None of this is to say that crime in Chicago hasn’t gone down since Emanuel and McCarthy arrived. It almost certainly has. After all, the city saw a steady drop in index crimes over the preceding seventeen years.
That kind of modest decline was the norm in 2013 for the ten biggest U.S. cities. Preliminary FBI statistics show that index property crimes (burglaries, thefts, auto thefts, and arsons) declined by an average of less than 3 percent last year in those cities. Of those, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts fell the most: by just under 7 percent each, on average. In contrast, Chicago recorded seismic drops of 22 and 23 percent, respectively, for those two crimes in 2013.
If Chicago has indeed succeeded in slicing property crime by such huge amounts—especially when most of its manpower has been devoted to preventing shootings—then you’d think Emanuel and McCarthy would have been touting their winning strategies. The two have never been bashful about their accomplishments. But when was the last time you heard them describe their strategies to prevent burglaries? Or robberies? Or auto thefts? (When Chicago asked Collins for those details, he gave a four-point response that basically boils down to: The decreases shown in CompStat are due to CompStat.)
It would be easy enough for an independent authority to make sure that crime statistics are accurate. But none do. The Illinois Uniform Crime Reporting program—a one-person office within the state police department—merely submits the department’s numbers to the FBI after checking for data-entry errors, not for accuracy, according to a state police spokeswoman.
And the FBI? Its Uniform Crime Reporting program leaves the counting and reporting to the police. (The departments can refuse to participate, by the way.) Which essentially means the departments police themselves. Audits are rare: From 2009 to 2013, the FBI audited just 451 of the nation’s nearly 18,000 law enforcement agencies that report crime data to the bureau. The last time the FBI audited the Chicago Police Department, the FBI spokesman said, was April 2006.
Here’s the capper: Even if the FBI finds problems, it cannot impose any penalties. “It’s an absolute joke,” says Eterno.
Even the recent audit by the office of Inspector General Joseph Ferguson was quite limited. It examined only 383 of the 83,480 assault-related incidents reported by the department in 2012. And it didn’t check to make sure the facts in the reports matched the victims’ original complaints.
When we asked Collins what safeguards the department has to prevent or catch the manipulation of crime reports, he pointed to the department’s Quality Assurance Unit. It randomly checks case reports for accuracy, Collins said, and reviews every report that has been reclassified. In 2012, the department’s Robert Tracy told Chicago: “I have quality assurance … ensuring that the numbers we put out publicly are accurate. Nothing worse can happen than not having the right numbers.”
Tracy, as you’ll recall, also runs the CompStat program. It’s the old fox and hen house dilemma.
Changes to how crimes get recorded and counted. Allegations by cops of rampant downgrading and underreporting. Lack of transparency. All this has a familiar ring to Silverman, the criminologist, who has studied police data practices in numerous U.S. cities for years. His opinion: “It’s like they wrote the script here [in New York], and you guys [in Chicago] took it.”
Since part 1 of this special report was published on April 7, strange things have happened to the department’s crime data. On April 11, RedEye reported that eight homicide cases were missing from the 2014 year-to-date murder total on the city’s public data portal. Collins called the problem a “temporary technology glitch.” An online vendor, he added, would “re-sync” the data that same day.
But three weeks later, the problem hadn’t been fixed. Also, when we checked the portal a week after part 1 of this story ran, 364 murders were listed for 2013, though the department’s widely reported official year-end tally was 414. That error persisted until at least May 1. Also on May 1, the department announced 95 murders for the first quarter of 2014, but the portal showed just 72 for that period. (It has since been corrected.) The data for 2011 and 2012 are consistent with previously reported totals.
At the end of April, another odd thing happened. A blog called Crime in Wrigleyville and Boystown found that the data portal was missing at least 22 percent of all reported crimes in Lake View between March 15 and April 14. When we asked Collins about it, he said “the issue should be completely correct by the end of the day [May 5].”
Just as puzzling, a week before part 1 of our story was published, the department stopped its usual practice of posting CompStat reports on its website each week. It did not resume posting until May 2, at which time it put up a report covering the week ending April 27. What about data for the weeks ending March 30, April 6, April 13, and April 20? Never posted. “The person who updates the CompStat data on our website was on vacation for several weeks,” Collins responded, calling the lapse an “administrative oversight.”
These issues, and others described in this story, aren’t just academic. Reliable data are integral to virtually every police-budgeting and crime-fighting decision, from how many officers to hire to where to deploy them. Undercounting allows crimes to go unsolved and criminals to get lighter penalties. And it leaves victims—the real people who become the statistics—feeling betrayed, distrustful, and vulnerable.
Consider the unfortunate jogger mentioned earlier. According to veteran police sources, her attacker’s behavior constitutes criminal sexual abuse, defined as sexual conduct by the use of force or threat of force. And that’s exactly how the police report, filed a few days later, classified the incident.
Shortly afterward, however, a detective told the woman that the crime was not sexual abuse after all, but battery. The woman recalls the detective saying that “the man who attacked me would’ve had to have said something sexual or touched himself” for the crime to be sexual abuse. So she reiterated: “He grabbed his crotch and grabbed mine.”
She says the detective told her, “To be honest, I don’t think the state’s attorney is going to do anything with this.… It’s just not a big deal compared to all the other crime that’s going on.”
Maybe so. But according to the FBI, crimes are supposed to be classified and counted based solely on the police’s investigation, not on what officers think prosecutors might do later in court.
Weeks later, the woman learned, to her dismay, that the police report had been changed anyway. It no longer contained any reference to the sexual nature of the attack, which was now classified a simple battery—the kind of charge given to a person who, say, slugs someone.
“It was a sexual attack,” the woman insists. “He could do it again, and he could do it to someone who couldn’t fight back, who couldn’t get away.… It’s not fair that the sexual nature of this wouldn’t be on his record.” (Because the victim captured the man’s license plate number, the police caught a suspect; the case is working its way through the courts.)
“There’s no reason to reclassify [this case] to a battery,” agrees a veteran detective who reviewed the case at Chicago’s request. “Unless someone just wanted to make the lakefront seem a lot safer.”
Before Commander Voulgaris and his officers closed last fall’s meeting in Wrigleyville, the Nineteenth District’s community policing sergeant, Jason Clark, urged the people gathered in the room to be aware of their surroundings. He reminded them to call police when they spot anyone suspicious. He added that the department had grant money coming in for “personal alarms” that they could attach to their key chains. The crowd gave him a blank stare.
Moments later, everyone stood up to leave. It was already dark. Toward the back of the room, an older woman gathered her things, including the packets of monthly police statistics distributed when the meeting began. She stopped for a minute and turned to a neighbor.
“Could I get someone to walk me home?” she asked.
Grantland
FINALIST—FEATURE WRITING
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p; One of two stories published by a digital-only publication to be nominated for the 2015 Ellie for Feature Writing (the other was the winner, The Atavist’s “Love and Ruin”), “The Sea of Crises” is, said the Ellie judges, “a daring, dreamlike narrative that weaves together reporting on the career of Hakuho, the great sumotori, and the suicide of the writer Yukio Mishima.” Brian Phillips is a staff writer at Grantland, where he covers sports ranging from tennis to the Iditarod. Launched in 2011, Grantland is a sports and pop-culture website operated by ESPN. This year Grantland was also nominated for Ellies for film criticism by Wesley Morris and Jonathan Hock’s video series on Steve Nash.
Brian Phillips
The Sea of Crises
The White Bird
When he comes into the ring, Hakuho, the greatest sumotori in the world, perhaps the greatest in the history of the world, dances like a tropical bird, like a bird of paradise. Flanked by two attendants—his tachimochi, who carries his sword, and his tsuyuharai, or dew sweeper, who keeps the way clear for him—and wearing his embroidered apron, the kesho-mawashi, with its braided cords and intricate loops of rope, Hakuho climbs onto the trapezoidal block of clay, two feet high and nearly twenty-two feet across, where he will be fighting. Here, marked off by rice-straw bales, is the circle, the dohyo, which he has been trained to imagine as the top of a skyscraper: One step over the line and he is dead. A Shinto priest purified the dohyo before the tournament; above, a six-ton canopy suspended from the arena’s ceiling, a kind of floating temple roof, marks it as a sacred space. Colored tassels hang from the canopy’s corners, representing the Four Divine Beasts of the Chinese constellations: the azure dragon of the east, the vermilion sparrow of the south, the white tiger of the west, the black tortoise of the north.1 Over the canopy, off-center and lit with spotlights, flies the white-and-red flag of Japan.
Hakuho bends into a deep squat. He claps twice, then rubs his hands together. He turns his palms slowly upward. He is bare-chested, 6-foot-4 and 350 pounds. His hair is pulled up in a topknot. His smooth stomach strains against the coiled belt at his waist, the literal referent of his rank: yokozuna, horizontal rope. Rising, he lifts his right arm diagonally, palm down to show he is unarmed. He repeats the gesture with his left. He lifts his right leg high into the air, tipping his torso to the left like a watering can, then slams his foot onto the clay. When it strikes, the crowd of 13,000 souls inside the Ryogoku Kokugikan, Japan’s national sumo stadium, shouts in unison: “Yoisho !”—Come on! Do it! He slams down his other foot: “Yoisho!” It’s as if the force of his weight is striking the crowd in the stomach. Then he squats again, arms held out winglike at his sides, and bends forward at the waist until his back is near parallel with the floor. Imagine someone playing airplane with a small child. With weird, sliding thrusts of his feet, he inches forward, gliding across the ring’s sand, raising and lowering his head in a way that’s vaguely serpentine while slowly straightening his back. By the time he’s upright again, the crowd is roaring.
In 265 years, sixty-nine men have been promoted to yokozuna. Just sixty-nine since George Washington was a teenager.2 Only the holders of sumo’s highest rank are allowed to make entrances like this. Officially, the purpose of the elaborate dohyo-iri is to chase away demons. (And this is something you should register about sumo, a sport with TV contracts and millions in revenue and fan blogs and athletes in yogurt commercials—that it’s simultaneously a sport in which demon-frightening can be something’s official purpose.) But the ceremony is territorial on a human level, too. It’s a message delivered to adversaries, a way of saying This ring is mine, a way of saying Be prepared for what happens if you’re crazy enough to enter it.
Hakuho is not Hakuho’s real name. Sumo wrestlers fight under ring names called shikona, formal pseudonyms governed, like everything else in sumo, by elaborate traditions and rules. Hakuho was born Mönkhbatyn Davaajargal in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in 1985; he is the fourth non-Japanese wrestler to attain yokozuna status. Until the last thirty years or so, foreigners were rare in the upper ranks of sumo in Japan. But some countries have their own sumo customs, brought over by immigrants, and some others have sports that are very like sumo. Thomas Edison filmed sumo matches in Hawaii as early as 1903. Mongolian wrestling involves many of the same skills and concepts. In recent years, wrestlers brought up in places like these have found their way to Japan in greater numbers and have largely supplanted Japanese wrestlers at the top of the rankings. Six of the past eight yokozuna promotions have gone to foreigners. There has been no active Japanese yokozuna since the last retired in 2003. This is a source of intense anxiety to many in the tradition-minded world of sumo in Japan.
As a child, the story goes, Davaajargal was skinny. This was years before he became Hakuho, when he used to mope around Ulaanbaatar, thumbing through sumo magazines and fantasizing about growing as big as a house. His father had been a dominant force in Mongolian wrestling in the 1960s and 1970s, winning a silver medal at the 1968 Olympics and rising to the rank of undefeatable giant. It was sumo that captured Davaajargal’s imagination, but he was simply too small for it.
When he went to Tokyo, in October 2000, he was a 137-pound fifteen-year-old. No trainer would touch him. Sumo apprentices start young, moving into training stables called heya where they’re given room and board in return for a somewhat horrifying life of eating, chores, training, eating, and serving as quasi slaves to their senior stablemates (and eating). Everyone agreed that little Davaajargal had a stellar wrestling brain but he was starting too late, and his reedlike body would make real wrestlers want to kick dohyo sand in his face. Finally, an expat Mongolian rikishi (another word for sumo wrestler) persuaded the master of the Miyagino heya to take Davaajargal in on the last day of the teenager’s stay in Japan. The stablemaster’s gamble paid off. after a few years of training and a fortuitous late growth spurt, Davaajargal emerged as the most feared young rikishi in Japan. He was given the name Hakuho, which means “white Peng”; a Peng is a giant bird in Chinese mythology.
Hakuho’s early career was marked by a sometimes bad-tempered rivalry with an older wrestler, a fellow Mongolian called Asashoryu (“morning blue dragon”), who became a yokozuna in 2003. Asashoryu embodied everything the Japanese fear about the wave of foreign rikishi who now dominate the sport. He was hotheaded, unpredictable, and indifferent to the ancient traditions of a sport that’s been part of the Japanese national consciousness for as long as there’s been a Japan.
This is something else you should register about sumo: It is very, very old. Not old like black-and-white movies; old like the mists of time. Sumo was already ancient when the current ranking system came into being in the mid-1700s. The artistry of the banzuke, the traditional ranking sheet, has given rise to an entire school of calligraphy. Imagine how George Will would feel about baseball if he’d seen World Series scorecards from 1789. This is how many Japanese feel about sumo.
Asashoryu brawled with other wrestlers in the communal baths. He barked at referees—an almost unthinkable offense. He pulled another wrestler’s hair, a breach that made him the first yokozuna ever disqualified from a match. Rikishi are expected to wear kimonos and sandals in public; Asashoryu would show up in a business suit. He would show up drunk. He would accept his prize money with the wrong hand.
The 600-pound Hawaiian sumotori Konishiki launched a rap career after retiring from the sport;3 another Hawaiian, Akebono, the first foreign yokozuna, became a professional wrestler. This was bad enough. But Asashoryu flouted the dignity of the sumo association while still an active rikishi. He withdrew from a summer tour claiming an injury, then showed up on Mongolian TV playing in a charity soccer match. When sumo was rocked by a massive match-fixing scandal in the mid-2000s, a tabloid magazine reported that Asashoryu had paid his opponents $10,000 per match to let him win one tournament. Along with several other wrestlers, Asashoryu won a settlement against the magazine, but even that victory carried a faint whiff of scandal: The Mongolian became the first y
okozuna ever to appear in court. “Everyone talks about dignity,” Asashoryu complained when he retired, “but when I went into the ring, I felt fierce like a devil.” Once, after an especially contentious bout, he reportedly went into the parking lot and attacked his adversary’s car.
The problem, from the perspective of the traditionalists who control Japanese sumo, was that Asashoryu also won. He won relentlessly. He laid waste to the sport. Until Hakuho came along, he was, by an enormous margin, the best wrestler in the world. The sumo calendar revolves around six grand tournaments—honbasho—held every two months throughout the year. In 2004, Asashoryu won five of them, two with perfect 15–0 records, a mark that no one had achieved since the mid-1990s. In 2005, he became the first wrestler to win all six honbasho in a single year. He would lift 400-pound wrestlers off their feet and hurl them, writhing, to the clay. He would bludgeon them with hands toughened by countless hours of striking the teppo, a wooden shaft as thick as a telephone pole. He won his twentyfifth tournament, then good for third on the all-time list, before his thirtieth birthday.
Hakuho began to make waves around the peak of Asashoryu’s invulnerable reign. Five years younger than his rival, Hakuho was temperamentally his opposite: solemn, silent, difficult to read. “More Japanese than the Japanese”—this is what people say about him. Asashoryu made sumo look wild and furious; Hakuho was fathomlessly calm. He seemed to have an innate sense of angles and counterweights, how to shift his hips a fraction of an inch to annihilate his enemy’s balance. In concept, winning a sumo bout is simple: either make your opponent step outside the ring or make him touch the ground with any part of his body besides the soles of his feet. When Hakuho won, how he’d done it was sometimes a mystery. The other wrestler would go staggering out of what looked like an even grapple. When Hakuho needed to, he could be overpowering. He didn’t often need to.
The Best American Magazine Writing 2015 Page 32