What do you want to hear? Have you ever been to the CBOT building at 11PM? I have, within the last couple weeks. The south Loop is and always has been a ghost town after business hours. There aren't restaurants there, just office buildings. The CBOT building in particular --- I had an office a block from there in the Monadnock building for around 10 years, and even in 2007 I'd have been nervous there super late at night.
It's a big city. People get mugged here. I'm not claiming otherwise.
But when people talk about out-of-control Chicago crime, they're talking about the shootings, 100%. This isn't San Francisco. There isn't a narrative about crime here where like, nobody can operate a Walgreens here because of organized shoplifting rings (I'm sure they exist!), or out-of-control homeless tent encampments and street drug use. The narrative here is gangs randomly and prolifically shooting people in gang squabbles.
And that narrative plays out in Lawndale, Austin, Garfield Park, Englewood, Grand Crossing, and Chatham, not Lincoln Park, Lakeview, Logan Square, and Bucktown.
Hah. You got me. You're right, Lakeview is a blighted hellscape, and not a rich white neighborhood where the median home price is over $500k in a city with absolutely no housing scarcity whatsoever. Remind me to wear a bulletproof vest next time I go to Delilahs.
You got me again; you're right, it's not a "white neighborhood". It's just a "not Black" neighborhood.
You get that I've, like, been to Lakeview a bunch, right? Like, I used to live there? My favorite bar in the world is there? I never know, when I'm talking to people on HN, if Chicago is an abstraction to them and they're just trying to pull facts out of Google or whatever.
Everywhere in the US maybe. I couldn't imagine normalizing this sort of behavior. Peace is definitely a huge blessing that many people take for granted.
Mostly... there are plenty of people getting robbed in the loop and Lincoln Park. I had an associate get carjacked and cops refused to follow the stolen car to avoid a chase.
I don't believe your friend†. I work downtown, as does my wife and son. I've been mugged (not carjacked, just mugged --- and not in the Loop!) and had the police catch the assailants within minutes. If I got carjacked, I have a very high degree of confidence in the police response I'd get. But if I was a Black teenager shot in Lawndale, I would have zero confidence.
† Except to the extent that the police won't give chase in Chicago, just like pretty much every other major city, since police chases were killing innocent bystanders on the regular before they were essentially banned everywhere.
I'm sorry I'm trying to follow your argument here. Are you saying that because you have never been carjacked or mugged in the loop that it has never happened to anyone else? Or that because you had one rapid response by the police that all police responses are rapid?
I grew up in Chicago, many of my family and friends still live there. I would categorize your experience as both atypical and extremely privileged. You should hesitate before extrapolating.
I do not believe that someone got carjacked in the city of Chicago and CPD blew them off. That's all I'm saying. Do people get carjacked here? Absolutely, 100%.
I don't think I've ever heard someone proclaim such trust in the CPD.
The original comment just says the cops refused to chase... which you yourself acknowledge as likely in a child comment. If you believe that carjackings happen and that the police are unlikely to chase, I'm not sure what else there is to deny.
That is, other than the implicit challenge to the idea of an extremely safe gentrified Chicago. Violent crime doesn't only happen in Englewood. There's a pretty wide range of neighborhoods between Garfield Park and Edgebrook.
That's great, but it makes even less sense to accuse someone of lying about their experiences if it is something that should be reasonably expected. What a strange reaction.
"For all three crimes the department says it groups together as carjacking arrests, that’s a clearance rate of just 3.1% for incidents that have occurred so far this year."
The cars generally get recovered (they're used to commit further crimes, not so much chop-shopped), but the M.O. of a carjacker is to hand the car off quickly to an accomplice who didn't participate in the robbery, and from that person to someone else, which makes arresting the person who committed the actual armed robbery hard. I'm certainly not trying to tell you that Chicago reliably arrests carjackers.
You said you didn't believe OP's friend about being carjacked and the police not giving chase in a certain area. The clearance rate of carjackings and that chase rate are quite low. All that need to exist is a non-zero carjacking rate in that rate for what OP said to be true.
San Francisco also has a policy against car chases. I don't know how recent it is, but it's definitely a thing, now, presumably mostly among liberal coastal cities. (But maybe even broader to some extent?)
TL;DR: Pursuits are only authorized, if at all, in the case of violent felonies or when there's immediate risk to public safety. See section IV.
Moreover, even if a pursuit is authorized, the rules stipulate that they have to break off the chase if there's a risk to public safety. (This is also stated in the above order.) And as compared to years prior and oh-so-many-famous car chases in California, tolerance for the risks in car chases has plummeted. (If we're being cynical, mostly out of concern for the criminal, not the public; or at least concern regarding the ire of criminal rights advocates whenever a chase results in the death or injury of the suspect.) For example,
> Officers responded to a call Sunday evening of a Tenderloin robbery and auto theft, but were forced to end their pursuit when the suspects began driving the stolen vehicle in an erratic and dangerous manner.
You will find similar rules in virtually every major urban police department in the country. Police chases are empirically a terrible idea: they kill innocent people, routinely.
Sure, a Hollywood-style car chase is incredibly dangerous, and I never understood why they were tolerated as much as they were. (I mean, other than the obvious explanation that our culture of policing taught that effective policing required an indiscriminate and overwhelming show force and authority.) But some municipalities draw different lines such that once a suspect gets into a car, that's often the end of any pursuit, whether the suspect was even aware of being pursued.
People complain about, e.g., "chilling effects" on legitimate free speech rights stemming from policies designed to restrain unprotected speech. Well, all manner of policies can have "chilling effects", sweeping more broadly in practice than they were intended. Such effects are modulated by various norms. In San Francisco a growing chorus of people (across the political and social spectrum) are complaining about cops failing in an unprecedented manner to investigate, detain, arrest, or otherwise enforce laws as dictated by formal policies (i.e. excluding cases where city policy clearly required abstention), and to the extent it's true (some of it is demonstrably true), part of that is because the political culture in SF causes police to be excessively risk-averse regarding modern reform policies. If you follow seemingly inconspicuously, or your pursuit nominally meets policy but things go sideways, that's your job on the line, and cops enjoy much less deference administratively than in other cities--certainly the DA, but even the Mayor and Police Chief in SF are less tolerant of cops who create controversy, whether or not negligent.) The situation in Chicago might be similar to some extent, especially as of the past couple years.
The new equilibrium might still be preferable, or if not there may be ways to reach a better equilibrium without revisiting sins of the past, but this sub-thread began from you saying that you didn't believe a poster who claimed a police officer deliberately abstained from pursuing a suspect getting away by car. You apparently believed such events are so rare as to be fictitious. But they absolutely do occur, with increasing frequency, and in no small degree driven by changes in formal policy. Maybe the poster is being misleading, but on its face nothing about it seems implausible; quite the contrary.
I don't know what all of this is intended to communicate, but you can just Google <city> "motor vehicle pursuit policy" and compare Chicago to whatever major city you think handles this better.
