Crime in most of Chicagoland is somewhat higher than in recent previous years, and lower than it was when I moved back here in 2005.
That's certainly the case for McDonalds Corporate, which has its headquarters in the heavily-patrolled, maximally gentrified West Loop. Nobody who works in McDonalds HQ is worried about crime near their building.
Where crime in Chicago is a real problem is in the south and west sides of the city, where white people don't live. Those areas are playing out a slow motion mechanistic tragedy set in motion a century ago when they were redlined, sliced in half by the Dan Ryan, evacuated by white people, and disinvested. A map of Chicago violent crime is, roughly, a map of redlining.
The city can make no excuses for this. It's an ongoing human tragedy running at a scale that is hard to get your head around. At the same time, it's hard to take the CEO of McDonalds seriously, because the crime problem in Chicago is mostly segregated away from him and people like him (and me).
That's certainly the case for McDonalds Corporate, which has its headquarters in the heavily-patrolled, maximally gentrified West Loop. Nobody who works in McDonalds HQ is worried about crime near their building.
Where crime in Chicago is a real problem is in the south and west sides of the city, where white people don't live. Those areas are playing out a slow motion mechanistic tragedy set in motion a century ago when they were redlined, sliced in half by the Dan Ryan, evacuated by white people, and disinvested. A map of Chicago violent crime is, roughly, a map of redlining.
The city can make no excuses for this. It's an ongoing human tragedy running at a scale that is hard to get your head around. At the same time, it's hard to take the CEO of McDonalds seriously, because the crime problem in Chicago is mostly segregated away from him and people like him (and me).