that the UCMC provided to the community as part of a national probe into

Damian Turner is shot on the corner of East 61st Street and South Cottage Grove Avenue. He dies en route to Northwestern Memorial Hospital

August 15, 2010

whether nonprofit hospitals were really providing the care to the poor and uninsured required to maintain their tax-exempt status. Grassley concluded that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had poorly defined what services qualified for the tax benefits, and included a provision in the 2010 Affordable Care Act requiring the IRS to review charity care provided by hospitals every three years.

But nearly two years after Turner’s death, after a long back-and-forth with UCMC officials, several of his friends say that he continues to inspire their push for a trauma center.

Karenda White, 20, who described Turner as an “older brother” and was with him the day before he died, said that Turner’s personal struggles inspired his activism.

“His experience made him want to help others and see better for his neighborhood,” said White, who is also a FLY member.

Mason said that once Turner set his mind to something, he didn’t back out. Mason said that he saw Turner’s charisma on display one day when the two demonstrated downtown with FLY to protest evictions from Woodlawn’s Grove Parc housing complex. Even though it was cold and police urged them to leave, Turner continued to lead protesters with a megaphone.

“When a guy like that is gone, it really makes you think, ‘Man, what are all the things he could’ve done?’”

Mason said. “It makes you reflect on yourself and think, ‘Man, what can I do since I’m still around?’”

UCMC announces new partnership with CeaseFire Chicago.

They promise to spend $120,000 in an effort to reduce gun violence on the South Side

February 2011

They don’t want these black, poor, unprivileged folks coming into their hospital, using their Medicaid and Medicare and being uninsured.

Activists and UCMC administrators meet at a public forum hosted by Student Government

November 2011 Grey City | 5

illustration by alice bucknell

6 | Volume 13

by David Kaner

Pot and Prejudice The term “drug offender” is not the first word that comes to mind when speaking with Kay (not her real name) over the phone. A Chicagoland native majoring in art and psychology at DePaul University, her enthusiastic tone, nervous laugh, and Midwestern twang make her sound like any number of undergrads in the Windy City. Her affection for pot certainly isn’t unusual either. What is unusual is where she found herself early in her freshman year: a white college student under arrest by Chicago police for possession of marijuana.

“Extremely out of the ordinary” is how Kay describes her experience. Plenty of her friends smoke too, some of them daily. None have ever been in trouble with the authorities for their habit. But one night in October 2009, she became the exception. Breaking up a party in her room that had gotten too loud, campus security smelled pot and asked to search her purse. Kay, who hadn’t been smoking, consented, forgetting about the small bag of weed—less than half a gram—stuffed inside. Her resident head called the cops. Within minutes, she was led out of the room in handcuffs.

After a night of being shuttled between facilities (the booking station didn’t have any female cops on duty to watch her), Kay was handed a court date at 7 o’clock the next morning, along with the rawhide laces confiscated from her moccasins, and released. A month later, a judge would take just a few minutes to throw out her case. While DePaul—the largest Catholic school in the country—required her to meet with a priest, the residence director, and a substance abuse counselor, the Chicago justice system scrubbed her record without a second thought.

Today, Kay sees her experience as something to laugh about, a “comedy of errors.” It’s an anecdote she’s more than comfortable sharing once she gets to know someone well. But her brush with the CPD raises a host of questions. Why are people caught with small amounts of pot arrested and held, at the taxpayer’s expense, if they’re just going to have their case dismissed anyway? Why, in a city that is nearly one-third white, is it so remarkable for a white person

to be arrested for marijuana? And how, if the current system of enforcement is unfair and inefficient, can it be changed?

RACE AND WEED It doesn’t take more than a cursory glance at a demographic map to learn that Chicago is a city with serious racial fault lines. The South Side, with the exception of a few pockets like Hyde Park, is overwhelmingly black. The West Side alternates between heavily black and heavily Hispanic. Meanwhile, whites live primarily on the North Side and on the city’s fringes. Few people familiar with the city’s makeup would have expressed surprise at a report issued earlier this year by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which concluded that, despite experiencing the second-highest increase in integration over the past decade, Chicago remains the most segregated city in the nation.

Although restrictive covenants and race riots are a fading memory for many Chicagoans, the polarization of their neighborhoods is only the most visible reminder of the tensions that continue to inform the city’s politics and culture. Law enforcement, in particular, remains a flash point. The CPD, which now employs almost as many minorities as whites, has pushed back against a reputation in some quarters for bias and brutality with initiatives like community policing, aiming to prevent crime by fostering close ties between neighborhood residents and officers on the beat. But accusations of mistreatment and racially motivated arrests continue.

Looking at law enforcement statistics, the questioning of the CPD’s motives is understandable. Illinois leads the nation in the proportion of drug crime arrestees who are black. And in an analysis of Cook County records conducted by the Chicago Reader last year, the disparities in arrests for misdemeanor marijuana possession were striking. Although Chicago is about 33 percent black and 32 percent white, of the 47,400 people arrested in 2009 and 2010 for whom possession was the most serious charge, 78

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100

78%

BY THE NUMBERS: WEED and ETHNICITY IN CHICAGO

PERCENT (%)

75

50 32.9%

31.7% 28.9%

25

17%

5%

0

Black

Hispanic/ Latino

White

ETHNICITY by ethnicity, percent of all arrested for marijuana possession in Chicago by ethnicity, percent of entire Chicago population source: 2010 us census; chicago reader

percent were black, and 5 percent were white. The racial disparity in convictions is even more extreme: For every white person convicted for possession, 40 black people were found guilty.

A HIGH PRICE Along with the puzzling demographic skew in arrests and convictions, Chicago’s prosecution of pot smokers faces another criticism, one that has gained greater urgency in an era of budget cuts: It’s expensive. Last summer, Cook County’s budget was more than $300 million in the red. Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s last budget, whose cuts to some city services has triggered numerous political fights in the past months, was drafted under the specter of $650 million in projected deficits. Chicago Public Schools might have to find $1 billion by 2014 to cover their obligations.

While politicians look for programs to slash, the criminal justice system in the city incurs a number of fixed costs for every person that passes through its cells. While about nine in 10 have their charges dropped, Cook County still has to keep its prison lit and heated, its staff available to process and watch

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inmates, and the accused fed. The total cost to the taxpayer, according to Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle: $143 per night, per prisoner.

That figure doesn’t include overtime pay for police officers to appear in court when someone is brought before a judge. Nor does it include the time spent by the judge, public defender, and other employees of the court on cases that by and large get thrown out.

And although the vast majority of offenders don’t end up serving time, in theory a misdemeanor could come with up to a year in jail. Whether they spend a few days in prison or longer, the disruption to their lives also imposes additional social and economic costs to themselves and their communities.

BROKEN WINDOWS Of course, all of this does not necessarily mean that Chicago police are pursuing an explicitly racist agenda to the detriment of public finances. As told to me by a CPD officer who spoke under anonymity, “If you have a small amount of pot (personal use), nine out of 10 of us won’t take you in. It’s a misdemeanor that almost always gets thrown out in court.” But there are

extenuating circumstances that might make an arrest more likely and arguably even beneficial for public safety.

Misdemeanor possession charges are sometimes used as a tool by police officers looking to get someone off the streets fast. If they suspect someone of being involved in a more serious crime—say, a shooting—but haven’t assembled enough evidence yet, a few joints might be the most expedient way to prevent someone from causing more harm. A night in jail might also be a convenient way for law enforcement to let gang members cool down when tensions arise.

Another argument in favor of arrests for misdemeanor possession can be found in the so-called “broken windows theory.” Most famously associated with successful efforts to reduce crime in New York City in the ’80s and ’90s, the theory is based on the idea that a general sense of disorder is a major factor in the propagation of violence in urban neighborhoods. Accordingly, aggressively targeting smaller crimes that contribute to a feeling that an area is unsafe—such as graffiti, public drinking, and, yes, marijuana smoking—is supposed to restore a sense of the rule of law, leading to a decline in more serious infractions. Since this policing strategy is applied to neighborhoods with high crime rates and those neighborhoods tend to have heavily minority populations, it follows that the racial disparity in arrests can at least partially be explained as a reflection of the geography of crime in Chicago, rather than bias on the part of the police.

However, there are several issues with these justifications. Although there may be a practical explanation for the numbers (something that would require a far more rigorous statistical analysis, anyway), it doesn’t detract from the sense of unfairness that comes with selective enforcement of the law. Consequently, it must be questioned whether these methods are doing more harm than good to the cause of law and order by generating distrust of law enforcement in minority neighborhoods.

Additionally, the broken windows theory, though continuing to inform the thinking of the Chicago Police Department, is not necessarily borne from sociological research. Since its debut three decades ago, numerous other explanations, from economic changes to Roe v. Wade and the ebb of the crack epidemic, have been offered for the decline in crime rates in New York and other locales that employed its precepts. Numerous scholars have assailed it as ineffectual at best and a thin veil for racial and socioeconomic discrimination by law enforcement at worst.

And even many in favor of a hard-line approach to crime, including Chicago Chief of Police Garry F. McCarthy, now openly worry about the social cost of the high rate of incarceration in Chicago and around the country. But if the status quo isn’t working, what will?

A NEW DIRECTION? “We all know that the War on Drugs has failed to end drug use. Drugs and the failed War on Drugs have devastated lives, families, and communities. For too long, we’ve treated drug use as a criminal justice issue rather than a public health issue, which is what

it is. Rather than continue this cycle of arrest and detention and imprisonment, we must shift our focus to prevention and intervention. Rather than investing in detaining people in the Cook County Jail at almost $150 a day, we need to invest in treatment, education, and job skills training.”

These words would not be very surprising coming from a community activist, social critic, or academic. But until recently, it would have been unusual for elected officials, conscious of the stigma attached to being “soft on crime” in American politics, to say something of the sort. This explains why it made national headlines when Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said them at a rally in downtown Chicago last summer commemorating the 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s declaration that substance abuse was “public enemy No. 1.” Since that moment, the debate over drug arrests has been more visible than usual, jumping from City Hall onto the pages of local newspapers—and out to the public at large.

“Studies show that drug use is pretty much the same across all different race and ethnicity backgrounds, but we do see disproportionately high arrests of people of color,” said Juliana Stratton, executive director of the Cook County Judicial Advisory Council. However, she is quick to point out the “deep respect” Preckwinkle has for the CPD and that the issue amounts to more than racism. “One of the things we have to acknowledge is that many possession arrests do occur in poor neighborhoods that are wracked with violence, and the police are really struggling to control serious crime. When you look at the overall numbers of those who are being arrested, you will find more people of color, especially young people, and we know that just continues to destabilize communities. So I think it’s not just an issue of race: It’s also an issue of poverty.”

Echoing her boss, Stratton points to the War on Drugs as a failure, evidence that “arresting our way out of the issue is not effective.” In its place, she says, policy makers are beginning to ask, “What do people need so they do not continue to cycle in and out of the system?” Decreasing the prison population is a main goal; one of the alternatives being examined is ticketing instead of arresting, which would help people avoid a criminal record that might prevent them from finding a job or receiving financial aid. More broadly, Preckwinkle’s office wants to make sure that “when we think about criminal justice in Cook County, we don’t just start with the jail. We go to the point of people getting connected to the system, the point of arrest, and seeing if we can get on the same page [with the police] with the overall goals, which are that those that are a danger to society are the ones that we focus on in terms of detaining.” As for those charged with low-level possession, Stratton adds, we should be “asking the question, ‘Is that really what poses a public safety issue?’ As the political debate continues, I think people are pulling away from that.”

If it were up to Cook County, changes in drug policy, emphasizing treatment rather than imprisonment, would likely already be underway. But the county just runs the jail and has no direct power over the police department that fills it. Instead, the county

We all know that the War on Drugs has failed to end drug use. Drugs and the failed War on Drugs have devastated lives, families, and communities.

Grey City | 9

is seeking an ongoing dialogue with the city and the CPD, in order to reconsider the effectiveness of current law enforcement practices. Although there has been much discussion over the past year, no changes to Chicago Police Department policy have been announced. As Stratton acknowledges, “For political leaders, it’s often a question of not wanting to appear soft on crime. That’s been a struggle in this debate throughout. I think we are moving forward in terms of having this as a topic of conversation.

The challenge we have is, if we have this conversation, how will people perceive it in terms of whether you’re being tough enough on crime?”

DECRIMINALIZATION OR LEGALIZATION?

NORML and its allies see the legalization of marijuana as both a prospective boon to government coffers and a potentially huge blow to criminal networks.

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Even as the new approach floated by Toni Preckwinkle and her team remains in limbo, some advocate a step for which few figures in elected office are willing to express support: full legalization. “We do support Preckwinkle’s efforts to change these policies,” said Dan Linn, executive director of the Illinois chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), “but we are advocating for the removal of all criminal penalties for responsible adult possession, consumption, and cultivation of cannabis. Writing someone a ticket instead of arresting them is a better option, but we don’t think they should get penalized at all.”

In Linn’s view, a problem with decriminalization is that it gives police officers, who could still collect fines from marijuana smokers, a continuing financial incentive to go after offenders. Furthermore, if reform in Chicago looked like decriminalization in other jurisdictions, it might not solve the issue of discrimination. “Most of these decriminalization ordinances have a clause in them where the officer can arrest the suspect if they decide to, and that’s going to lead to cases of discriminatory arrests. There are also problems with people without identification on them, who would be subject to arrest instead of a citation. Unfortunately, people in low-income communities can’t always afford to have a state ID or driver’s license on them—and those are the people who will get arrested, the people we’re looking to help with these changes in policy.”

Another cause for concern, even with prison mostly off the table, is that financial penalties for marijuana users would be excessive. “There’s a decriminalization bill down in Springfield right now where the penalties for possession of less than an ounce of cannabis are $500 for a first offence, $750 for a second offence, and $1,000 for every subsequent offence. That frankly is just too much money for someone who can hardly afford to put food on the table as it is,” Linn said. “If they have to pay a $1,000 ticket or pay rent, they’re probably going to pay rent, and then have a warrant issued, and then be subject to arrest. And that’s exactly what we’re looking to avoid: giving these people a criminal record. It doesn’t do anybody any good.”

Like Juliana Stratton at Cook County, Linn believes that the political debate is trending toward greater leniency for marijuana smokers. However, he is optimistic that, moving forward, support will shift toward

full legalization instead of decriminalization or other smaller reforms, because of the better economic and criminal justice outcomes he sees associated with the former. “The political climate right now should really be about legalizing it, regulating it, and taxing it to help with the struggling budgets at all levels of government.” Drawing comparisons to the end of Prohibition, NORML and its allies see the legalization of marijuana as both a prospective boon to government coffers and a potentially huge blow to criminal networks, not to mention a massive relief for the average consumer.

With decriminalization, “it’s still illegal to have and sell the product, and therefore you’re going to have criminals controlling the distribution. If you take it out of the underground sector, legalize it, and regulate it, you can control better who’s producing it, who’s distributing it, who’s getting it, and where they’re able to use it.”

CONCLUSION Given the slow and often-mystifying way politics works in Chicago, it’s impossible to accurately guess when drug policy in the city will change. However, talking to people both in and out of government, it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t believe it will change, at least eventually. Preckwinkle’s remarks last summer demonstrated to a remarkable degree that drug reform is now a major topic of conversation in the halls of power. And looking at events elsewhere in Illinois indicate that talk may well be transformed into action: Since 2009, Urbana and Evanston have both decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana, while Springfield has changed possession from a crime to an ordinance violation.

Meanwhile, legalization, once a political nonstarter, is generating increased interest. In a Gallup Poll last year, a record 50 percent of Americans supported legalization. In what is certainly a trend to watch, support was the heaviest among the youngest voters, aged 18 to 29, with each successively older generation registering lower levels of approval. This could mean legalization will be an increasingly popular position as time goes by. For the moment, no attempt at statewide legalization has been successful, with even famously liberal states like California rejecting it by substantial margins. However, with ballot initiatives this November in Colorado and Washington and more efforts on the horizon, the issue remains in flux.

In April, the world’s most famous Chicagoan, Barack Obama, flew to Colombia for the annual Summit of the Americas, where many of his Latin American colleagues publicly voiced the view that ending the War on Drugs was essential to reducing crime in their nations and in their northern neighbor. The United States government disagreed. “I don’t mind a debate on issues such as decriminalization,” the President told an interviewer, but, holding fast to his administration’s policy line, added, “I personally don’t agree that that’s a solution to the problem.” There is little hope, most observers agree, that drug policy will change much in the near future, at least at the federal level. But one thing is certain, in both Chicago and the nation at large: That debate, whether political leaders mind it or not, has already arrived.

A brief history of the

UCPD by Jordan Larson

jamie manley

| the chicago maroon

Grey City | 11

Milestones of the UCPD

1930s Divisions of the University hire their own security guards who double as janitors.

12 | Volume 13

1952

A faculty wife is assaulted on the Midway, prompting the creation of the South East Chicago Commission (SECC) by the University and community. The SECC then hires security officers and a law enforcement liaison.

1968

The International Association of Chiefs of Police help the University’s security department become a police department, hiring its first director, James Delaney.

1983

Patrol Officer Steven Mitchell, the only UCPD officer to die in the line of duty, is stabbed while investigating a suspicious person call.

1989

Under Rudy Nimocks’s direction, the Department gains certification from the Illinois Local Governmental Law Enforcement Officers Training Board.

It then hires more full-time police officers, adds sirens and emergency lights to its patrol cars, and begins to expand its geographical jurisdiction.

2007

Graduate student Amadou Cisse is shot outside his apartment at 61st Street and Ellis Avenue, prompting the addition of more emergency phones, the creation of an e-mail alert system, and extension of late-night shuttle service. According to a Nov 21, 2008 Maroon article, Cisse’s death marked “the first murder of a U of C student in over 30 years.”

2009

UCPD contracts with security company AlliedBarton to bring more security guards to campus.

2010

Light towers are built on the Midway.

2012

UCPD hopes to gain more independence from the CPD in their jurisdiction, hire a detective, add a lock-up, and send their reports directly to the state.

A sign outside the glass structure located at 6054 South Drexel Avenue reads “SAFE BABIES, SAFE SPACE, SAFE HAVEN.” Only a few feet away stands a blue emergency phone, one of the 329 present on the University of Chicago campus. South Cottage Grove Avenue lies a block to the west, and South Lake Park Avenue nearly a mile away to the east. These are, respectively, the western- and eastern-most boundaries of the University of Chicago Police Department’s (UCPD) patrol district. Along with East 64th Street to the south and East 37th Street to the north, these four boundaries enclose two districts of the city’s total of 25: districts 2 and 21, the latter ranking the 5th safest in Chicago.

This building also houses the Department of Safety and Security, which includes the University of Chicago Police Department. From the offices within, 6.5 square miles and 65,000 people are monitored and protected by officers, security guards, and dispatchers. The Department employs about 140 officers with full police powers and operates on a budget of $5.5 million a year.

Although clearly a formidable institution, it was only formally created about 40 years ago and has only recently become known as a police department. And while the UCPD is the second-largest private police force in the country, its history exists only in archived reports, scattered newspaper articles, and the memories of its employees.

“There are no firm records, it may surprise you, on either the Department or on the history of the Department,” said Robert Mason, the Public Information Officer of the UCPD. The UCPD was not formally created until the 1960s, but its origins lie in an early form of basic security for the University. According to Mason, “it started out when they had security officers back in the ‘30s, and each division of the University would hire one or two people to be their security officers.” Many of the officers also served as the janitors for their respective buildings.

A greater culture of safety and protection can be traced to the University’s role in urban renewal in Hyde Park and Kenwood and the creation of the South East Chicago Commission (SECC) in 1952. The 1950s saw a greater concern in safety in the area, as neighborhood residents grew increasingly concerned with the state of dilapidated buildings and unsavory businesses.

“In February of ‘52, there was a faculty wife assaulted and robbed on the Midway,” said Mason, who also served as the executive director of the SECC from 1982 to 2009. “That seemed to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Numerous faculty members and senior staff members went in to see the Chancellor...and demanded that something be done. Either move the University out of this horrible area or do something to clean [it] up.”

The SECC was then created in order to make the area surrounding the University more attractive to families and faculty, citing “social organization and urban renewal” as its main

goals, according to a 1955 annual report from the Commission. The SECC was closely connected to the University and, though officially registered as a not-for-profit in the state of Illinois, it acted as an arm of the University in many ways. The Commission was created under the authority of the University’s president, Lawrence A. Kimpton, only a year into his presidency, and he served as the president of the Commission until his resignation from both the Commission and the University in 1960.

Safety was the primary goal of the SECC, and it used security in addition to neighborhood programs and building renewal in order to achieve it. According to the same annual report, “security for residents and businessmen and visitors in our community is of primary importance....

Results of these efforts have paid off in better patrolling of our streets, good deployment of manpower, and a subsequent decrease in crime.”

Though the SECC described its security’s function as “day-by-day cooperation with local police from patrolmen to supervising captain,” its first law enforcement officers were hired not to patrol or directly maintain safe areas, but often to force out undesirable businesses.

Peter Rossi and Robert Dentler’s 1961 book on the subject, titled The Politics of Urban Renewal, claims that the Commission first hired two private police officers for use on one case: to investigate a hotel in which criminal activities were rumored to take place. The information the officers collected was ultimately used to have the hotel foreclosed, and the tactic was later repeated to clear out other buildings.

In total, 101 acres of property were torn down during urban renewal.

“There were some good things that happened, there were some bad things that happened,” Mason said. “Things were done at that time that wouldn’t be done, couldn’t be done, today. But they were done and the area is what it is.”

It was only a few years after the SECC hired policemen that the University began creating what would become the UCPD. In 1968, the International Association of Chiefs of Police helped develop the University’s security department into a more full-fledged police department, and hired the UCPD’s first director, James Delaney, a retired CPD captain.

In 1989, Rudy Nimocks retired from the Chicago Police Department and became the UCPD’s Chief of Police. The first item on Nimocks’s agenda was to make the UCPD a fully certified law enforcement agency.

“When I first got here, I discovered that even though the police officers at the University of Chicago Police Department had received their training in a certified training facility...they still hadn’t gotten that [Illinois Local Governmental Law Enforcement Officers Training Board] certification,” Nimocks said. “Within a couple of months it was done.”

Though the UCPD wasn’t formally certified, its officers still had full police powers because

of the Private College Campus Police Act, an Illinois law allowing the Board of Trustees of a private college or university to maintain a campus police force. The law is designed to accommodate universities in areas with high crime rates, according to Nimocks.

While the actual powers of the UCPD were not affected by its certification or lack thereof, simply achieving it was the first step for a number of changes. Nimocks began to hire more full-time officers rather than part-time officers, many of whom also worked as CPD officers and composed the majority of the force at one time.

The Department, because of its higher status, was then able to start using patrol cars with sirens and emergency lights, which it didn’t use prior to its certification “because the idea at the University was to have it as a kind of low-profile security department,” according to Mason.

Gaining certification was also the UCPD’s first legal step toward expanding its jurisdiction to cover nearby areas.

“I convinced the University that it may be a good idea to expand the geographic jurisdiction to the connecting areas on the premise that we had a lot of people who came over into our area to commit crimes who live right next door, and then there was the fact that the University wanted to put charter schools in those neighborhoods,” Nimocks said.

The first expansion in the UCPD’s district was from East 61st to East 64th Street. The second expansion was from East 47th to East 39th Street, which has since been expanded to include East 37th Street due to the opening of Donoghue Charter School in 2005.

In the past decade, the UCPD has seen more changes, including its partnership with security company AlliedBarton in 2009 to bring more security officers to campus, as well as the building of light towers on the Midway in 2010. According to the University’s community safety Web site, the “budget for police protection has increased by more than $1 million in the past three years,” and crime rates in 2010 and 2011 in the Hyde Park–Kenwood area were some of the lowest in decades.

The Department also aims to gain further independence from the CPD within its jurisdiction

by December of this year. According to Mason, “We’re not going to be doing anything more than we’re doing now, it will just be more official.” Proposed changes include a lock-up, sending reports directly to the state, and hiring detectives to assist with investigations.

While some may see these increased powers as extreme, especially for a private police force, the Department aims to protect students and community members in whatever way it can.

“That’s the primary responsibility of any public safety agent, is that they are able to prevent crime,” Nimocks said. “That’s the hardest part of their responsibility, because obviously you can’t be everywhere at the same time. But you try to do it the best you can with the resources you are allowed.”

There are no firm records, it may surprise you, on either the Department or on the history of the Department.

Grey City | 13

THE STRONG ARM OF THE LAW

BY CRYSTAL TSOI As a reporter, I’m used to seeing my name in the bylines, not the headlines. I want to tell the story, not be in it. I never thought I would experience police brutality firsthand, but I did.

And now that I’ve gone through the same trials and setbacks as those I have reported on, it’s time for me to step back into the bylines to tell my story.

I was arrested for saving a girl’s life, not for demonstrating with Occupy Chicago or protesting the NATO summit. I did not ask to get arrested as a political statement.

Looking back, I see a seemingly innocuous sign of what was to come. Last March, I had been assigned to follow up with an article for the Maroon on Gregory Malandrucco and Matthew Clark, two University affiliates who were allegedly beaten up by plain clothes CPD officers a year ago. Greg and Matt had recently obtained and released surveillance footage of the officers who assaulted them that night, and the interview with them was to see if there were new developments in the case.

One of the most salient memories I have of that first meeting was Greg’s struggle to retell the story of what happened to him and Matt that night. There were moments of silence and reflection—emotional collateral in every word that Greg spoke. I would never have guessed that I, too, would one day share with Matt and Greg my own experiences with police brutality.

My story begins like any other 20-something’s typical weekend. I was out at a nightclub on the West Side of Chicago for my friend’s 22nd birthday. Toward the end of the night, I saw a girl lying unconscious on the dance floor.

As a certified first responder, I stopped to ensure that she got the proper medical attention. I went through all the basic procedures.

I checked her pulse. It was faint. She was not responding to verbal or physical stimuli, which suggested alcohol poisoning. My questions to the individuals around her revealed that she

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| the chicago maroon

was there by herself and the woman who was with her did not know her personally. I told someone to call 911 and repositioned her flat on her back with her head tilted to the side so that no vomit got into her airways.

Despite my hesitation about a potential neck injury, the bouncer carried her over his back and out of the club, where I stayed with her until the paramedics came about 15 minutes later.

The police came with the paramedics and dispersed the crowd surrounding the girl. After handing over care of the girl to the paramedics, I backed away from the police perimeter. However, as a matter of potential liability, I wanted to leave any information that might be medically relevant to the girl later at the hospital with a law enforcement official at the scene, especially considering how the bouncer had carried the girl down the stairs over his back.

I approached a nearby officer and presented myself as CPR/first responder certified.

“Officer, I need to leave you information about the victim…”

But before I could finish, he cut me off and said, “You need to back off and leave the area.

The professionals are here and have everything under control.”

“I understand that Officer, but I don’t…”

“If you don’t fucking back off right now, I’m going to arrest you.”

He then forcefully grabbed my arm and shoved me back several feet.

I was livid. As I was thrown back by the officer’s forceful push, my friend caught me and held me back despite my vocal protest that what the officer had just done was wrong.

Eventually I broke free from my friend’s restraint and walked back toward the officer with the intent of asking him for his star number and name in order to file a report with the Independent Police Review Authority.

“What is your badge number and your…”

Before I could finish my question, he twisted my right arm to my back. My whole body convulsed in pain when he applied additional pressure and secured my other arm behind my back.

One of my most salient memories from that seconds-long encounter was that, as he dragged me away to his patrol vehicle, I screamed out in pain and desperation to the crowd to no avail.

“Please, please help! He’s hurting me! He’s hurting me! Someone please, he’s hurting me! I did nothing wrong!”

For fear of the same repercussions, no one dared stop him. The officer then pushed me against his patrol car to secure handcuffs on me and “tossed” (as he would describe it at my trial last month) me into the back of his car.

Another officer, who I assumed was his partner, got into the car with me.

“What are you arresting and charging me with?” I asked.

“Oh, it can be a number of things, failure to disperse and follow orders from a police offi-

cer. We’ll decide when we get to the station, so don’t you worry about it.”

Growing up in Los Angeles in a culture fostered by memories of Rodney King and knowing neighbors who had the words “fuck the police” shaved into their heads, I knew resentment grew from a history of police brutality and corruption. The stories I heard when I was a child, as well as Greg and Matt’s experiences, all came rushing back. Even one of the readings I did for my Law and Society class, a study on police interrogation and intimidation tactics, joined the maddening thoughts flooding into my head.

Now I was having a firsthand encounter with those tactics and those feelings of resentment.

The car reached the Wood Street Station in the 13th district at 2:30 a.m. I wouldn’t leave the station to be transferred and subsequently processed at the female lock-up for another four hours. It was during this time that my vague notions of police culture would become a full-blown reality.

Police culture places a large emphasis on absolute authority and its use as an intimidation mechanism. In the dialogue between captive and capturer, reason does not factor into the discussion. It is a fruitless conversation based on circular logic and fallacious acts of subordination. The reinforcing fraternal cohesion among the cops at the station and their adamancy in demonizing me shook my own cognizance of what happened that night and even my belief in my own innocence in the weeks to follow.

When I tried to explain myself, one of the female cops replied with, “You think you’re Ms. Hero saving the world? Well, I’m giving [the victim] your personal information so that if anything happens to her, she’ll sue you. Also, if you’re thinking about suing us, we can always subpoena the tapes and we’ll see who’s right. Remember, whatever document you sign your name on is a legal document and you’re held under oath. I can’t wait until the day we can sue you guys back. They need to make that happen.”

They allowed me to call one friend before taking my phone away. Thankfully my friend Jonathan was still awake, and he and another friend took a cab to the station—only to be told that it would still be hours before the station could even book me.

As I was sitting there, watching them discuss the crimes they could plausibly charge me with, I realized this was the B.A. topic I had been searching for all summer. Although this was not necessarily the ideal situation in which I had hoped my Einstein moment would occur, I took it as it was and voiced my gratitude to the cop who had arrested me for his timely role in reinvigorating my intellectual pursuit of knowledge.

I would not be released for another five and a half hours, at 11:30 a.m. the next day. During that time, I was stripped of my personal belongings,

Police culture places a large emphasis on absolute authority and its use as an intimidation mechanism.

Grey City | 15

Much of this whole ordeal had been about waiting for what sometimes felt like a drawn out indefinite end.

fingerprinted and processed, and kept in a cell while I waited for someone to come post bail for my release. Though the officer who arrested me had mercifully allowed me to write down a few numbers on my hand at the police station, they were wiped off my palms when they were cleaned for fingerprinting. One of two numbers on my hand was Jonathan’s, and he couldn’t accept my collect calls without a credit card. The other was my friend Maritza’s, who thankfully accepted my call.

However, I still had a long wait ahead of me before she could arrive, and it was tortuous.

When you’re in the confines of a cell, sitting on a cold slab of metal with nothing to occupy your mind, you experience a momentary lapse in sanity.

“This is what you get for breaking the law!” the female attendants kept yelling at me. Pleading with them about my innocence was stupid and pointless.

As I waited for Maritza, fears that she might not find me for another 24 hours before I could get released mentally and physically crippled me. Never had I felt so hopeless.

Maritza and her cousin finally arrived at the station and I was released with two counts of resisting arrest. The minute we got into the car I fell into Maritza’s arms crying. It was an amalgamation of all the anger, indignation, and despair I had suppressed all night and morning.

Despite everything that had happened that night, I still possessed a naïveté that compelled me to believe that my name would be vindicated in a court of law.

My first of many court dates was November 2. As expected, my cop showed up bright and early at 9 a.m. Not as expected was the overwhelming sense of fear that resurfaced when I saw him again.

We set a date two weeks later for November 16, during which I would appear at the 555 West Harrison Street courthouse to schedule the date for my actual trial, which was then set for January 30. I read Malcolm Feeley’s book The Process Is the Punishment for class, and its succinct title captured my experiences in five words.

In fact, during one of my interviews for my B.A. thesis, I spoke to a cop who revealed that there was an unspoken rule that if a civilian

1.9

$

asked for the badge number, you arrest them.

My cop was getting paid to lose a day of work to go to court, while I had to skip classes that I couldn’t afford to miss. That was my punishment for holding a policeman accountable.

On the morning of January 30, I learned that all the cases at 555 West Harrison Street had been transferred to another courthouse at 25th Street and California Avenue. On a day when I had hoped to finally be redeemed in the eyes of the law, this long and arduous process was prolonged by at least another two months. I then had another date scheduled for March 1 in order to decide my final trial date.

The courthouse at 25th and California stood in stark contrast to 555 West Harrison. Standing next to a penitentiary, it boasted a menacing exterior and an equally depressing interior, with off-white courtrooms illuminated by garish fluorescent lights. My trial date was set for April 18, two days before my B.A. thesis was due.

Much of this whole ordeal had been about waiting. Waiting for the next date and waiting for what sometimes felt like a drawn out indefinite end.

One of the things I have learned in and out of the classroom by this point is the cultish style of operation of the American judicial system. It is a system that favors its own, those who possess an intricate knowledge of its inner workings, from prosecutors to police officers.

As a result, my case depended solely on my lawyer’s experience and connections. Luckily, my lawyer knew the system well. He understood my chances with each judge, the effect each officer would have on the witness stand, and, incidentally, informed me of my arresting officer’s history of being rough with females.

Because at the end of the day, the charges brought against me weren’t an act to deter future disobedience of the law. If that were the case, what kind of Aesop’s fable moral would this send to all the arrogant college students such as myself? That you will be arrested and prosecuted in the court of law if you responsibly help someone?

No. My cop’s attitude told me nothing about respect for the law, only about his desire to punish me for a perceived challenge of authority, the authority of a Chicago Police Depart-

Amount awarded to Chicago nurse Rachelle Jackson in a 2009 federal suit against the CPD after an incident of “false arrest, malicious prosecution, coercive questioning and intentional infliction of emotional distress,” according to the Chicago Tribune.

MILLION

16 | Volume 13

4

The process fourth-year Crystal Tsoi faced when fighting two counts of resisting arrest outside a club in August 2011. Tsoi, who based her B.A. thesis on the experience, claims to have been arrested after trying to provide medical information for a girl passed out at the club.

TRIAL DATES over months

ment officer. Prior to the trial itself, my lawyer went over what I was going to say on the stand, and a part of me was excited to tell my side of the story.

The judge we got that day favored bench trials over jury trials. Accordingly, my lawyer informed me that opting for a jury trial would actually jeopardize my case. Instead, a bench trial increased my chances of a full acquittal.

The officer who had arrested me and the female officer who had booked me came to the stand. The prosecutor questioned them on what happened that night, basing the case on the fact that I was drunk and didn’t know what I was doing. It did not look good at that point.

Every objection raised by my lawyer was overruled and I began to feel apprehensive.

However, halfway through the prosecution’s questioning, my lawyer leaned over to me and whispered, “You’re going to be not guilty.” He then decided to waive calling up his one and only witness: me.

Like I said before, my lawyer’s experience with the law sometimes borders on mystical.

Afterward, when I asked him how he had known, he replied like a magician who refuses to reveal his tricks, “When you do this long enough, you just know.”

But before the judge gave out his decision, he decided to reprimand me in theatrical fashion: “Young lady, what you did that night jeopardized what these fine men and women of the law were trying to do to save someone’s life. This is America, a country based on the rule of law, and you are compromising the very values of this nation. I have reviewed all the evidence of this case and I hope you learn from your mistakes.”

The whole time that the judge was reciting this dramatic monologue, my lawyer leaned over and told me to ignore everything he said.

8

“I find you ‘not guilty.’”

What just happened? Did my lawyer orchestrate a deal before the trial? Was this all a theatrical production done for reeducating me in a civic lesson? My seven-month-long saga ended not with any dramatic legal banter between the prosecution and my lawyer but with a simple not guilty ruling. I wasn’t complaining, but at the same time I still didn’t understand what had happened.

After court was adjourned, my lawyer told me to stay behind while he went into the room behind the courtroom to the judge’s chamber.

He then came back out and led me out of the courtroom.

“That was absolutely ridiculous! I can’t believe he said all of that. Outrageous!”

The whole time, I was under the assumption that the judge was just putting on a show and I asked, “Wait. So everything he had said about the rule of law…he was serious?”

“He meant every word of it! That was absolutely unbelievable the way he yelled at you like that. Which is why I went back and talked to him afterwards. I told him that all you did was try to help a girl. Given, I stretched it a bit and said you don’t even drink but that was just so over the top. He did not need to say all those things to you. Actually, I don’t think I can try another case in front of that judge after telling him off.”

I’ve often described my experience as Kafkaesque. My experiences served to not only further confirm my skepticism about the law but also highlight the arbitrariness of its enforcement and execution. I didn’t learn any real lessons, and I have no trite inspirational one-liners to move the masses. I have only a compelling story, and I hope you can make sense of the absurdity of my predicaments.

This is America, a country based on the rule of law, and you are compromising the very values of this nation.

Grey City | 17

Q&A with

(Nobel Prize Winner) GARY BECKER

by Mahmoud Bahrani 18 | Volume 13

tiffany tan

| the chicago maroon

In 1968, University of Chicago economist Gary Becker solved the problem that had plagued law enforcement officers, politicians, and city planners since, well, the dawn of civilization: How do we stop criminals from committing crimes, and is stopping crime even desirable? Becker’s paper, “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach,” looks at criminals as rational individuals, just like anyone else. Criminals, like ordinary citizens, seek to maximize their own well-being, but through illegal instead of legal means. Radical in its time, the Becker Model has stood as an authoritative theory on crime since it was published.

Becker was also the first economist to apply economic models to non-market social structures (think Freakonomics), an achievement for which he was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Becker’s current research focuses on the repercussions of an increase in students pursuing higher education, the value of increasing life at old age, and the various intricacies of human capital. Professor Becker sat down with Grey City to discuss misconceptions about crime, the effects of drug legalization, and whether or not it’s possible to stop crime.

Grey City: So I understand that your first paper was inspired by a particular event. Can you tell us what that was?

Gary Becker: I was teaching at Columbia University and was driving to an oral exam with Ph.D. students. The question [I asked myself] was, “Should I park closer in a spot that was illegal, or should I park in a lot which was somewhat further away?” So I had to make a calculation: What was the likelihood that I’d be caught if I parked it down the street versus the time, the money, that would be lost by parking further away? I decided to park on the street, and since it was an oral exam, the first question I asked the student when my turn came to examine him on price theory was how he would handle a problem of this type…. I asked a lot of questions, and they didn’t do very well on it [laughs]. After I came out of the exam, I figured this is a really good problem to work on, so I started thinking more systematically about it.

GC: As we all know, you ultimately came to the conclusion that criminals are just like any other individuals, facing daily problems like your parking situation. That’s a pretty radical thought: People like to think that criminals are acting with some ulterior motive that can’t be understood. When you presented this idea in Crime and Punishment, how did people react?

GB: A lot of hostility among many people. Some economists found it simpatico, so to speak. A number of economists and certainly many non-economists—sociologists and psychologists—found it really ill in way of thinking about the problem. It’s still controversial, but it became less controversial over time as more and more work was done on crime by economists and others, and as the notion of deterrents—that you can deter people in a variety of ways: by punishment, by education, by giving them better alternatives—became much more acceptable.

GC: The paper comes to a rather interesting solution, that punishments should be limited almost exclusively to fines. That’s not very intuitive.

GB: It’s acceptable to fine as long as people have the money and are not what we call “judgment proof.” So if you commit a murder, maybe no fine

would compensate society for the damages done by that murder. A fine would be determined by how much harm you’re doing as a result of your actions.

A murder would have an extremely high, maybe even infinite, value on it, and even very wealthy people would not be able to meet that price. If they can meet the price, then you have to deter it in another way or in complementary ways—that’s why we think of imprisonment, probation, things of that type.

Fining has a great advantage. If you’re a criminal and you pay me (as the government) a fine, then I’m getting compensated. On the other hand, say I send you to prison; then you’re giving up something, but I’m also giving up something since I have to have guards and money and so on to take care of you. So that’s a really bad form of punishment.

Prison may be inevitable, but you try to use a more effective punishment first if you can. A lot of activity we punish with fines. You drive too fast; you get a fine. A company pays less than minimum wage; they get punished with a fine. But they’re not always useable…and in those situations you have to supplement them with real punishments, which have a real cost to society too. You still want to punish the criminal, you still want to deter the action, but it’s going to cost you something.

To get people upset, I like to say there’s an optimal amount of crime.

GC: Is it possible to eliminate crime entirely?

GB: It may be possible, but I’m not sure it’s desirable. To get people upset, I like to say that there’s an optimal amount of crime. We might be better off in a society where everyone was law-abiding and wasn’t willing to violate any laws, but is it worth it to try to eliminate all crime? You would have to make the punishments very severe. Not only fines, but imprisonments and so on…. It’s not worth it to eliminate all crime; it’s just too costly.

So you do a balance. That’s what economics is all about: balancing incentives, balancing the marginal advantages of reducing crime by one unit versus the cost to society of doing that. And that balance will generally fall [where there are still some criminals left in society]. It used to be said that there was no crime in communist China, and the reason there was no crime was that the government had such close surveillance on everybody…. Most people don’t want to live in that kind of society.

Grey City | 19

Gary Becker explains what he would do if he were chief of police. tiffany tan the chicago maroon

You don’t want drugs because you don’t think it’s moral. On the other hand, you don’t want all these costs from drug enforcement policy, so you have to balance those two principles.

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GC: So, let’s say you’re the chief of police and you could institute any policies that you wanted. What would be the optimal policies, say, for the city of Chicago?

GB: It depends on the type of crime. There’s not one policy for every crime…. You mostly want to deter the most serious crimes. You don’t want to sentence people to 10 years in prison because they went 50 miles per hour in a 40 mile per hour zone…. If I was police chief, if I could control policy…I would legalize the sale of drugs. We’re putting a lot of people in prison for that, and we’re crowding our prisons. I would say it’s not worth it, in terms of the cost to society and to the individuals being punished. We should move in the direction of legalization.

GC: The counterargument to legalizing drugs is that you’re giving drug usage the moral stamp of approval.

GB: Well, we legalize a lot of things we don’t necessarily like to do. A lot of people vote for legalizing divorce, even though they wish people would stay together. They recognize that there is a cost you’re imposing on people. Many people might say [that] in a world where, by making drugs illegal, you could costlessly eliminate [drug usage], a lot of people would favor that policy. I don’t deny that…. The problem is that that’s not the world we live in. We’ve tried a policy of punishment since President Nixon started a War on Drugs in the 1970s. It’s almost 40 years ago now, and it has not been a successful policy…. We’re

putting a lot of police on it. We’re sending people to prison for what are relatively minor crimes committed against other people…. I had a teacher, Frank Knight, who was a great economist, who taught at the University of Chicago, who used to say, “Principles conflict.” You may have a principle: You don’t want drugs because you don’t think it’s moral. On the other hand, you don’t want to have all these costs from drug enforcement policy, so you have to balance those two principles.

GC: Another focus of your research is on the economics of discrimination. Chicago is one of the most segregated and discriminatory cities in the country. Does this contribute to crime? Are the two interlinked?

GB: It’s controversial how much segregation contributes to crime. What is true is that because of segregation, minorities commit a disproportionate share of the felonies, and the victims are usually other minority members. Segregation does affect who’s the victim of a crime…[but] I think the most serious problem about crime—and maybe it’s related partly to segregation and minorities and discrimination—is that so many minority members drop out of high school, and we know that those are the people most likely to commit crime. So if we can get a better school system, they would find that their legal opportunities are better than their criminal opportunities, and they wouldn’t commit crime.

That’s the worst thing we’re doing to minorities in Chicago and in many other places as well.

GC: So your response would be to give them other incentives, to increase the side of the equation that deters them from committing crime.

GB: It turns out that, for most people, trafficking drugs doesn’t pay very well. But even law-abiding people on the street are making around minimum wage. We need to reform our educational system so that these people think to themselves, “I can do better than that by finishing high school and getting a better salary. I don’t have to risk going to prison. And I’ll make more money.” People will choose [to finish school]... We will reduce the amount of crime that way. I think that’s the worst thing we’re doing to minorities in Chicago and elsewhere—that we have such a high dropout rate. Now is that discrimination? It’s more complicated than that. [The problem is] probably not going to good enough schools. It’s also probably weak family structures, which are much harder to attack. But certainly the school system we can make better, and I think we should give high priority to that.

GC: You won the Nobel Prize in 1992 for applying economic principles to non-economic fields. What inspired you to think this way? You were one of the first to do this.

GB: When I was in college, I was interested in social problems. I majored in economics because I was also interested in mathematics, and economics attracted me because of the mathematics. And then I thought, “Well, maybe I can use my mathematics to help with social problems.” When I was a senior in college, I got a little discouraged with economics because it

seemed not to deal with real problems. I thought about going into sociology at that time. But I found sociology too difficult. So I decided I’d stay with economics, and fortunately I came to the University of Chicago as a graduate student, had some great teachers who inspired me and showed me that economics is a powerful tool for understanding the world, and that really made a great difference in my life. But I had this interest in social problems even before coming to Chicago; I just didn’t know how to do it using economics. That’s what I learned when I came here.

GC: Switching gears a little bit, the NATO conference was in Chicago this past weekend, and one of the arguments against having the conference was that it would bring a lot of crime. Same thing with the Olympics a couple years ago. Do big events always necessarily have to bring crime, and are those big events worth having if there’s always going to be crime?

GB: Well, whether it’s worth having is…[laughs].

People say Chicago got a lot of prestige from hosting the NATO event. The reason it brings crime is that we divert a lot of our police to the event…. If I was a criminal, I’d say it was a pretty good time to commit a crime [laughs]. Police aren’t around: If I want to drive faster on the highway, I’ll do it. And I was on the highway Friday evening just before they were closing it down. I was on the highway going to a dinner party on the North Side, so I had to go through this stretch, and people were driving fast. I mean, the likelihood you would be apprehended at that time was much, much lower.

I think that’s the worst thing we’re doing to minorities in Chicago and elsewhere—that we have such a high dropout rate.

THE CHICAGO MAROON

The Lumen Christi Institute for Catholic Thought, The Katholische Sozialwissenschaftliche Zentralstelle, and The John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought present a symposium on

Toward a Moral Economy: P o l i c i e s a n d Va l u e s f o r t h e 2 1 st c e n t u r y

thursday, May 31, 4:00 PM Max Palevsky Cinema Ida Noyes Hall 1212 East 59th Street University of Chicago Address: Reinhard Cardinal Marx, Archbishop of Munich Presentations: Roger Myerson, University of Chicago, Kevin M. Murphy, University of Chicago, Russell Hittinger, University of Tulsa This event opens the Fourth Lumen Christi Institute Conference on Economics and Catholic Social Thought and inaugurates the Institute’s Collaboration with the German-American Colloquium of the Katholische Sozialwissenschaftliche Zentralstelle.

For more informantion, please visit www.lumenchristi.org/moral_economy/

The Lumen Christi Institute for Catholic Thought

As the United States and the global economy continue to reel from the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, we face several questions: • What went wrong?

• How to prevent another such crisis?

• Can there be moral responsibility in a globalized economy?

• What would a moral economy look like?

On May 31, Reinhard Cardinal Marx, the Archbishop of Munich and a leading figure in contemporary Catholic social thought, will explore these questions in a major address, “Toward a Moral Economy.”

Two leading University of Chicago economists— Roger Myerson, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize, and Kevin Murphy, winner of the John Bates Clark Medal and the MacArthur Fellowship—will offer their perspectives.

They will be joined by Russell Hittinger, member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and co-chair of the Lumen Christi Institute’s Program in Catholic Social Thought.