CHICAGO — Just five months after announcing she would no longer talk about crime in her constituent newsletters because doing so is racist and fuels an “inaccurate public perception about crime rates,” Ald. Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth (48th) reversed course this morning.
Calling her office “outraged and disheartened by recent gun violence incidents that have taken place in the ward,” Manaa-Hoppenworth laid out her “Safe48 Health & Safety Plan.”
When she banned crime topics from her newsletter in May, the first-term alderman tried to drape her decision in a scholarly cloak by linking to a couple of studies that she said supported her thinking, including one from the University of Tehran. Anyone who wants to know about crime in the ward has to opt-in to receive separate emails. Presumably, they’re the racists who live in her corner of Edgewater and Uptown.
You may or may not be surprised to learn that Manaa-Hoppenworth’s decision to stop telling people about shootings and murders in the ward has failed to reduce the number of shootings and murders.
“People are leaving Edgewater because they don’t feel safe,” the alderman told Block Club Chicago this week, “and we can’t afford to lose more people.”
Maybe including crime news in her newsletters wasn’t the reason people didn’t feel safe after all.
As of this morning, there have been 14 shooting incidents in her ward this year, up 180% from last year. It’s the highest year-to-date total since at least 2016.
And 23 people have been shot during those 14 incidents, according to a city database provided to media outlets. That’s up from 11 people at this point last year. Here’s how that compares to other recent years:
- 2016 – 10
- 2017 – 9
- 2018 – 4
- 2019 – 7
- 2020 – 7
- 2021 – 5
- 2022 – 13
- 2023 – 11
- 2024 – 23
So, Manaa-Hoppenworth is launching Safe48. She started her announcement by blaming city, state, and national leaders who “failed to protect our communities from senseless loss of life due to guns.”
However, as you saw above, previous years were much safer in her ward as recently as 2021, presumably when the policies she is blaming were in effect.
Safe48 has four components, according to her email:
- Youth-focused initiatives that provide resources and opportunities
- “Addressing root causes” with “workforce development, housing and economic development”
- Increasing community policing, “i.e., foot and bike patrol”
- Collaboration with public safety partners such as the State’s Attorney’s Community Justice Center to “help neighbors advocate for further action on cases that impact our ward.”
Manaa-Hoppenworth’s email this morning also invites readers to sign up for her mailing list for racists, er, for people who want to opt-in to receive crime news.
So what about all of this?
Here’s the deal. Six of the people shot in her ward this year were targeted inside and outside of a single residential building on the 6000 block of North Kenmore. That’s nearly a quarter of this year’s victims.
There haven’t been any shootings there since August, reportedly because some people got evicted. So, safety seems to improve if you remove the very small number of people who cause problems rather than spin in circles, trying to solve 50 tangential issues that will have no knowable effect.
Here’s a proposal that builds on the improvements seen at that building on Kenmore. What if officials expanded that idea? They could arrest the teeny-tiny percentage of people who shoot others and put them somewhere secure so they can’t shoot anyone else. We could call those places “jails” and “prisons.”
In a bit of a wit-twister, the alderman’s latest announcement ends with the claim, “Our community keeps us safe,” which suggests that the community didn’t do its job and is responsible for her office’s outrage and disheartenment.
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