Tag Archives: crime

When drug cartels arrive in the American suburbs

Posted on by

The American suburbs are sometimes portrayed as idyllic but drug cartels operating in the suburbs would give way to a different view…

But a wide-ranging Associated Press review of federal court cases and government drug-enforcement data, plus interviews with many top law enforcement officials, indicate the groups have begun deploying agents from their inner circles to the U.S. Cartel operatives are suspected of running drug-distribution networks in at least nine non-border states, often in middle-class suburbs in the Midwest, South and Northeast…

Border states from Texas to California have long grappled with a cartel presence. But cases involving cartel members have now emerged in the suburbs of Chicago and Atlanta, as well as Columbus, Ohio, Louisville, Ky., and rural North Carolina. Suspects have also surfaced in Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania.

Mexican drug cartels “are taking over our neighborhoods,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane warned a legislative committee in February. State Police Commissioner Frank Noonan disputed her claim, saying cartels are primarily drug suppliers, not the ones trafficking drugs on the ground…

Statistics from the DEA suggest a heightened cartel presence in more U.S. cities. In 2008, around 230 American communities reported some level of cartel presence. That number climbed to more than 1,200 in 2011, the most recent year for which information is available, though the increase is partly due to better reporting.

There are some high-profile suburban cases mentioned later in the story.

My first thought is that this could make a hot TV show or movie: charming suburb shattered by the actions of a cartel family. Why resort to stories about international spies or terrorism (thinking about The Americans)? This also reminds me of a scene in Gang Leader for a Day where Sudhir Venkatesh describes a meeting of the gang leaders in a large suburban house. While the kids play and the wives socialize, the men plotted.

But, I can also imagine the real concern of suburbanites. I remember being in late grade school and middle school when gangs were seen as a big threat to our suburb. This topic seemed to dominate conversation for several years. So then take it a step up and think how suburbanites might react to international drug cartels with lots of money, manpower, and weapons. This goes against everything suburbs are supposed to represent: a lack of violence, safety for kids, respectable neighbors.

It would be interesting to look further at why drug cartels are expanding operations in the suburbs. Is this where the demand for drugs is highest? Is it easier to be anonymous? Do the suburbs offer the “good life” while conducting operations?

Is downtown Naperville really unsafe at 10 PM?

Posted on by

Is downtown Naperville an unsafe place? According to the Naperville chief of police, recent efforts by the department and other interested parties have helped make the downtown safer late at night:

Naperville police Chief Robert Marshall is just five months into his revamped downtown enforcement plan and he and city leaders already are calling it a success…

Beginning in September and running through mid-January, four additional officers were moved downtown between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays to focus on disorderly conduct issues, public intoxication and urination, and underage drinking. According to Marshall’s memo, the officers contributed 591 hours of additional police coverage and cost the city nearly $35,000 in overtime costs.

“Last year we had a tragic murder, an armed robbery and two very violent beatings that sent all participants to the hospital,” Marshall said. “As far as violent crimes go, that is a very low number, but our goal is zero. And in the five months since we’ve enacted our plan (in September), that’s exactly what we have.”…

“There is a perception that it’s not safe to come downtown after 10 p.m.,” Pradel said. “Our police are doing their part and we’ve told the business community they are also responsible to make that perception go away.”

I am particularly interested in this quote from Naperville’s mayor who discusses the perception about Naperville’s downtown late at night. This violence could be quite jarring in a community like Naperville that is both quite wealthy and quite safe for a community its size. Who exactly is worried about the downtown at night? Perhaps it is Naperville residents who like the residential nature of the suburb and buy into the small town charm leaders claim Naperville possesses. Perhaps it is possible visitors who will take their money elsewhere. In these sorts of discussions, I haven’t seen any numbers about a downturn in business in Naperville – is this about perceptions or an actual loss of business?

Overall, this seems to come back to an issue I’ve raised before: how can a community like Naperville (and other upscale suburbs face similar issues – see here) both encourage business and cultural activity while also protecting the residential charms of their community? Bars and restaurants can bring in large amounts of money into city coffers. Many communities would love to have the number of restaurants and visitors that Naperville attracts. Yet, this can also bring trouble, particularly when bars are involved.

For now, Naperville leaders seem happy with their new approach that minimizes violence but keeps the money flowing in. Perceptions and reputations are important as suburbanites can spend their money in plenty of places other than Naperville.

Designing schools to be safer and encourage learning

Posted on by

Architectural Record takes a look at how schools might be designed differently after the December 2012 Newtown shootings:

While fortress-like buildings with thick concrete walls, windows with bars, and special security vestibules may be more defensible than what is currently in vogue, they are hardly the kind of places that are optimal for learning. Edmund Einy, a principal at GKKWorks, says that what’s been done so far in many urban schools in the name of safety—such as slapping bars on the windows—has had a pernicious effect on students’ morale and performance. Einy’s new Blair International Baccalaureate Middle School, in Pasadena, foregoes bars. But administrators must greet students before they are allowed to go inside, which led GKKWorks to create an entry plaza. “There’s not much more we can do,” he says. “What are we going to do, put kids in prisons?”…

In recent years, glass has become the material of choice for the walls of many schools, which have cottoned to the idea that students will be more stimulated in rooms bathed in natural light. An example—according to Thomas Mellins, an architectural curator—is Ennead Architects’ Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Queens, N.Y., where a transparent façade allows close-up views of ballet and other classes. (Mellins’ exhibition, “The Edgeless School: Design for Learning,” is on view at New York’s Center for Architecture through January 19, 2013.)

For his part, Mellins doesn’t rule out that the shootings may result in design changes; he just hopes law enforcement talks to architects early in the design process. But, Mellins says, “I don’t think safety concerns translate into a simple and direct agenda, like build this way, don’t build that way.”

In a sense, school design has baked-in security concerns ever since the mass school shooting in Columbine, Colorado, in 1999. Doors now routinely lock after the first bell. Metal detectors are also common. Possibly, more steel could be used in doors, but “that seems to be sort of in the opposite direction of where schools have been headed,” says architect Jerry Waters, of Portland, Oregon’s Dull Olson Weekes Architects. School buildings make up 70 percent of the firm’s portfolio. Waters adds, “When someone has the intent to kill, I’m not sure if architecture can solve that problem.”

I have multiple questions after reading this:

1. It sounds like there might be different designs based on the primary purpose of a school’s architecture: is it to help encourage learning or to keep kids safe? How much should the two be mixed?

2. I wonder about lockdown procedures in buildings with a lot of glass and open space. Where can students and staff hide if need be?

3. I’m intrigued that there is no reference here to any studies of this issue. Isn’t there any data on what environments are safer? I wonder if this is similar to the zeal that was once expressed in the US and elsewhere for high-rise public housing but these ideas were reversed decades later when the results weren’t as expected. Architectural determinism can be misused.

$53 million was embezzled from Dixon, Illinois in part because the community had a commission form of government

Posted on by

Rita Crundwell is accused of embezzling $53 million from the small community of Dixon, Illinois. In this account of how this happened, an argument is made: Crundwell’s embezzlement was made easier because Dixon operates under the commission form of municipal government.

Something else—ominous in retrospect—summons a small-town feel: the unusual system of governance. Since 1911, Dixon has been run by the commission form of government, an old model used by only about 50 of the 1,300 municipalities in Illinois. Power is divided among five people: a mayor and four part-time commissioners who oversee their own fiefdoms (public property, public health and safety, streets and public improvements, and finance).

The positions pay a pittance—the mayor makes $9,600 a year; the commissioners, $2,700 each, according to the annual budget—which means that most officeholders juggle their duties with full-time jobs and spend limited time at City Hall. The owner of a carpet and flooring store served as finance commissioner for a number of years. He was succeeded by a business teacher and athletic coach down at the high school, Roy Bridgeman, who served for more than two decades. As for Mayor Burke: he runs his own real-estate firm.

The problem is that “the commissioners are just citizens,” says Jim Dixon, a retired attorney who served as mayor from 1983 to 1991 and is a descendant of the town’s founder. “Some of them may not always have been qualified for the areas they were elected to oversee.” Dixon says he pushed, unsuccessfully, to change to the far more common city manager model of government.

Still, the commissioner system made for a neighborly and easygoing approach and seemed to accomplish the goals that gave rise to its adoption in the first place: placing a check on the power of the mayor’s office and curbing the possibility of corruption. It didn’t hurt that it also saved the city money on the salaries that a professional city manager and staff would command.

Some background to this story: the commission form of government was particularly popular over 100 years ago. However, many communities have long shifted to newer forms of government that feature a city manager. One reason for this was to avoid the outsized influence commissioners could have if they had more control over one area. In suburbs, this shift to hiring a city manager often happened in the decades after World War II when both established and new suburbs faced new issues and complexity associated with growth. For example, a suburb like Naperville was swamped with requests for development and moved through the 1950s and 1960s toward more professional city government and urban planning. The post-World War II also featured a movement toward professionalization of tasks in communities that were once simply enough to hand over to trusted local officials. Today, city managers are well-trained officials who often move up the ranks to larger and larger communities as they demonstrate their abilities. Of course, as this article mentions, hiring a city manager and more professionally-trained city employees does cost money. (See this Wikipedia article on the council-manager form of government for more information.)

So will Dixon now move to having more professionals in local government? Part of the appeal of living in a small town is the trust residents and officials have in each other but it will be interesting to see if there are major responses to this breach of trust.

A UN report discusses how Facebook can be used for terrorism

Posted on by

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime released a report this week on how terrorists are using new platforms like Facebook:

Terrorists are increasingly turning to social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to spread propaganda, recruit sympathizers and plot potential attacks, a United Nations’ report released Monday says.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime said Internet-based social platforms are fertile, low-cost grounds for promotion of extremist rhetoric encouraging violent acts, with terrorists able to virtually cross borders and hide behind fake identifies…

The University of Waterloo sociologist said networks like Facebook are effective tools to screen potential recruits, who could then be directed to encrypted militant Islamic websites affiliated with al-Qaida, for example.

Check out what the full report says about Facebook. Here is the first mention of Facebook (p.4):

The promotion of extremist rhetoric encouraging violent acts is also a common
trend across the growing range of Internet-based platforms that host user-generated
content. Content that might formerly have been distributed to a relatively limited audience, in person or via physical media such as compact discs (CDs) and digital video discs (DVDs), has increasingly migrated to the Internet. Such content may be distributed using a broad range of tools, such as dedicated websites, targeted virtual chat rooms and forums, online magazines, social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, and popular video and file-sharing websites, such as YouTube and Rapidshare, respectively. The use of indexing services such as Internet search engines also makes it easier to identify and retrieve terrorism-related content.

The second mention (p.11):

Particularly in the age of popular social networking media, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and blogging platforms, individuals also publish, voluntarily or inadvertently, an unprecedented amount of sensitive information on the Internet. While the intent of those distributing the information may be to provide news or other updates to their audience for informational or social purposes, some of this information may be misappropriated and used for the benefit of criminal activity.

And that’s about it when it comes to specifics about Facebook in report. One case involving Facebook was cited specifically but the bulk of the terrorist activity appeared to happen on other websites. On one hand, officials say they will continue to monitor Facebook. On the other hand, Facebook is one popular website, among others, where Internet users can interact.

I imagine Facebook as a company is also interested in this and its too bad they didn’t respond, at least not to Bloomberg Businessweek:

Spokespeople at Facebook, Google and Twitter didn’t immediately return phone calls and e-mails seeking comment.

Not what you want to advertise: Naperville to add more police downtown

Posted on by

Naperville is a big suburb that has been known in the past for being wealthy and safe. However, some recent events are leading to a change: more police presence in its lively downtown.

Police Chief Bob Marshall told the City Council Tuesday he has seen “a trend of relatively serious crimes,” in the past few months since officers who were helping patrol the downtown over the summer returned to their regular duties in area schools. Incidents have included two violent fights and an armed robbery in addition to last February’s fatal stabbing of 24-year-old Naperville teacher Shaun Wild at a downtown bar.

Marshall said he is taking a more proactive approach to weekend patrols by adding police officers to the beat as well as both uniformed and plain-clothes investigators…

Councilman Bob Fieseler said he does not believe most Naperville residents are partaking in the late-night activity they are paying police to monitor, and the city may want to consider closing bars an hour earlier, which would mean midnight on weeknights and 1 a.m. on weekends…

Councilman Joe McElroy called shortening hours “the nuclear option,” but agreed the city may eventually have to look at doing so as a last resort. He also would like to see more activities like theater and live music offered in the downtown as an alternative to getting drunk.

This highlights two suburban conundrums. First, lots of suburbs would like to have downtowns like Naperville that include national retail stores, local businesses, and plenty of restaurants and bars. These businesses bring in visitors and, more importantly, money to the city’s coffers. Yet, bars can also bring about a different kind of atmosphere that is less family-friendly. Second, Naperville says it has small-town charm and yet its size, which could be related to perceptions about crime and the presence of multiple bars, suggests the city has some qualities of bigger cities. What is Naperville really: an idyllic single-family home community or a thriving jobs and suburban cultural center?

My guess is that Naperville would prefer to keep this increase police preference as unobtrusive as possible. A very visible presence might be bad for business but more incidents could also be bad for business.

It’s not just bad that murders are up in Chicago; it is also that murders are still falling in other major cities

Posted on by

While murders in Chicago are up in 2012, murders continue to fall in other big cities:

Jack Levin, a sociology and criminology professor at Boston’s Northeastern University, says it’s troubling that Chicago’s murder count is rising while it falls in other major cities. In 2010, Los Angeles had 297 murders, the lowest since 1967. New York homicides have been declining since 1990, when a record 2,245 fell in the nation’s largest city.

The rest of the article then discusses what might be done in Chicago.

However, why not put this in a more comparative perspective? In other words, just how unique is Chicago compared to other places? As an urban sociologist, this is an interesting if more broad question: are the major US cities more similar or more different? Putting it differently, what is so unique about Chicago that leads to the occurrence of more murders? Chicagoans themselves, and probably also residents of other major cities, may think their city is ultimately unique and not replicable elsewhere. Yes, major cities differ on a variety of factors but they also share some common characteristics such as social complexity, pockets of wealth and poverty, the strong presence of gangs, large (and occasionally problematic) police forces, and politicians who want to reduce the crime rate to make the city safer, protect kids, burnish the city’s image, and help promote economic growth. Is there anything Chicago could learn from elsewhere in order to reduce the murder rate?

 

Graham Spanier suggests his sociology background means he wouldn’t have ignored Penn State scandal

Posted on by

The former president of Penn State, sociologist Graham Spanier, earlier this week argued in a letter to the Penn State board that his background, including his work as a sociologist, means he would would have acted if he had known what was happening with Jerry Sandusky:

Had I known then what we now know about Jerry Sandusky, had I received any information about a sexual act in the shower or elsewhere, or had I had some basis for a higher level of suspicion about Sandusky, I would have strongly and immediately intervened. Never would I stand by for a moment to allow a child predator to hurt children. I am personally outraged that any such abusive acts could have occurred in or around Penn State and have considerable pain that it could perhaps have been ended had we known more sooner…

It is unfathomable and illogical to think that a respected family sociologist and family therapist, someone who personally experienced massive and persistent abuse as a child, someone who devoted a significant portion of his career to the welfare of children and youth, including service on the boards of four such organizations, two as chair of the board, would have knowingly turned a blind eye to any report of child abuse or predatory sexual acts directed at children. As I have stated in the clearest possible terms, at no time during my presidency did anyone ever report to me that Jerry Sandusky was observed abusing a child or youth or engaged in a sexual act with a child or youth.

This conclusion should have been abundantly clear to Mr. Freeh and his colleagues who interviewed me for five hours before their report was finished and interrogated scores of employees about me. Yet the report is full of factual errors and jumps to conclusions that are untrue and unwarranted. I have identified many errors in the report that pertain to me, which my attorneys will share confidentially with University legal counsel for your records and consideration. Moreover, I look forward to the opportunity to set the record straight with representatives of the Board of Trustees as you might desire.

I don’t think I’ve ever run into this before: a sociologist using their academic background as a defense for their actions outside of the field of sociology. Alas, sociologists are fallible as well…

Perhaps I simply haven’t run into it or people are waiting to see how this all plays out but I haven’t seen any fellow sociologists defend Spanier yet.

George Will: don’t let people use the Aurora tragedy to “commit sociology”

Posted on by

Columnist George Will made an interesting statement on television on Sunday about not “commit[ing] sociology” after the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado:

“That’s what the problem is – an individual’s twisted mind,” he said on ABC’s “This Week” roundable. “There is a human itch in the modern age to commit sociology as soon as this happens and to piggy-back various political agendas on a tragedy. And I just think we ought to resist that. … There are deranged people in the world.”

I’ve never heard of this phrase before: “commit sociology.” Will makes it sound like a very unlikable thing, perhaps like committing a crime. Perhaps it is on par with the epithet of “social engineering” that Will has brought up before. But, Will might be in good company with W.H. Auden. This reminds me of some of the commentary after the London riots in 2011. Efforts to explain what was behind the attack were sometimes interpreted as excuses or rationalizations. There is a difference between pushing a political agenda and interpreting social events but good social science aims to do the latter.

Sociologist: 70% of murders in two high-crime Chicago neighborhoods tied to social network of 1,600 people

Posted on by

Social networks can be part of more nefarious activities: sociologist Andrew Papachristos looked at two high-crime Chicago neighborhoods and found that a majority of the murders involved a small percentage of the population.

Papachristos looked at murders that occurred between 2005 and 2010 in West Garfield Park and North Lawndale, two low-income West Side neighborhoods. Over that period, Papachristos found that 191 people in those neighborhoods were killed.

Murder occasionally is random, but, more often, he found, the victims have links either to their killers or to others linked to the killers. Seventy percent of the killings he studied occurred within what Papachristos determined was a social network of only about 1,600 people — out of a population in those neighborhoods of about 80,000.

Each person in that network of 1,600 people had been arrested at some point with at least one other person in the same network.

For those inside the network, the risk of being murdered, Papachristos found, was about 30 out of 1,000. In contrast, the risk of getting killed for others in those neighborhoods was less than one in 1,000.

On one hand, this isn’t too surprising, especially considering the prevalence of gangs. At the same time, these numbers of striking: if a resident is in this small network, their risk of being murdered jumps 3000%.

I would be interested to know how closely the Chicago Police have mapped social networks like these. Do they use special social network software that helps them visualize the network and see nodes? Indeed, the article suggests the police are doing something like this:

Now, he wants to tap the same social networking analysis techniques that Papachristos, the Yale sociologist, developed to identify potential shooting victims, only McCarthy wants to use it to identify potential killers.

Police brass will cross-reference murder victims and killers with their known associates — the people projected as most likely to be involved in future shootings.

“Hot people,” McCarthy calls them.

Those deemed most likely to commit violence will be targeted first: parolees and people who have outstanding arrest warrants.

McCarthy said his staff estimates there are 26,000 “hot people” living in Chicago.

It would also be worthwhile to see how effective such strategies are. This isn’t the first time that organizations/agencies have tried to identify at-risk individuals. So how effective is it in the long run?