MEDIA WATCH: Journalism school students scoop Chicago dailies with 'Youth Violence' report
Even considering the fact that they are still taking the official hustler line from the likes of Michael Pfleger (who has several government contracts operating out of his St. Sabina's Catholic Church) and Phillip Jackson (the former CPS and CHA official who is now the Black Star Project), students at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism scooped Chicago's daily newspapers with their statistical analysis of so-called 'Youth Violence' just before Thanksgiving. The Northwestern reporters analyzed the data and discovered that Chicago's rate of youth violence is greater than other major cities.
Unfortunately, in their story they bought the party line that avoids targeting the largest drug gangs in the USA as a major cause for the violence, and a secondary line that claims that "honors students" cannot be part of street gangs. But even with those three major limitations (the other being relying on Jackson and Pfleger as two of their most important sources for quotes), Medill News Service has focused on a job that should be done by others in Chicago's media world.
So it's worth sharing their entire report with the readers of Substance and substancenews.net.
A billboard at 6743 S. Ashland trumpets a $5,000 award for information that leads to arrest and conviction of youth killers. The billboard, unveiled two months after the death of Derrion Albert by the Rev. Michael Pfleger, is funded by donations from congregants and community members.
Medill exclusive: Chicago again poised to be country’s most violent city for youth (by ADAM WREN, Nov 24, 2009)
Chicago is on the brink of yet another year as the country’s most dangerous city for youths, according to a Medill Reports analysis of city and state police records and U.S. census data.
In a year when the city has come under the glare of media camera lights for the beating death of 16-year-old Derrion Albert, Chicago’s youth homicide rate is set to eclipse those of major cities such as Los Angeles and Philadelphia, with two months still remaining in 2009.
Since 2006, Chicago has been at the top of the country’s five most populous cities in youth homicides, statistics show. If Chicago’s current homicide rate continues over the last two months of this year, the city would experience almost 1.5 youth homicides per 100,000 residents in 2009, clutching the dubious distinction for the fourth year in a row.
“Chicago has become the ground zero for youth violence,” said Phillip Jackson, executive director of the Chicago-based Black Star Project, which specializes in mentoring low-income black and Latino youths at risk of committing or being victimized by violence. “Children in Chicago have the mentality of children who live in legitimate war zones. They can’t even concentrate on academics, on being children.”
The statistics seem to belie recent comments by public officials — from the U.S. Attorney General to the Chicago Police Superintendent — that youth violence in Chicago is not as bad as it appears to be.
Dispatched to Chicago by President Obama to quell concerns after a video of Derrion Albert’s fatal beating hit airwaves nationwide, Attorney General Eric Holder attempted to frame youth violence as a U.S. problem, not only a Chicago one.
“Youth violence is not a Chicago problem, any more than it is a black problem, a white problem, or a Hispanic problem,” said Holder, flanked by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Mayor Richard M. Daley, at an Oct. 7 City Hall press conference. “It is something that affects communities big and small, and people of all races and all colors. It is an American problem.”
Duncan took a similar tack.
“Chicago is not unique,” he said. “Four students have been shot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, already this year. Philadelphia, Seattle, Miami, New Orleans, and many rural communities have also lost schoolchildren to violence in recent weeks.”
And in October, Chicago Police Department Superintendent Jody Weis announced a 47 percent decline in homicides in which youths were involved over the first nine months of 2009 compared with the same period last year.
But, zooming out, numbers compiled by Medill Reports tell a different, more unsettling tale.
Through October, Chicago has seen 33 children under the age of 17 killed, a rate of about 1.2 homicides per 100,000 residents. That trend, if projected over the last two months of this year, would result in a youth homicide rate of nearly 1.5 per 100,000.
That figure is almost a third higher than the youth homicide rate of the next closest city, Phoenix, which is around 1.2 homicides per 100,000.
Last year, at the top of a handful of the nation’s largest cities, Chicago had a homicide rate of about 1.8 youth homicides per 100,000 residents. The city’s rate exceeded that of Los Angeles, which saw 1.1 youth homicides per 100,000 residents in 2008.
Homicide statistics were obtained by Medill Reports through public records requests of city police departments and state Uniform Crime Reporting offices in Arizona, California, New York and Pennsylvania, and cross-referenced with population data from the U.S. census.
The figures include instances when the victim was under the age of 17, except for New York City, which tracks homicide victims from the ages of 1 to 15 and 16 to 19.
The statistics and the violent episodes they reflect punctuate a particularly violent school year for many students enrolled in Chicago Public Schools, said the Black Star’s Jackson.
“With the death of the school board president, he was working on the issue of violence,” Jackson said of Michael Scott, who is believed to have committed suicide last week. “It confirms for children what they already know: They live in a violent world.”
A Chicago Public Schools spokeswoman said that since the beginning of the school year, 12 students had been killed and 78 shot.
Jackson said he is especially disturbed by what he sees as the changing profile of the youth homicide victim. Where in the past many victims were known gang members, now victims like Derrion Albert are honor students, he said.
“The people who are dying are people who are innocent, who are caught in the crossfire,” Jackson said.
That’s also a trend observed by Dexter Voisin, a University of Chicago researcher who studies youth violence.
“This flies in the face of conventional thinking,” Voisin said of the trend. “It really draws attention to the fact that something is really wrong here.”
But, as Voisin said, “homicides are only the tip of the iceberg.”
Voisin said many other types of violence – battery and assault, for example – impact children deeply, despite going unreported in many cases.
In a study of one Chicago Public School, which will appear in an upcoming volume of the Journal of Adolescent Health, Voisin and his colleagues found that 45.7 percent of students had witnessed someone being injured or killed in a non-gang incident.
“Our lens is so narrow,” Voisin said, “that we’re really not fully understanding the extent of [youth violence].”
Voisin said the alarming rate of homicides in Chicago has dulled peoples’ senses to the shocking nature of youth violence.
“It’s become so common that something that is an aberration has become normalized,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s sort of become commonplace.”
Final edited version of this article posted at www.substancenews.net November 25, 2009, 5:00 p.m. CDT. If you choose to reproduce this article in whole or in part, or any of the graphical material included with it, please give full credit to SubstanceNews as follows: Copyright © 2009 Substance, Inc., www.substancenews.net. Please provide Substance with a copy of any reproductions of this material and we will let you know our terms — or you can take out a subscription to Substance (see red button to the right) and make a donation. We are asking all of our readers to either subscribe to the print edition of Substance (a bargain at $16 per year) or make a donation. Both options are available on the right side of our Home Page. For further information, feel free to call us at our office at 773-725-7502.
Comments:
By: Jim Vail
cops and teachers
It should also be noted that there's a hiring freeze on cops in Chicago - so the homicide rate climbs; and the advent of charter schools who can kick out more easily and prevent troubled youth from being their responsibility to educate, still perform worse than traditional public schools. Because charter schools are filled iwth mostly beginning teachers who are in and out quickly, obviously having great teachers who return year after year because they are appreciated by being decently compensated counts a lot.
By: zeta
REN 2010, A MONSTER!
PLEASE VIEW AND PASS ALONG. VERY INTERESTING!
http://vimeo.com/3658572
After viewing this interesting video you have to remember that REN 2010 is a catalyst for this violence. Students are torn from the schools where teachers have mentored and supported them for years. Then in many cases their homes are knocked down and they have to move to neighborhoods that they are not familiar with.
In many cases poor minority people are moving into uppity neighborhoods where they are resented because of cultural components. In the African American community there are two separate cultures often at odds with each other. Mix in the rival gang problem and you have a total nightmare.
Those people at the top who think they can move people around like pawns in a sick chess game are responsible for the deaths and mayhem they have created in Chicago.
Just imagine being poor, living in the projects with little parental guidance and many times no parents (due to incarceration and early deaths) and having the only stability you have ripped from under you every few years.
The architect of REN 2010 must have been an insensitive monster.
By: George N. Schmidt
Insensitive monsters have names: Daley, Duncan, Huberman, Scott, Williams
"The architect of REN 2010 must have been an insensitive monster..." (Zeta, above).
True. Let's name them, though, so they do not remain anonymous. The primary architects and implementers of Renaissance 2010 (which is soon to become Renaissance 2015) have names:
Richard M. Daley
Arne Duncan.
Michael Scott.
Ron Huberman.
Rufus Williams.
Followed by the staff in the Office of New Schools (every last one of them) and the six surviving members of the Chicago Board of Education: Norman Bobins; Tariq Butt; Alberto Carrero; Peggy Davis; Clara Muñana; and Roxanne Ward.
Every one of those people is a crazed cult type: Ayn Rand fundamentalism. They have spent more time juicing and moaning over their well worn copies of "Atlas Shrugged" than over anything to do with real democratic public schools. Name their crimes, but also name each of them.
By: kugler
chicago might have future
it one way this story is sad that the adults in this city are so corrupt not to do this type of investigation, but on the other hand it is nice to see fresh minds that are willing to seek answers to the problems they face and see on a daley basis despite what adults are telling them should see.