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With violence up, Chicago police focus on a list of likeliest to kill, be killed

When a few police cars pulled up outside Daniel Alcantara’s West Side residence last summer, the gang member dashed into his home.

From outside his window, the officers asked him to come out and talk. They weren’t there to arrest him, they explained, but to warn him: They believed he was at a high risk to go to prison — or to the grave. It was time to give up the gang life, and they were there to help him, they said.

The warning proved prophetic. Last month, Alcantara, 20, was gunned down in the Logan Square neighborhood, another victim of escalating gang wars.

With violence raging in Chicago at levels unseen since the late 1990s, the Police Department’s strategy to combat it relies heavily on so-called predictive policing, which aims to figure out who is most prone to violence — either as a criminal or victim — and intercede.

After taking office in March amid one of the most tumultuous times in department history, Superintendent Eddie Johnson bluntly said, “We know who they are.” He was referring to the approximately 1,400 individuals, many of them gang members, whom the department put on a list of those they say are most likely to commit or be targeted by violence. Those on that list, Johnson said, are driving the killings and shootings.

Indeed, officials said 85 percent of the more than 2,100 people shot so far this year had been placed on what police refer to as the “strategic subject list.”

When the department carried out two huge roundups in recent months, arresting scores of people over a few days, including at the start of the Fourth of July weekend, most of those arrested were on the list. Officers arrested more than 225 people since May in the two raids — all but 37 of them on the strategic subject list.

The intent was clear: Get as many of those behind the violence as possible off the street.

“We want to send a message to violent offenders that we won’t tolerate the violence,” the superintendent said in an interview about the raids.

Johnson said the list isn’t used to target people for arrest but said the fact that many of those who were brought in during the recent raids were on the list is proof that they are at high risk for crime.

“The thing about the strategic subject list is it just helps us identify people that would be party to violence,” Johnson said. “It’s just telling us that we are targeting the right people.”

The strategy’s role in preventing violence, however, is unclear. Over that recent holiday weekend, 66 people were still shot, five fatally.

The strategy’s long-term success is just as opaque. The arrests appeared to pull people off the street for just a short time. A Tribune analysis of the 88 individuals arrested on mostly narcotics and gun charges in the raid before the Fourth of July weekend found that almost a third — 27 — had already bailed out of Cook County Jail as of mid-July.

In an interview Thursday, Johnson acknowledged the strategy has its challenges but believes that long-term it will have an impact.

“I know that if we hold repeat offenders accountable, (we’ll) see a lot of that crime decrease,” he said. “I think we have to start somewhere, and the dialogue is where we start.”

How the strategy works

In his few months in office, Johnson has largely stuck to strategies first implemented under predecessor Garry McCarthy. But pressure is mounting as violence continues to surge. With more than 330 homicides, slayings have risen 43 percent and shooting incidents 50 percent through July 10, the department said. Homicides are on a pace to top 600 for the first time since 2003.

Targeting those on the strategic subject list is among the key elements of the department’s overall antiviolence strategy, which includes seizing illegal weapons, and is geared at gang factions police say are responsible for much of the rise in violence.

Police, with the assistance of county and federal authorities and the Illinois Department of Corrections, also host “call-ins” — meetings at which gangs are warned they will be singled out if more violence occurs, but gang members also are offered help to change their way of life.

Gang members may be required to come to the meetings as part of conditions for their parole or probation. So if they don’t attend, they could be sent back to prison or Cook County Jail.

The strategic subject list approach includes door-to-door visits, dubbed “custom notifications,” in which police officials, clergy and community leaders warn about the dangers of a criminal lifestyle, while offering social services to help steer them away from trouble.

Critics have questioned the department’s secrecy over what factors go into the computerized algorithm used to come up with the list.

Johnson said that race and gender are not factors in deciding who is at risk.

“It’s not based on race, ethnicity or geographic location,” he said. “We don’t use it to target certain individuals other than we pay a visit to their residence to offer them services to get out of the (gang).”

But a California-based group that defends civil liberties in the digital world raised concern that the arrest data that goes into it could be inherently biased against African-American and other minorities.

“Until they show us the algorithm and the exhaustive factors of what goes into the algorithm, the public should be concerned about whether the program further replicates racial disparities in the criminal justice system,” said Adam Schwartz, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Karen Sheley, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, also expressed worries about the inability of the public to scrutinize the strategic list, considering the consequences for those on it.

“You don’t have to use race in your formula to end up with an outcome that disproportionately affects people on the basis of race,” she said.

Police data strategy evolves

For decades, police departments across the country have been trying to use data to fight crime. Jonathan Lewin, deputy chief of the Chicago Police Department’s technology and records group, recalled reading an article on crime prevention from a department publication from the 1960s that showed a map with push pins highlighting locations of incidents.

By the early 2000s, with the help of computers, the techniques had grown far more sophisticated. In 2003, Chicago changed its approach to fighting violence, adopting a model similar to New York’s CompStat program, which analyzes crime statistics to help determine where officers are needed most. The strategy still remains and was refined in 2011 under McCarthy, a former NYPD deputy commissioner.

At weekly meetings, top Chicago police brass would hold commanders accountable for crime in their districts. Under Phil Cline, who led the department from 2003 to 2007, hundreds of officers moved from beat patrols to roving specialized units that parachuted into neighborhoods experiencing spikes in violence.

Computerized data from the department’s Deployment Operations Center — which mapped crimes each day in known gang territories — determined the daily assignments of officers assigned to the Targeted Response Unit. Officers from the Special Operations Section hit the same areas hard, looking for narcotics and illegal guns.

The results were dramatic. By the end of 2004, homicides fell to 453, down almost 25 percent from 2003.

But a series of police scandals, including numerous robberies and home invasions involving crews of SOS officers, led to the shutdown of the aggressive specialized unit. By 2008, homicides topped 500 for the first time in five years.

Then-Superintendent Jody Weis responded by forming the Mobile Strike Force, a roving specialized unit with the same purpose as SOS but whose officers were said to be given better supervision and better training.

With Rahm Emanuel’s election in 2011, McCarthy took over as superintendent and disbanded the Mobile Strike Force and the Targeted Response Unit over concerns that their aggressive styles further divided police and minority communities. The officers moved to beat patrols amid hopes of improving interactions with residents. But that strategy appeared to backfire when homicides again exceeded 500 in 2012, leading McCarthy to reverse course by bolstering roving saturation teams and sharply boosting overtime pay so hundreds more officers could work the most dangerous neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, Chicago had begun experimenting in the late 2000s with predictive policing, a scientific approach to figuring out which “hot spots” would see spikes in violence so more officers could be deployed to help out. When Chicago became the only big-city department to win the second phase of a National Institute of Justice grant, police placed increasing emphasis on who was causing the violence.

The idea was inspired by the research of Andrew Papachristos, a Yale University sociologist whose five-year study of violence in Chicago’s Harrison patrol district on the West Side showed its homicide rate to be more than three times worse than Chicago’s average. Many of its homicide victims, he learned, often shared similar backgrounds: lengthy arrest records, victims themselves of past shootings and arrests with others who also had been shot.

Papachristos’ ideas eventually led to the formation of a strategy that would first become known as “Two Degrees of Association.” At its origin in 2013, it was a list of about 420 people the department considered to be at-risk. Police started visiting their homes with a two-fold message: warnings that police were on to their criminal activity and offers of a better life with the help of social services, ranging from substance abuse counseling to job training.

The list, now the strategic subject list, is in its fourth variation. Its algorithm — developed by an engineering professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology — has been refined for better accuracy, according to Lewin.

Police score people on the list for a variety of risk factors, with ranges of zero to more than 500. The final number represents the degree to which they are in danger, as compared to the average Chicago citizen. So, a person with a score of 500 is that many times more likely to be involved in violence than the average resident.

The department has not said how many people in total are on its strategic subject list, but it said it is focusing on the 1,400 people on the list whose overall scores are between about 400 to more than 500.

The department will not reveal all the risk factors that go into the algorithm or the weight given them, saying to do so would allow criminals to undercut its effectiveness. But at police headquarters in mid-July, Lewin discussed some of the key factors: an individual’s criminal history, especially any weapons offenses or crimes of violence; their age at their first arrest; whether the nature of their arrests escalated over the years; if they had been the intended targets of shootings or the victims of violence; and if those they’ve been arrested with had themselves been shot.

At the beginning, more than 50 variables had been considered, but a much smaller number proved to be more meaningful, Lewin said.

In defending the list against accusations it may unfairly target people, Lewin said the effort is focused on prevention, not profiling.

“If you look at how the highest risk people in the model unfortunately reflect people that are being killed in Chicago, it’s a proven predictive model. So if the data was suspect, it wouldn’t be proven to work,” Lewin said. “Each subject on this list is a person whose life we’re trying to save.”

Offering a way out of gangs

Nearly 850 individuals have been contacted at their homes since the list’s start three years ago, and 144 of them have received follow-up visits, said Christopher Mallette, the executive director of Chicago’s Violence Reduction Strategy, which is working with Chicago police on this strategy.

Mallette says the strategy is working. More than half of the 846 people contacted had been victims of violence themselves before police visited them, yet just about 11 percent of them had been victimized again by violence since being contacted by police, according to Mallette. One-fifth of the 846 people had been re-arrested for a violent offense since the visits, he said.

About one out of four asked for help for themselves or people they knew, Mallette said.

As for the call-ins, there have been about 70 such meetings in almost six years, attended by more than 2,100 gang members. Only 5 percent became victims of violence after the call-in, Mallette said, while 12 percent were re-arrested for a violent offense. More than half reached out for assistance, Mallette said.

“They may be dangerous people, but they’re logical and rational-thinking human beings,” said Mallette, who’s affiliated with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “The key to all of this is … if you have the right people offering the support, if you have the right tone and tenor with which you engage people, then the door is open.”

Clergy, concerned residents and representatives of social service agencies attend both the custom notifications and gang call-ins, offering “anything and everything” gang members need to make the transition, Mallette said.

Johnson said the effort is focused on holding repeat offenders, particularly those with gun violations, accountable for failing to change their lifestyles. He also said that the strategy could be more successful if lawmakers and the judiciary worked harder to keep repeat offenders in jail.

“The challenge is to try to get them out of the gang, to hold them accountable,” he said. “I am convinced that we are getting better and better at identifying the people that will be problematic … the challenge is holding them accountable, and … CPD is doing their part.”

Experts debate strategy’s worth

Crime experts say research shows that “hot spot” policing can help reduce violence, but that remains to be seen with programs like the strategic subject list. Chicago’s program is being evaluated by the RAND Corporation, a public policy think tank that does statistical analysis, which will present its findings in the coming months, Chicago police said.

David Klinger, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, said the approach is worth trying because of the “huge overlap” between the pools of victims and those who commit crimes.

“If the police can start something where conversations are going on, even with hard-core offenders, if there is any notion of deterrence, ‘Hey, we’re watching you,’ that could have an effect,” said Klinger, a law enforcement expert. “Knowing that the police are out there focusing on the bad guys … might be something that would more generally deter people and lead them to make other choices.”

But deeply rooted distrust of cops among some groups and elevated tension across the country between law enforcement and minorities in light of high profile use-of-force incidents captured on video may make it even more difficult for police to enact change, Klinger said.

Ronald Safer, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago, also said the strategy may be hampered by distrust of police.

“The idea is good in that prevention is far better than enforcement,” said Safer, who prosecuted the Gangster Disciples in the 1990s. “The problem, at the moment, is that the police have no credibility.”

“I know firsthand the impossibly difficult and dangerous job these officers have,” he said later. “But the fact that 98 percent of them are well-intentioned and well-meaning is not enough. The police have to change their approach with the community.”

Schwartz, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is concerned that the data going into the algorithm can be reflective of police unfairly targeting African-Americans and other minorities, who are arrested at disproportionately higher rates than whites.

Any strategy that involves “machine learning,” the foundation for predictive policing, is only as good as the data that is entered, Schwartz said.

“You put this all together and the result is bias in and bias out,” he said.

He thinks the algorithm for the strategic subject list should be made public to alleviate concerns about its fairness.

“When the government is identifying a small number of people who are going to get extraordinary scrutiny from the police, the government should be transparent about how they’re selecting those people,” Schwartz said.

Sheley, of the ACLU, said she was skeptical that the offer of social services, which could be anything from counseling for drug and alcohol abuse to job training, would significantly alter these people’s lives.

“Are you honest and serious about wrapping them in the kinds of social services that will take them out of a situation, which is violent, with all the cards stacked against them?” Sheley asked.

Marquis Henderson, a 22-year-old who has been arrested about 50 times, has a score of 445 on the Police Department’s strategic subject list. He was among the 140 people arrested by police in May on the West Side.

The charges against him were later dropped. In an interview outside an apartment building on Roosevelt Road, he said he has never been visited by police with an offer of social services.

Selling drugs isn’t a choice for some, he said, but the result of few economic options in his community. It’s hard to get a job, he said, when you don’t have money to begin with.

“If you’ve been doing something illegal, it’s hard to stop because this is what you’ve, this is how you’ve been surviving,” he said. “So you mean to tell me I’ve been surviving like this all my life, and I’m gonna just stop today and get up and go down here and go sign an application?”

Henderson said he didn’t expect to ever get out of the marijuana business — too many people want to buy drugs for him to turn the money down.

“I’m gonna sell drugs the rest of my life,” he said. “Even if I have job and a degree and everything, I’m gonna still sell weed.”

Asked if he feared for his life, he said “not me personally” but then added, “I ain’t gonna lie, sometimes, sometimes. … This is Chicago. Anything could happen.”

On Thursday night, Henderson was shot in the Austin community, a graze wound he shrugged off.

‘It’s the police. When do they want to help?’

Police say they visited Daniel Alcantara last Aug. 13 because of his score of 500-plus on the strategic subject list. Mallette said Alcantara was “a known shooter” for his gang, then in the midst of a conflict with rivals.

When police arrived at his home at Augusta Boulevard and Harding Avenue in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, Alcantara ran inside. He refused to answer the front door, but the commander reassured him, saying, “If we were going to serve a warrant, do you think we’d be knocking and talking to you right now?” according to Mallette. Alcantara laughed, Mallette said, and talked to police through an open window.

Alcantara’s younger brother, Rafael, 17, recalled the visit.

“Danny looks out through the window and was like, ‘What’s going on? Do you have a warrant for my arrest or something?’ ” his brother said during an interview in his mother’s West Side apartment. “And they’re like, ‘Can you just step out? … We promise it’s nothing. We just want to talk to you.’ “

Officers told him he was on a list “of being like endangered, like being murdered in a way,” his brother said. “And they were just saying how they want to help him because his name was on that list.”

According to his brother, Alcantara was skeptical and thought the visit was “weird.”

“Why would they pick me out of hundreds off this list?” his brother remembered Alcantara saying later. “We didn’t see it as they really wanted to help. … It’s the police. When do they want to help somebody?”

Mallette, however, said that about a month after the visit Alcantara reached out for help in obtaining a high school equivalency degree.

But Alcantara still had too many enemies.

‘I don’t want to die’

On Feb. 7, Alcantara was outside his home when he was wounded in a shooting that left another man dead. Shot in the eye, Alcantara was rushed to Norwegian American Hospital by his sister, Areli Alvarez, 28, who recalled speeding down streets to get help.

“He was like, ‘Be careful. I just want to make it to the hospital. I don’t want to die,’ ” his sister recalled.

He survived, but four months later, on June 3, was shot again while visiting his old neighborhood.

His longtime girlfriend, Janessa Arocho, 21, recalled finding him in the street, shot in the chest. She recalled cradling his bleeding body in her arms until he died.

“He had a really good sense of humor, a good heart,” she said in his mother’s kitchen, where a photo of Alcantara from his childhood hung on a wall. “He was really smart.”

She said Alcantara was well aware of the risks of gang life.

“He knew what the life he was living was going to bring him. He would say it himself,” Arocho said. “He said … he knows there’s people out there that don’t like him.”

His brother said Alcantara joined a gang because that’s what all their friends did growing up. He said his brother warned him away from joining, but that Alcantara was too tangled in the life to move on.

“He just wouldn’t be him no more,” he said. “I don’t think he’d want to go somewhere else and be a new person.”

His sister said he had briefly stayed with her when she lived in a safe, quiet neighborhood on the Northwest Side. But he’d always return to their old Logan Square neighborhood, to old friends, to his lifelong ties.

“I used to get mad at him like, ‘Why are you going where you’re not supposed to be? You’re supposed to be here. Just stay here. There’s no danger for you here,’ ” Alvarez said.

Alvarez said her brother just laughed off her worries and told her, “I’ll be back.”

Chicago Tribune’s Steve Schmadeke contributed.

jgorner@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @JeremyGorner