Remarks by U.S. Attorney Zachary T. Fardon at City Club of Chicago

The following are remarks by Zachary T. Fardon, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, delivered at the City Club of Chicago on September 28, 2015:

In April of last year, I had the chance to come here for the first time.  I was about 6 months into my job, and I had the option of talking about whatever I wanted.  I chose to talk about violent crime in Chicago.  Well, it’s been 17 months.  I’m honored to be back.  And I again have something I want to say about violent crime in Chicago.

Our murder rate so far this year is up about 20% from last year.  And 20% is a troubling number.  But let me give you two points of context that lend perspective: First, last year - 2014 - was our lowest homicide rate in Chicago since 1965.  That’s 5 decades.  So the watermark against which we’re measuring our 20% increase this year is a historically low one.

And second, we are not alone.  Major cities across the country are seeing even more significant surges in homicide rates this year: in Milwaukee, they’ve seen a 76% increase; in St Louis, a 60% increase; in Baltimore, 56%; in Washington, DC, a 44% increase.  So viewed in that light, our 20% increase in Chicago is not as alarming as many.

So I could leave it at that.  I could make those contextual points in response to the inevitable audience question about violence, and I could choose to focus my opening remarks instead on ISIL, or public corruption, or cybercrime, or any of the other mission-critical areas we serve at the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

I’m not going to do that.  Why not?

[Refer to PowerPoint]

Every face you see here is a child shot and killed this year in the city of Chicago.  Let’s focus in on a few:

• In February, 13-year-old Anthony Diaz was observing an altercation between his 17-year-old sister and another girl in Belmont Cragin - a fight, by the way, arranged through social media. As Anthony was walking away from the fight, he was shot 4 times and died.
• In May, Raheem Dameron, a 15-year-old, was standing with a friend on a Bronzeville street when shots were fired from a passing car.  Raheem’s friend was hit in the ankle and survived.  Raheem was hit in the back and died on the scene.
• On a June afternoon, 15-year-old Martese Gentry came upon an altercation on Millard Avenue in Lawndale.  A person in the fight opened fire and bullets struck Martese in the abdomen and chest, killing him.
• Amari Brown was 7 years old and spending the Fourth of July this year at his grandmother’s house in Humboldt Park, when somebody sprayed gunshots onto the porch of grandma’s house, injuring a woman and killing Amari.
• 17-year-old Kimythe Hubbard was one of 6 siblings in his Woodlawn family, 3 boys and 3 girls.  On July 9, Kimythe was walking behind the Mount Pleasant Missionary Baptist Church when he was shot in the back and died.

Those are five.  Every face you see here has a story; every one a child shot and killed this year in Chicago.

No place in Chicago is completely safe but there are neighborhoods on the West and South sides that are unfairly, disproportionately impacted by the gun violence.  By police district, so far this year the most violent parts of Chicago include the 4^th, 6^th, 7^th, and 11^th districts.  Those districts are home to some of Chicago’s beautiful neighborhoods and public places.

So what do these neighborhoods otherwise have in common?

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Gangs and gang factions.  Gangster Disciple factions, Latin King factions.  Dozens of gang factions across these neighborhoods.  Gang factions that are constantly recruiting new members, and recruiting them young.  In our most violence-afflicted neighborhoods, we now see kids affiliating with gang factions as early as the 1^st or 2d grade.

And we are seeing not only more homicides in these neighborhoods but more shootings, and particularly more indiscriminate shootings – shootings over petty things – disrespect, trash talk, just walking across gang turf lines.

Let’s look at a random weekend this year.

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This July 4^th weekend, over 50 people were shot in Chicago.  This slide shows just a few examples of the shootings.  A bullet in the armpit, a bullet in the finger, a bullet in the butt, a bullet in the foot.  Random shots, drive-by shots, sprayed shots.

And more and more often, shots fueled by social media. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook.  Petty disputes and trash talk that escalate over social media with sometimes fatal consequences.

Let me give you a quick case example.

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In February 2014 there was a gang-related shooting of a 19-year-old named Shaquon Thomas, also known as Young Pappy.  Young Pappy was hit but not killed in the shooting.  A 17-year-old boy named Markeyo Carr was caught by a stray bullet and killed.  The next day Young Pappy tweeted “I’m Still Here.”  A few months later, in July of 2014, there was another attempt to shoot and kill Young Pappy.  This time a stray bullet struck a 28-year-old photographer named Wil Lewis who was waiting for a bus in Rogers Park.  Wrong place, wrong time.

In April 2015, Young Pappy posted a video called “Homicide” on YouTube in which he taunted his rival gang members.  Then in May he posted another video, this one called “Shooters”, in which he pretended to be holding a gun and taunted “you don’t even know how to shoot.”  One week later he was gunned down and killed about a block from where he recorded that video in Uptown.

A 22-year-old named Clifton Frye posted comments about Young Pappy’s shooting on his Facebook.  3 days after Young Pappy was killed, Frye was shot and killed by a 17 year old boy.

That’s 4 dead – a 17-year-old, a 19-year-old, a 22-year-old, a 28-year-old, and at least one 17-year-old trigger puller.  Why?  No real reason; taunting, disrespect, loathing fueled by social media.

Here’s the point: our violent crime problem in Chicago has become more unwieldy; we’re seeing more and more indiscriminant shootings, social media spats leading to spraying bullets.  And often with kids on either or both sides of the gun.

Whatever the statistics, this year versus last, and regardless that our surge this year reflects a national trend, here’s my bottom line: in Chicago, our violent crime problem is a social justice problem.  For too long, gun crime has been tearing at the fabric of our social contract in this city.  These are our kids. These are our neighborhoods.  This problem hits the heart of who we are, and who we want to be, as a city.  We cannot abide our Chicago being one where it’s okay for kids to die and entire neighborhoods to cocoon in fear.

Let me be honest if obvious: these issues are tough.  Our violence problems are rooted in social injustices like poverty, and joblessness, and educational and economic inequality.  Kids need parents, and mentors, and education, and work opportunities.  And when instead what they see, in some parts of our city, starting in the first or second grade, is gangs and gang factions as a social network and ostensible path to self-identity and success, then we have lost the war before the battle has begun.

I’m not here to offer sound-bite solutions.  I am here to speak honestly and to address some of the important moving parts I see from the perspective of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

And I’m here to ask you to think about what you can do from your perspective, and to carry forward this discussion into your community, your work place, your church, your family.

We have to keep a long view. These are generational challenges.  But to borrow a phrase from Dr. King we also have to feel the fierce urgency of now.  I want us to wake up every day and recommit to ending this cycle of kids dying and neighborhoods set apart.

For the remainder of my remarks, I’m going to touch upon three things that are important from my perspective: first, prosecutions; second, juvenile justice; and third, the issue of community trust.

Prosecutions

At the United States Attorney’s Office our primary job is enforcement.  We prosecute criminals.  And federally, with our limited resources here, we have to be especially careful to focus on the worst of the worst – to pick the right individuals, and then to use the appropriate federal tools to help take those individuals off the street.

We are doing just that.  Our prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office are right now bringing big cases against violent gangs and offenders.  A few quick examples:

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• United States v. Levaughn Collins et al.  James Triplett controlled the heroin market in a North Lawndale neighborhood west of Douglas Park.  This year, we charged Triplett, his supplier Levaughn Collins, and a number of other defendants with a variety of federal crimes.  This is a photograph showing the line of people waiting to purchase heroin as part of this market before we took it down.  And this shows the weapons that we recovered when we executed that takedown.
• United States v. Nate Hoskins (“Operation Double Is”).  “Double Is” stands for Imperial Insane Vice Lords.  We recently charged 24 Double Is with RICO and other offenses related to drug trafficking and violence on Chicago’s West Side.  Among other things, the indictment alleged the gang-related murder of a man named Marcus Hurley.  This photo shows Hurley’s killer running from the crime scene after he shot Hurley at defendant Nate Hoskins’ direction.  The shooter himself was also later shot and killed.
• United States v. Andrew Shelton et al.; United States v. Dimitri Woods et al.; United States v. Terrance Griggs.  These are all gun cases.  In the Shelton case we charged 11 defendants with the theft and distribution of 111 handguns.  In the Woods case, 2 ATF informants were robbed at gunpoint while purchasing guns and a bulletproof vest from the defendants.  And in Griggs, the defendant was convicted this year of selling 11 guns and a bulletproof vest to an informant. This photo shows an SKS automatic weapon and bulletproof vest seized as part of that case.

Those are a few examples.  We’ve got many others, and our investigations pipeline is robust.  On nearly all of the cases, we continue to work closely and collaboratively with our local and state partners, including especially the Chicago Police Department and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office.  We are a likeminded group.  Our collective noses are down on the enforcement front, and we don’t plan to let up.

Now, at the tail end of any prosecution is the question of sentencing - who gets locked up, and for how long.  Over the past couple years, there has been a lot of focus on the issue of over-imprisonment in our country.  And that’s for good reason; the issue is real.

Since 1980, our national prison population has exploded.  The total detention population in this country has more than tripled, to where as of last year, the United States had 5 percent of the world’s total population, yet 25 percent of its prisoners.

Guess what?  That costs money.  Taxpayer money.  Lots of it.  Last year, over 26% of the Justice Department’s 20-plus-billion-dollar budget went toward housing prisoners.  To give you a reference point, about 7.6% went toward funding all U.S. Attorney’s offices.  We now spend way more money housing prisoners than hiring prosecutors to go after the bad guys in the first instance.

In light of that stark truth, about 2 years ago, the Justice Department launched an initiative called Smart on Crime under which the Department drew a circle around lower-level non-violent drug defendants and said as to those defendants, let’s stop the historic practice of seeking the highest mandatory prison terms, and instead let’s return sentencing discretion to the courts.

Smart on Crime is basically a policy decision–in light of fiscal realities–to return sentencing discretion to the bench for certain non-violent offenders.

Here is what Smart on Crime is not.  Smart on Crime is not “Soft on Violent Crime.”  It is not, in any way, an abandonment of the Justice Department’s commitment to fight violent crime.  In fact, our U.S. Attorney’s office here remains as aggressive as ever in using our most powerful tools to take violent offenders off the street.

As I’ve said before, prosecutions alone will not fix our problem; we can’t arrest our way out of the realities reflected in those slides.

But I want to be clear about this: we have to be aggressive and prosecute the trigger pullers; we have do everything we can to take murderers off the streets, including asking our judges to impose significant prison terms for violent offenders—locally and federally.  That is being Smart on Crime, and that’s a critical piece of long-term success.

Juvenile Justice

Our federal court system, at least for now, is an adult system.  It’s not suited to address juvenile violence issues.  And yet, you know that a significant part of our problem in Chicago is a youth violence problem.  We have child shooters; we have child victims.  And not surprisingly, in predicting adult violent behavior, a key inflection point is 14, 15, 16 years of age.  Kids carrying guns or committing acts of violence at that age are much more likely to later repeat those acts of violence and to end up incarcerated as adults.  

Last year, my Office launched a new initiative – our “Youth Outreach Forums”.  In partnership with the Chicago Police Department, Chicago Public Schools, and the Cook County Juvenile Probation Department, we designed forums to talk to at-risk kids 13-17 years old.  We began hosting the forums in Englewood, and Garfield Park, and Humboldt Park, and we’ve now moved inside the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center and are conducting forums there.

Our forums are structured to educate these kids about the dangers of gang affiliation and recidivism, including especially picking up a gun.  The forums are also designed to encourage education and help introduce these kids to community services and organizations that give them alternatives to the gang route -- a pathway, a network that is good instead of bad.

We’ve made the forums evidence-based.  The University of Chicago Crime Lab is tracking the kids who complete the forums against placebo groups to assess results.  That will take time, but if we can move the needle on even some of these kids’ fates, we will have done something important.

Just a few weeks ago, I was at one of our Youth Forums in the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center.  The kids I met that day may have done something wrong to land them in detention, but it could not have been more clear to me that these kids were not hardened criminals; they were kids; they were curious; they were hopeful, they were struggling and looking for help.

I’m proud that our office is leading the way forward and holding these forums.  I don’t believe these forums are a panacea.  What they are is a start, a catalyst, a way for us to shine our flashlight on a place that dearly needs attention for us to succeed, as a city, long term in the fight against violence. 

So that’s another piece of our puzzle at the U.S. Attorney’s Office.  We have the hammer of prosecution and prison for truly violent people.  And we’re working to extend the rope, the lifeline for kids who’ve wandered down the wrong path and need our help before it’s too late.

Community Trust

Another critical piece of our puzzle, and the last broad topic I’ll hit on during my limited time today -- community trust.  The issues that became front-and-center after Ferguson, and then Staten Island, and Ohio, and Baltimore, and on down that list – those issues are directly relevant to our fight against violent crime here in Chicago.

Distrust between communities and cops breeds violence.  Distrust causes kids to make bad decisions, it causes cops to make bad decisions, and it makes it harder to solve violent crimes when they occur.  So this issue of trust between cops and communities is huge.

Last December, shortly after the “no prosecution” announcement in Ferguson, my office hosted a Community Round Table, and we had there Attorney General Eric Holder, Mayor Emanuel, Anita Alvarez, Garry McCarthy, other law enforcement leaders, community and religious leaders, and a select group of kids from some of these most violence-afflicted neighborhoods in Chicago.

To be frank, I wasn’t sure what to expect going into the roundtable.  This is another thing that is not exactly in the traditional wheelhouse of a U.S. Attorney’s Office.  That said, I found it valuable.  It brought together some passionate leaders from across different parts of the city, and we had a candid and thought-provoking discussion about policing and trust issues.

So we did it again in March of this year.  We had another roundtable. And we’re doing another one in November.  As long as there’s work to be done, my Office will keep making the time and sending the invitations.   

The most remarkable aspect of these roundtable discussions, to me, has been the kids.  We’ve had a great group of young men and women who came to us from the most violence-afflicted neighborhoods.  And we also had CPD commanders from those same neighborhoods.  And the back-and-forth during the roundtables between the kids and the commanders has been enlightening.  Here’s the nub of what I’ve taken away from it:

From the kids’ perspective, what they want from the police is respect.  They don’t want to feel judged by the color of their skin, or by whether they’re wearing sagging pants, or because they’re hanging on the block with gang members.  What they want is to be judged on their own merits, and when officers don’t know them personally and lump them in with other kids in the neighborhood who dress the same way, or look or talk the same way they do, that breeds resentment and distrust.

From the officers’ perspective, they want to succeed.  They want to make the neighborhood safer and be good at their jobs.  But what also became clear through the dialogue is that they too want to feel judged on their own merits.  They don’t want to feel embattled or vilified just because they wear the badge; they want to feel respected by the people they are risking their lives to protect.

And from both sides, the common ground for improvement?  Connectivity.  Knowing each other.  Making an investment of time and good will outside the context of bad things happening.  Whether it’s law enforcement hosting a neighborhood barbeque, or a park clean up, or participating in a local basketball tournament -- whatever the vehicle, whatever the context, finding ways for officers to get to know the kids, and kids to get to know the officers, so that when the officers come across the kids at a crime scene or in an investigation, that prior relationship, however deep, exists.  When you have that, things won’t always go perfect but they tend to go a whole lot better.

I’m grateful that we are seeing more and more of that these days from our city and community leaders and the great women and men of our Chicago Police Department.

I want to ask you to think for a minute about what it means to serve as a Chicago Police Officer.  Police officers by and large are the most noble of our public servants; they are citizens who’ve decided to take a job, with modest pay, where every day they wake up not knowing if they may get hurt or even killed.   And why do they do that and wear that risk every day?  I will tell you my view, based on many years of first-hand experience working with cops -- most do it because they care.  They want the same things nearly all of us want: to be happy, to love, to have a family, to enjoy a safe community, and live an impactful life.

Police officers are not separate and apart from our communities; they are our communities, no different than you and me.  And they fundamentally deserve a presumption of our respect and trust.

For our system of justice to work, people need to believe in that system.  With no trust, there is no belief.

These trust issues, of course, are not unique to Chicago.  There is a national discussion happening now, and an important watermark in that national discussion, in my opinion, occurred earlier this year when FBI Director Jim Comey gave a speech at Georgetown University.  If you haven’t read it, I’d encourage you to jump on line and find it.  Comey talked about the relationship between law enforcement and the diverse communities law enforcement serves.  And in reflecting upon that relationship, he identified what he called his “own hard truths.”

I share Jim Comey’s hard truths.  Here they are: 

First, we in law enforcement have to be honest and acknowledge that much of our history is ugly when it comes to issues of race.  At many points in history, law enforcement has enforced a status quo that was brutally unfair to disfavored groups.  That is an ugly part of our national inheritance, and we need to accept that.

Second, we all – inside and outside of law enforcement - have to be honest about the widespread existence of unconscious bias.  By understanding latent bias, and talking about it, even if we can’t completely eliminate those reactive instincts, we can help our behavior in response to them.

And third, there is a cynicism that can happen to people in law enforcement over time based on experience and observation.  And that cynicism can lead to mental short-cuts that result in unfair treatment.  And in addressing that problem, we have to be honest and recognize that it’s not as simple as just changing who we hire and how we train law enforcement.  The truth is significantly harder than that.

We have to address the tragic reality that because of our nation’s past sins, young men of color, particularly in urban neighborhoods, too often inherit a legacy of crime and prison.  So yes, we have to talk about cops, but we also have to talk about how we change that legacy and create a better world and better options for those young men.

Those are Jim Comey’s “hard truths”.  And mine.  And really, they belong to us all.  Those hard truths go to the heart of everything that I have been talking about today.

Our violent crime issues in Chicago are hard.  Our history with regard to race is hard.  Poverty is hard.  Inequality is hard.  Childhood is hard.  Policing is hard.  Trust is hard.

One thing about hard things in life, it seems to me, is that usually they require balance, and measured circumspection, and patience and bravery to figure them out and to fix them.  Hard things don’t come with easy or quick solutions.

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This is Tyjuan Poindexter, a 14-year-old.  Eight days ago Tyjuan was walking with some friends to play basketball in his North Kenwood neighborhood on the South Side.  As a car drove by, someone yelled “is that them?” and started shooting.  One of Tyjuan’s friends he was going to play ball with, a 15-year-old boy, was hit in the ankle and the shin.  He survived.  Tyjuan was hit once, in the head.  He died that night, in a driveway on the corner of 44^th and South Greenwood.

The things I’ve talked about today -- prosecutions, youth outreach, community trust -- these are all important ingredients, from the perspective of my office, for helping to get us to a better place.  But there’s a lot work to be done.  Work in our courts.  Work in our government.  Work in our schools.  Work in our churches.  Work in our homes.  Work on our streets.

Each of us has to stop waiting for someone else to solve this problem and realize that the problem belongs to us all.

Let me close with a point of pride.  The events of Ferguson were about a year ago.  And in the wake of those events, and then again following the many other national crises over the last year, we have seen dozens and dozens of protests and rallies across Chicago.  Unlike many other places, our protests have been almost entirely peaceful, thoughtful and impactful.  A number of civic and religious leaders in Chicago have played - and continue to play - an important part in that process.  And at the same time, our law enforcement, and particularly the Chicago Police Department, have respected the protest process, and have repeatedly allowed our communities to be heard while ensuring the public safety.

That is called democracy.  And I’ve come to believe that we’re pretty damn good at it here in Chicago.  And that’s a reflection of the goodness of this place -- the strength and love citizens here hold for our city and each other.

That same strength and love is the key to our long-term success in fighting violent crime.  We as a community have to muster and leverage our best: our best leadership, our best philanthropy, our best resources, our best creativity, our best good will, and our best intentions.

We have to recognize that this fight is a law enforcement fight. And it is an economic fight.  And it is an educational fight.  And it is fundamentally a fight to overcome tragic aspects of our national inheritance.

The stakes are high.  The place we love hangs in the balance.  I believe we can succeed, and we will succeed because of who we are in Chicago.

Every one of us has to see the long horizon, while every day waking up with the fierce urgency of now.

Remarks by U.S. Attorney Zachary T. Fardon