No, Chicago Is Not More Dangerous Than Afghanistan

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/masteryofmaps/7237435800/sizes/m/in/photostream/" target="_blank">Flickr/Mastery of Maps</a>

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Comparing urban crime to literal war-zones is an unfortunate rhetorical device that never seems to go away. On Tuesday, Gawker‘s Cord Jefferson, attempting to illustrate the vast disparity in attention given to mass shootings like the recent incidents in Colorado and (to a lesser extent) Wisconsin and the high homicide rate in Chicago, wrote that “The Windy City’s murder rate is worse than the murder rate in Kabul, a literal war zone.” If that sounds too nuts to be true, that’s because it is. 

This bogus “fact” seems to have originated with an overzealous headline writer. Jefferson was citing a June The Daily column by David Knowles, whose dek reads “City officials fight back as murder rate outstrips N.Y., L.A. – even Kabul.” The column itself makes no such claim, nor does it even come close to describing the “murder rate” in Kabul. Instead, it looks at the total number of US servicemember deaths in Afghanistan in 2012, then looks at the total number of deaths in Chicago in 2012. It turns out there had been more murders in Chicago (228) than there have been US servicemember deaths in Afghanistan (144) at the time the column was written. “The streets of Chicago are officially more dangerous than a war zone,” Knowles wrote, “Homicide victims in the Windy City outnumber U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan this year.”

You see what the problem is here, right? Chicago is a city of nearly three million people, while there are about 90,000 US troops in Afghanistan (which is not the same as Kabul). The murder rate (not the total number of deaths) in Chicago based on those numbers is 8.42 per 100,000 residents. Given that US troops in Afghanistan are involved in an international armed conflict, it’s odd to refer to the all the deaths of US servicemembers as “murders,” but if you were to call this the “murder rate” it would be 160 per 100,000 troops. In other words, being a US servicemember in Afghanistan is about nineteen times as deadly as being a resident of Chicago. 

Jefferson wasn’t the first person to cite Knowles’ bogus statistic (and the point of his post doesn’t really rely on it) but it was also reproduced all over the Internet. The problem with referencing “facts” like this one, however, goes beyond its statistical wrongness: Jefferson and Knowles were trying to awaken people to an unacceptable level of suffering in Chicago. Unfortunately, comparing Chicago to a war zone creates more emotional distance than resonance, conjuring up images of some far-flung foreign battlefield. It also primes the reader to accept militarized solutions to the issue of crime—after all, if Chicago is like a “war zone,” then police are more justified in using escalated levels of force, innocents caught in the crossfire are easily rationalized as “collateral damage,” and “criminals” become implacable enemies rather than fellow citizens. The war zone metaphor foments the very complacency Jefferson is trying to shake people out of: After all, people die all the time in wars. Part of what gave the Colorado movie theater shooting its emotional impact is that it occurred outside the places many of us have cordoned off as “war zones” in our heads. We implicitly accept triple-digit casualties in places like Chicago as an unalterable fact of urban life, when of course they aren’t. 

Since I already wonder about the wisdom of turning mass shootings into national moments of collective trauma, I’m also skeptical of “nationalizing” Chicago’s homicide problem. Certainly people outside Chicago should know about it, and Jefferson and Knowles were doing an admirable thing by bringing it to people’s attention, but I’m not really convinced that Chicago’s murder rate would be better dealt with if everyone Felt Really Bad About It the way we Feel Really Bad about mass shootings, since the emotional signifying rarely leads to the kind of coherent public policy response that might actually change things for the better. Mostly, it seems like we participate in these national mourning rituals because they remind us that our own lives are limited and precious, not because they invoke a real sense of obligation towards those whose time on Earth might be cut short. 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate