LOL, the left is starting to really let it sink in that gun control is and always has been bad and useless:
The War on Gun Violence Has Failed. And Black Men Are Paying the Price.
But in Chicago, a town labeled as “ChiRaq,” a “war zone,” and a “murder capital,” gun enforcement overwhelmingly focuses on possession crimes — not use.
A Marshall Project analysis found that from 2010 to 2022, the police made more than 38,000 arrests for illegal gun possession. These arrests — almost always a felony — doubled during this timeframe. While illegal possession is the most serious offense in most of the cases we analyzed, the charges often bear misleading names that imply violence, like “aggravated unlawful use of a weapon.”
Recent research shows that most people convicted in Illinois for felony gun possession don’t go on to commit a violent crime, and the majority of those sentenced to prison for gun possession don’t have past convictions for violence. Instead, people who already committed violent crimes are more likely to do so again.
The racial disparities in this enforcement are glaring. Although Black people comprise less than a third of the city’s population, they were more than 8 in 10 of those arrested for unlawful possession in the timeframe we reviewed. The number of Black people arrested could fill every seat at a Chicago Bulls game and then some; the majority are men in their 20s and 30s.
The consequences of these arrests are long-lasting. If convicted, people face a year or more in prison, depending on the charges. Even without time behind bars, those we interviewed faced damning criminal records, time on probation, job loss, legal fees and car impoundments.
Officials justify the focus on confiscating guns — even if they are not being fired at anybody — as a way of curtailing violence. But these tactics have not substantially reduced shootings in Chicago. In fact, as possession arrests skyrocketed, shootings increased, but the percentage of shooting victims where someone was arrested in their case declined.
“Guns are not assembly-line cases, and they shouldn't be treated as such,” says Chris Hudspeth, 31, who has been incarcerated for illegal gun possession. “I’m scared for my life — and I gotta go to prison because I fear for my life, for my family’s safety? Because we’re not fortunate enough to live someplace else?”
The Chicago Police Department did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, nor did they comment on findings The Marshall Project shared with them. Gun arrest practices rest with the next mayor, whom voters will choose in an upcoming runoff election. The options are stark: Brandon Johnson, a Black county commissioner pitching police reform, and Paul Vallas, a White perennial candidate and veteran education official backed by the city’s police union. Despite running on seemingly different platforms, both mayoral candidates are suggesting tough-on-gun policies to address public safety.
To legally purchase a gun and carry it in public, Illinois residents need two licenses: a firearm owner’s permit that costs $11 online and a concealed carry card. These licenses are referred to locally as a FOID and a CCL. Since Chicago has no gun ranges within the city, residents have to travel to the suburbs to participate in half of the legally required 16 hours of training. All together, the process can cost upward of $300 in fees and take several months.
If a person lacks both licenses — or has a gun owner’s card but not a concealed carry permit — they can be arrested for illegal gun possession.
Officers quickly became frustrated with Hudson, the footage shows, as he continued to question the relevancy of guns for the traffic stop.
“It has to do with all of our safeties. If there’s a firearm in this vehicle — all of our safeties are at risk now,” said an officer near the passenger side.
Hudson explained that his Smith & Wesson pistol was in a computer bag on the passenger-side floorboard. While he and an arresting officer standing near the driver’s side window debated over the stop, at least five additional police vehicles and nearly a dozen officers arrived on the scene.
“If he doesn’t have a FOID or CCL, I’m breaking the window — just letting you know,” another officer remarked while checking Hudson’s credentials. When a bystander told the police he was recording the interaction, police footage shows the initial officer retrieving Hudson’s unloaded gun from a police vehicle and then showing it off for the pedestrian to see.
Once police confirmed that Hudson was, in fact, a fully licensed gun owner, they arrested him for refusing an officer’s order, refusing to disclose his gun, and for having expired license plates.
A judge dismissed his charges weeks later. “It was almost like an ‘aha!’ moment,” Hudson said in an interview. “What if they are predatorily stopping CCL owners, minority owners, and they’re trying to find ways to charge them with something so they can legally confiscate your firearm?”
At the end of 2022, Chicago Police reported more than 12,700 gun seizures. Many of the firearms recovered were revolvers and pistols, not semi-automatic rifles or untraceable ghost guns, and they often originate from nearby suburban gun stores, where they were first legally purchased.
But there are many ways to acquire a gun beyond that. People we interviewed said they found firearms stashed underneath cars or behind trash bins. Some got them as gifts from family and friends, or bought them from people who steal guns or traffic them for money. These methods are often appealing to people who may not be able to legally buy a gun due to an age requirement, their criminal background or their mental health status.
As a result, getting guns off the street is like peering into an abyss: Thousands of guns spread across the city, with no record of where they exist or who has them beyond an initial sale receipt.
“How many legal and illegal guns in Chicago? I think everyone would like to know that,” said Kimberly Nerheim, a spokesperson for the Chicago Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives division.
Chicago’s current push to get guns off the street follows years of documented problems with some of the tactics its police use. A 2017 U.S. Department of Justice investigation reported that officers coerced residents into providing information on guns by dropping them off in dangerous areas. The Chicago Police Department has also faced lawsuits accusing officers of planting guns at crime scenes. Last year, a jury awarded a former police officer millions in a whistleblower lawsuit, which alleged that the Chicago police retaliated against her for raising concerns about a gun possession arrest.
Under Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who leaves office in May, arrests for violating the state’s weapons laws are among their highest in more than 25 years.
To see what this looks like in practice, The Marshall Project requested public documents outlining the Chicago police strategy for seizing guns. The department told us there were no memos, presentations or reports available.
So we focused on more than 225 gun arrests conducted over last year’s Memorial and Labor Day weekends. We picked these holidays because they tend to have a heightened police presence.
We found that the overwhelming majority of those arrested were Black men. Most people had no arrest warrants out, nor were they on supervised release, probation or suspected of being in a gang. In most of the incidents we analyzed, police were not responding to 911 calls about a person with a gun.
In arrests where possession was the most severe charge — about 140 of the cases — we found that more than 7 in 10 began with a simple traffic violation. After this initial stop, police often used some other justification for a search.
Officers often did this by citing the smell of marijuana. Although Illinois legalized cannabis in 2020, smoking while driving is still prohibited.
In a third of the stops, we found the person arrested had their gun owner’s permit, but not the license that allowed carrying the loaded gun in public.
...
These arrests have cascading consequences. For those arrested during a traffic stop, we found that more than a third had their cars impounded and faced a $2,000 city fee, in addition to the daily storage fees private companies impose.
But we discovered that police stop a vast amount of people and find a miniscule amount of weapons. For instance, officers stopped more than 6,500 people from the Friday evening before Memorial Day through the following Monday. They confiscated about 130 guns in possession arrests.
“We have an incredible problem when it comes to gun violence, but our strategy is failing, and it’s making it worse,” said Sharone Mitchell Jr., the Cook County Public Defender. “Guilty or not, there's a significant impact when it comes to really damaging, invasive police behavior.”
Chicago isn’t alone in its practices. We found major racial disparities in enforcement in cities across the country, despite differences in gun laws and homicide rates.
In New York City, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, our analysis found that in the past decade, Black people were almost 70% of those arrested for gun possession, despite being about 20% of the city’s population. In a recent press release, the police department noted that, as of last year, gun arrests are at a nearly 30-year high.
In Houston, where few would blink at the sight of a pistol in a pair of Levis, data shows that arrests for illegal possession jumped more than 70% between 2019 and 2021. Black people comprised more than 60% of those arrested, despite making up less than a quarter of the city's residents. These arrests have skyrocketed even as Texas continues to roll back gun-control measures.
In Cleveland, which instituted open carry last summer, arrests for weapons-related charges hit a decade-high in 2021, with Black people accounting for nearly 90% of those arrested.
Similar trends were found in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Memphis.
“The police use these measures without engaging in any kinds of efforts to determine whether they work, and they've used them for decades and decades and decades,” says Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, who co-wrote a report on race and gun laws last year.
Studies have shown that policing targeting specific high-violence areas can lead to reductions in violence. However, the effects are limited to the cities and time periods that researchers study. Even researchers who found that arrests and gun seizures reduced crime raised concerns about how police casting an overly-wide net in Black communities can sow distrust or result in misconduct.
Researchers, attorneys and advocates we spoke with repeatedly compared the United States’ approach to gun violence to the war on drugs, a failed, decades-long endeavor to reduce drug use. Tough-on-crime policies and tactics like stop-and-frisk searches landed disproportionately on Black communities and sent incarceration rates soaring.
“All of this is really just flavors of the ‘war on crime.’ That’s the dynamic and that’s the danger here,” said Benjamin Levin, an associate law professor at the University of Colorado.
Although an average of more than 3,000 people are shot in Chicago each year, the type of justice Purnell experienced is fleeting for most. Since 2010, records show police have failed to make an arrest in more than 8 in 10 shootings.
Our analysis found that police often step up gun possession enforcement following spikes in violence. The shift in tactics is stark. At the beginning of 2010, fewer than half of gun arrests involved cases where possession was the most serious offense. As of last year, they now account for more than 80% of arrests with a gun — even as homicides remain their highest in decades.
“Since 2020, we have seen an uptick in shootings and violent crime. [That] would then lead one to believe that the people who just are possessing guns are the ones who are shooting guns,” Foxx said, adding that possession arrests “don’t correlate” with homicides, since most shootings remain unsolved.
Records show that nearly 60% of the 31,000 new felony cases pursued by Foxx’s office in the past three years were for illegal gun possession; roughly 4% were for homicides.
Kevin Scott worked as a Chicago police detective for more than two decades before retiring last year. He says solving violent crimes is harder than making weapons possession arrests because detectives have to compile several types of evidence to prove guilt, including witness statements, fingerprints and security camera footage.
Finding witnesses is particularly difficult, says Scott. “Some people, if they're not fearful of retaliation, maybe they have a distrust for the legal system itself,” he said.
Scott sees the department’s high number of gun possession arrests and its low number of shooting arrests as separate issues because the cases are handled by two different types of officers.
“There's so many other hoops you have to jump through to determine if someone even committed the crime of murder versus someone [who] had a gun on them,” he said. “You can arrest somebody with a gun all day long.”
Obviously, since this is a leftist publication, they can't resist dunking on white people for the splashy mass shootings that the media
loves publicizing, but the fact that they're finally learning how fucking stupid gun laws and enforcement of gun laws is equals a big win for sanity.
thereload.com
