Volume 89.2
March
2022

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Volume 89.2
Symposium Introduction: This Violent City? Urban Violence in Chicago and Beyond
Aziz Z. Huq
Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School.
John Rappaport
Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School.

Bartosz Woda provided invaluable help in preparing the charts in this Introduction; we owe him great thanks for his remarkable work. Professor Huq thanks the Frank J. Cicero Fund; Professor Rappaport thanks the Darelyn A. and Richard C. Reed Memorial Fund.

Our modest goal in this Introduction is to assemble some baseline empirics concerning both private violence and state coercion to provide a context for the pieces that follow. In so doing, we aim to mitigate the need for “scene setting” by each paper in the Symposium. Readers of the Symposium will find here a synoptic guide to some basic facts about the distribution and extent of criminal violence, as well as socioeconomic conditions and police activity, in Chicago.

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Volume 89.2
The Enduring Neighborhood Effect, Everyday Urban Mobility, and Violence in Chicago
Robert J. Sampson
Robert J. Sampson is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and Affiliated Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation.
Brian L. Levy
Brian L. Levy is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at George Mason University.

The authors acknowledge financial support from National Science Foundation Grant SES #1735505. Direct correspondence to rsampson@wjh.harvard.edu.

A longstanding tradition of research linking neighborhood disadvantage to higher rates of violence is based on the characteristics of where people reside. This Essay argues that we need to look beyond residential neighborhoods to consider flows of movement throughout the wider metropolis.

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Volume 89.2
Neighborhood Inequality and Violence in Chicago, 1965–2020
Patrick Sharkey
William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
Alisabeth Marsteller
Researcher at Princeton University’s Office of Population Research.

The authors wish to thank the editors at the University of Chicago Law Review, participants at the Symposium “This Violent City? Rhetoric, Realities, and the Perils and Promise of Reform,”moderator Aziz Huq and panelist Allegra McLeod for their insights on violence in Chicago, and Robert Sampson and Michael Maesano for their comments and feedback on the Essay.

This Essay analyzes trends in violence from a spatial perspective, focusing on how changes in the murder rate are experienced by communities and groups of residents within the city of Chicago. The Essay argues that a spatial perspective is essential to understanding the causes and consequences of violence in the United States and begins by describing the social policies and theoretical mechanisms that explain the connection between concentrated disadvantage and violent crime.

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Volume 89.2
Prospects for Reform? The Collapse of Community Policing in Chicago
Wesley G. Skogan
Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science and the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University.

The author thanks Mark Iris for his review of this manuscript. The author remains solely responsible for any errors.

Community policing’s accomplishments were numerous, but it fell victim to issues commonly facing reform: money—especially the impact of economic downturns; leadership turnover and policy preferences; changes in the social, political, and crime environments; and the emergence of new technologies for responding to community concerns.

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Volume 89.2
Capitalizing on Crisis: Chicago Policy Responses to Homicide Waves, 1920–2016
Robert Vargas
Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago.

We would like to thank Andrew Papachristos, Aziz Huq, Jenny Trinitapoli, and Wesley Skogan for comments and feedback on earlier drafts as well as Cecilia Smith and Parmanand Sinha for technical support with the geographic analyses.

Chris Williams
Ph.D. Student, Sociology Department, University of Chicago.
Phillip O’Sullivan
Joint J.D./Ph.D. Student, Department of Statistics, Harvard University.
Christina Cano
Undergraduate Student, Sociology Department, University of Chicago.

This Essay investigates Chicago city-government policy responses to the four largest homicide waves in its history: 1920–1925, 1966–1970, 1987–1992, and 2016. Through spatial and historical methods, we discover that Chicago police and the mayor’s office misused data to advance agendas conceived prior to the start of the homicide waves.

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Volume 89.2
Identifying and Measuring Excessive and Discriminatory Policing
Alex Chohlas-Wood
Executive Director, Stanford Computational Policy Lab
Marissa Gerchick
Data Scientist, Stanford Computational Policy Lab.
Sharad Goel
Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.
Aziz Z. Huq
Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law, University of Chicago.
Amy Shoemaker
Data Scientist, Stanford Computational Policy Lab.
Ravi Shroff
Assistant Professor of Applied Statistics, New York University.
Keniel Yao
Data Scientist, Stanford Computational Policy Lab.

We describe and apply three empirical approaches to identify superfluous police activity, unjustified racially disparate impacts, and limits to regulatory interventions.

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Volume 89.2
Racially Territorial Policing in Black Neighborhoods
Elise C. Boddie
Henry Rutgers Professor, Professor of Law, and Judge Robert L. Carter Scholar, Rutgers Law School.

I thank Michelle Adams, Devon W. Carbado, Don Herzog, and R.A. Lenhardt for their very helpful comments and feedback. Any errors are my own.

This Essay explores police practices that marginalize Black people by limiting their freedom of movement across the spaces of Black neighborhoods.

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Volume 89.2
Barbed Wire Fences: The Structural Violence of Education Law
LaToya Baldwin Clark
Assistant Professor, University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law.

I thank Guy-Uriel Charles, Hiba Hafiz, Osamudia James, Etienne Toussaint, the participants of this Symposium and the Culp Colloquia, as well as the excellent editors of the University of Chicago Law Review. To William, Ahmir, Amina, and Ahmad: thank you for giving me the time, space, and motivation to write about issues that matter to me. All mistakes are mine.

In this Essay, I argue that, in urban metros like Chicago, poor Black children are victims of not just gun violence but also the structural violence of systemic educational stratification.

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Volume 89.2
An Abolitionist Critique of Violence
Allegra McLeod
Professor, Georgetown University Law Center.

I wish to thank Sherally Munshi, Erum Kidwai, Saba Rewald, and participants at the University of Chicago Law School’s Symposium on violence for their engagement with this project. I am also most grateful to the abolitionist organizers, writers, and thinkers whose work to confront violence expands our collective imagination and contributes much to the realization of a more peaceful and just world.

This article proceeds by engaging the critical reflections, writing, organizing, and imaginative visions of contemporary abolitionists who are confronting the sources of violence by building solidaristic and equitable economic alternatives, proliferating peaceful and constructive approaches to violence that do not rely on militarized criminal law enforcement, working to reallocate resources from militarism toward human flourishing, and to commence a just transition to more environmentally sustainable forms of organizing human life on earth.

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Volume 89.2
Cities, Preemption, and the Statutory Second Amendment
Joseph Blocher
Lanty L. Smith ’67 Professor of Law, Duke Law School.

Many thanks to Richard Briffault, Jacob Charles, Aziz Huq, Darrell A.H. Miller, Richard Schragger, and Rachel Simon for comments and to participants in this symposium and the State & Local Government Works-in-Progress Conference at Willamette University College of Law.

Although the Second Amendment tends to dominate the discussion about legal limits on gun regulation, nothing has done more to shape the state of urban gun law than state preemption laws, which fully or partially limit cities’ ability to regulate guns at the local level. The goals of this short Essay are to shed light on this “Statutory Second Amendment” and to provide a basic framework for evaluating it.

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