A Conversation With Jens Ludwig

“If you look at the population loss from the city of Chicago, it’s really been very disproportionately concentrated, unfortunately, in the predominantly African American neighborhoods on the South and West sides where gun violence is most concentrated. … It’s the thing that keeps us awake when our kids are out and really is the key driver of the crime problem.”

—Jens Ludwig, Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor; Director, University of Chicago’s Crime Lab; Co-Director, Education Lab; Co-Director, National Bureau of Economic Research

“I think most criminologists tell the story of the divergence as one of Los Angeles and New York City professionalizing their police departments and making them (more data-driven) much earlier and proceeding much more rapidly than what we’ve seen here in Chicago.”

—Jens Ludwig, Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor; Director, University of Chicago’s Crime Lab; Co-Director, Education Lab; Co-Director, National Bureau of Economic Research

“This is a giant organization with its (own) culture. Changing the culture and the day-to-day operations in such a big organization … is time-consuming and resource-intensive. It was politically difficult every sort of step of the way, logistically complicated, and in L.A. they weren’t trying to do it against the backdrop of a once-in-a-century public health crisis.“

“If you look at the national conversation right now, you would think that there are two things that are diametrically opposed. You would think that you can either have the police worry about public safety, or you can reform the police department to treat citizens with respect and fairly and have officers held accountable when they’re engaging in misconduct. You would think that there’s no way to do both.

But when you look in Los Angeles, the murder rate dropped something like 80% over the last 30 years. And Los Angeles, unlike Chicago, is one of the cities that conducts regular opinion surveys of the public and asks them what they think of the police department. … You can see that the fraction of people who say they have confidence in the LAPD and trust the LAPD doubled over that period.

It shows you can do this. And I think for the city of Chicago to thrive in the long term, I don’t see what alternative we have but to do that.”

—Jens Ludwig, Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor; Director, University of Chicago’s Crime Lab; Co-Director, Education Lab; Co-Director, National Bureau of Economic Research

“Guns being used on the streets of Chicago are moving through a series of underground market exchanges. …We’ve spent a lot of time and money trying to disrupt illegal drug markets. It’s not clear that that’s done a lot of good, but I think there’s an important difference between an underground gun market and drug market. Guns are a durable good, unlike drugs, which are consumable. The number of transactions that you have every year in the underground gun market is like one or two or three orders of magnitude lower than what you see in the drug market.

There’s a bunch of reasons that suggest law enforcement pressure on those markets could do much more good against guns compared to drugs. We have this big (sector) in the Chicago Police Department that’s worried about underground markets. Right now they just spent a lot of attention on drugs. It makes you wonder how much safer we could potentially be.”

—Jens Ludwig, Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor; Director, University of Chicago’s Crime Lab; Co-Director, Education Lab; Co-Director, National Bureau of Economic Research

“These kids arrested for carjacking — suspects in these carjacking events. When you look at them 12 months later, their murder victimization rates, the rate at which they are killed at the hands of another person, are off the charts relative to any sort of benchmark that you could imagine, including active duty U.S. military troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. —Jens Ludwig

For a very large share of the kids involved in carjacking, this is not their first juvenile justice system contact. I think that we need to be doing a much better job of thinking about those early juvenile justice system contracts as an opportunity to connect kids to intensive (social) services. A lot of the kids involved in carjacking come from extremely disadvantaged, high-trauma environments, and they may really (benefit from) intensive social supports. —Jens Ludwig

When you look at the data of their subsequent gun violence victimization, I think that tells you very clearly that we are not doing nearly as good a job of even keeping them safe and connecting them to social services. If we could do that productively, that would obviously not just help them but help everybody in the city.”

—Jens Ludwig, Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor; Director, University of Chicago’s Crime Lab; Co-Director, Education Lab; Co-Director, National Bureau of Economic Research