CHICAGO — The last time Chicago hosted the Democratic National Convention, Joe Biden was a U.S. senator who gave a nine-minute speech praising President Bill Clinton’s leadership in securing a tough new anti-crime law.
“We’ll continue to get tough with kids who break the law. Gang members and other young people who commit violent crimes will do jail time. We’ll not allow young thugs to terrorize our neighborhoods,” Biden told delegates in August 1996 at the United Center, where they had gathered to nominate Clinton for a second term.
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act was the Clinton administration’s response to the intense levels of street violence that beset Chicago and the rest of urban America in the 1990s. Biden was a Senate sponsor of the measure, commonly known as the Crime Bill, and in his convention speech he celebrated a law that emphasized penalty enhancements for some crimes, set aside grants for building prisons and put tens of thousands of more cops on the streets.
“I have had the pleasure of having the endorsement of every major police organization in the country for the last 15 years and I’m here to tell you one thing: Bill Clinton is the best friend the cops in America have ever, ever had,” Biden said to applause.
The 1996 election was the last one in which the nation’s flagship fraternal policing organization, the National Fraternal Order of Police, endorsed a Democrat for president.
As Chicago again plays host to a convention, where Democrats will formally nominate Vice President Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor, as their presidential candidate, the party is walking a fine line on the crime issue: seeking support from voters tired of feeling unsafe while also being careful not to antagonize progressives who seek alternatives to more police and locking people up.
When the crime bill became law 30 years ago, Democrats and Republicans competed over who could be tougher on crime, playing on the fears of voters.
In the years since, Republicans have branded themselves as the law-and-order party while the Democratic rhetoric has shifted its focus to addressing the causes of criminal behavior, a change that’s been particularly pronounced in Chicago.
Some experts agree that neither approach has fully succeeded on its own.
“No matter what we have done as a society to try to rid ourselves or limit street crime, it hasn’t worked,” said William Sampson, an emeritus professor of public policy at DePaul University. “In the last 25, 30 years, the Democrats have looked at the results of the tough-on-crime efforts, which have been uneven at best.”
The Crime Bill left a complicated legacy in Chicago and the rest of the country.
Supporters point to provisions that include a decade-long ban on certain high-powered firearms and federal funding to combat domestic violence. The law also gave the U.S. Department of Justice the authority to open civil rights investigations against local police departments.
Detractors blame the law, either directly or indirectly, for fueling a culture of mass incarceration that particularly affected Black people and for putting too much emphasis on increasing police ranks.
The two sides do not break cleanly along party lines, but the effects of the law over 30 years have left some who backed it with mixed emotions.
Illinois Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, who voted for the Crime Bill as a member of the U.S. House, said politicians were attempting to address the scourge of crack cocaine, but he acknowledged that the law resulted in unfair treatment of Black people.
“We did what we thought was right at the time. It did not work. I hope we don’t repeat that mistake,” Durbin said of the Crime Bill. “You don’t hear many senators talk about the worst votes. But it would certainly be a vote that I regret.”
Former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun also voted for the bill during her single term in office from 1993 to 1999 and said she’d probably support the bill again. A federal prosecutor in the 1970s, she said she doesn’t agree with the suggestion that the measure contributed to mass incarceration, pinning the “prison pipeline” more on the “cultural indulgences of criminal behavior.”
“You have more crime in poorer communities, whether they are Black or brown, but that’s just the reality,” said Moseley Braun, a Democrat who was the first Black woman in the U.S. Senate.
At the same time, she acknowledged the root causes of crime, especially in marginalized communities, were not adequately addressed by the law.
“The Crime Bill started off really ambitious about curing some of that and it never got there,” Moseley Braun said. “These police departments are struggling really out of the burden of trying to do it all, and I think that’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing disappointing results.”
During Biden’s successful campaign against Republican President Donald Trump in 2020, the Democratic Party platform called for overhauling a “failing” criminal justice system. It was the year the COVID-19 pandemic took shape and a viral video captured George Floyd dying under the knee of a white officer. The platform called for better investments in education, jobs, housing and the arts, while decrying a “system (that) has criminalized poverty, overpoliced and underserved Black and Latino communities.”
Four years later, as the party gears up for a November rematch against Trump, that rhetoric is slightly toned down, with the Democrats’ 2024 campaign platform emphasizing ways to reduce recidivism in the justice system and pledging to expunge “federal marijuana-only” convictions.
Some of the messaging, though, hews close to elements of the Crime Bill.
The new platform advances a plan to provide funding for 100,000 additional police officers for “accountable community policing,” similar to a goal of the Clinton administration in 1994, and calls for another federal ban on high-powered guns. It also counters Republican accusations that the Democrats want to “defund the police.”
But the platform also set a goal of putting $5 billion toward community-based violence prevention programs, an investment that advocates say they’ve not seen on such a large scale.
Such programs have existed in Chicago and other parts of Illinois for about 25 years and are seen as a more holistic way to address crime. While state funding for years was inconsistent, Gov. JB Pritzker ‘s administration has budgeted hundreds of millions of dollars toward this effort in his 5½ years as Illinois’ governor.
“This is all built on the idea that violence prevention isn’t only about policing and incarceration. It should be about education and employment. It has to be about human services and mental health services,” Pritzker said in July at an event celebrating recent investments made in the effort.
Crime in the U.S. dropped in the years after the Crime Bill was signed into law in 1994. But determining the true causes of that decrease is tricky, and in Chicago, officers added under the law represented only a sliver of the Police Department’s total staffing.
Under the Crime Bill, Clinton set aside funds with a goal of hiring up to 100,000 police officers to improve local community policing — the idea that officers can partner with residents and others to address public safety issues. In the early 1990s, the Chicago Police Department had already started this effort through its Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, or CAPS.
Chicago recorded 931 homicides in 1994, the last time the city tallied more than 900 killings in a single year. At a CPD graduation ceremony in 1995, Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, praised the CAPS program and called community policing “a cornerstone” of the Crime Bill. At that time, the department was trying to bolster its ranks to 13,500 officers, which has long been considered its magic number for full strength.
By 1999, CPD had been awarded $73 million to hire 721 new officers and purchase computer equipment, according to Tribune reporting, though by then, community policing in Chicago was starting to receive criticism from some residents and community groups who questioned its effectiveness. Still, killings in Chicago dropped to 643 that year.
In 2004, 10 years after the Crime Bill was signed into law, Chicago recorded 454 slayings, at the time the city’s lowest tally since 1965. Other crimes in the city also declined during that time, a trend seen in other U.S. cities as well.
But as crime in Chicago decreased in the 2000s, attendance at CAPS meetings dwindled and economic woes in the city and the rest of the country stopped then-Mayor Richard M. Daley from hiring more cops, according to an article in an academic journal written by Wesley Skogan, an emeritus professor of political science at Northwestern University who has studied policing in Chicago. Many CAPS officers were also transferred elsewhere within the Police Department, and federal funding for more officers also dropped off.
“By the mid-2000s, community policing was struggling in Chicago,” Skogan said in an interview. “The impact of the Great Recession … caused Daley to make dramatic budget cuts all over the place.”
CPD’s staffing a few years later hovered around 12,500, while the official tally of homicides in 2014 was 416, which remains the city’s lowest annual total in almost 60 years.
But the conduct of some of its officers has come under scrutiny over the years from community activists and civil libertarians who, in 2015, convinced the department to change a policy that relied heavily on pedestrian street stops to look for illegal guns and drugs. The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois discovered officers made too many illegal stops — particularly of Black and Latino people — and got CPD to agree to improve its training and more sufficiently justify, on paper, each of its stops to ensure they’re constitutional.
That issue is indicative of the Police Department’s struggle to strike a balance between providing public safety and protecting civil rights.
“That is the real dilemma,” said Chicago attorney Tom Needham, who in the 1990s was an aide on criminal justice matters to Daley before becoming the chief of staff to police Superintendent Terry Hillard. “The neighborhoods that struggle with violent crime … want to be safer, and so the elected officials and the community leaders will often demand more police protection and greater safety. But at the same time, the police that are deployed there, not all the time, but too often, they police with such a heavy hand.”
Later in 2015, CPD faced another reckoning when a Cook County judge ordered the release of a squad car video showing Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke kill 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times.
The shooting sparked an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice into CPD that was made possible by provisions in the Crime Bill, which gave the Justice Department authority to investigate police departments as a whole for civil rights abuses and other deficiencies.
In January 2017, Democratic President Barack Obama’s Justice Department found “CPD’s pattern or practice of unreasonable force and systemic deficiencies fall heaviest on the predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods on the South and West Sides of Chicago.”
Then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who had served as Obama’s chief of staff before becoming mayor, resisted the oversight of CPD by a federal judge, and it wasn’t until 2017 when then-Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan filed a lawsuit forcing his hand. In 2019, a federal judge appointed a monitor to oversee the reforms. Five years later, that process is ongoing.
University of Chicago law professor Craig Futterman, a police accountability expert who helped push for the release of the McDonald video, welcomed the federal oversight into CPD but believes the Justice Department should’ve moved on the Chicago police sooner.
“There have been historically powerful ties between the White House and the mayors and political administrations in the city,” Futterman said. “Leaders in the civil rights community approached the Obama administration far earlier on about addressing these issues long before Laquan McDonald and there wasn’t action. And the primary reason there wasn’t action was the lack of political will until really people generated that will.”
Meanwhile, the Crime Bill’s Violence Against Women Act provision, touted by Biden in his 1996 speech, provided funding for women’s shelters, rape crisis centers and other services for victims of gender-based violence, whether it be domestic violence or sexual assault.
Kaethe Morris Hoffer, executive director of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, said funding from the measure helped boost her organization’s operations.
“It said something about what matters at the federal level,” she said.
For a time, the Violence Against Women Act allowed victims of gender-based violence to sue their attackers in federal court. But in 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that section of the law unconstitutional. Three years later, Illinois passed a similar measure known as the Gender Violence Act. Under this law, plaintiffs must file such lawsuits within seven years of the alleged infraction, but minors have until seven years after they turn 18.
After the Crime Bill was passed, some states enacted truth-in-sentencing laws that required people behind bars to serve substantial portions of their sentences. Illinois passed its law in 1995, and again in 1998 after the courts ruled the initial law unconstitutional.
The Crime Bill incentivized states to come up with truth-in-sentencing provisions to be eligible for federal funding to build prisons. From 1996 to 2001, Illinois received millions in federal funding, which was used for projects that included a reception and classification unit at Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, near Joliet, according to a 2012 report issued by the U.S. Justice Department.
Truth-in-sentencing has been seen by some observers as amounting to a penalty enhancement that contributed to unfairly long prison sentences and the aging of Illinois’ prison population. Illinois’ state prison population at the start of fiscal year 1996 was about 38,400 and had grown to more than 49,000 in February 2013.
Now, the state’s prison population stands at about 29,000, and explanations for that drop can be complicated. In the last decade, Pritzker’s predecessor, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, pledged to find ways to decrease the state prison population as a cost-saving measure. Later, the COVID-19 pandemic during Pritzker’s tenure prompted the early release of some inmates. But over the years, some crime experts note, law enforcement and the courts have put more emphasis on rehabilitating nonviolent people, particularly those convicted of drug offenses, to keep them out of prison.
Crime was a less prominent campaign issue during the years when Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama were in office, statistical declines coming as partisan disputes turned to the war on terror, the economy and health care.
For the Democrats, that changed during the 2020 election, when gun violence skyrocketed in some cities, including Chicago, amid the pandemic and the aftermath of Floyd’s murder.
But instead of taking the get-tough approach of the Crime Bill, Democrats focused on reforming the criminal justice system and the way police officers do their jobs.
The U.S. House in 2021 passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which calls for a slew of police reforms, including an elimination of qualified immunity that helps shield police officers in cases of accountability. That bill was held up in the Senate but was recently reintroduced after the fatal shooting of 36-year-old Sonya Massey, a Black woman from the Springfield area who was killed by a white sheriff’s deputy.
In Illinois, also in 2021, Pritzker signed into law the SAFE-T Act, a host of reforms ranging from requiring more police officers to use body cameras and issue citations instead of making arrests for certain low-level crimes to the elimination of cash bail.
While a reform-minded approach has so far proved safe for Democrats in blue Illinois, that hasn’t been the case on the national level.
And as some Republicans have conceded that locking people up isn’t always the best solution in combating crime, the party has aggressively decried “progressive prosecutors” throughout the country who they believe have been too lenient on criminals, while also emphasizing unwavering support for the police. In this election cycle, the GOP has tied crime to the influx of migrants coming into the U.S. from the southern border — though there’s no statistical proof that the new arrivals have caused an uptick in crime nationally.
Among the targets is Harris, a law enforcement veteran as a former attorney general and prosecutor in California who nonetheless is painted as a “Bay Area liberal” who’s soft on crime by the GOP. But her record reflects more of a middle-of-the-road approach to criminal justice.
As the San Francisco district attorney in the 2000s, she started a program that helped people caught up in the legal system find jobs instead of being locked up as a way to reduce recidivism.
As California’s attorney general a few years later, she pushed to keep the death penalty legal in the state — arguing the ruling that had made it unconstitutional was not sound — despite personal opposition to capital punishment. And she was criticized by community activists for showing too much of a reluctance to have her office investigate certain police shootings, though at the end of her time as attorney general, her office opened civil rights investigations into two law enforcement agencies.
The push for more police officers in the Democrats’ 2024 platform is now balanced by support for more violence prevention programs. In Illinois, these programs often involve street outreach workers who mediate conflicts between gangs or other parties and focus their energies on those most prone to violence, either as a victim or perpetrator. These groups connect these individuals with therapy, job training, or other intervention services.
Durbin said that shift in the Democrats’ position reflects the lessons the party has learned over the years in how to strike a balance on the issue.
“We’re thinking based on experience. What have we done that seems to work to reduce crime and the threat to neighborhoods and families? It includes having a good professional police force. But that isn’t all it takes to stop crime,” Durbin said.
