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CONCLUSION
Our hope is that the data reported here may be helpful to the ongoing conversation in Chicago about how to improve the safety and well-being of all residents of our home city, particularly those living in our most disadvantaged neighborhoods where the burden of crime is most severe. The data indicate that overall crime in the city of Chicago is not spiraling out of control. However, the city has witnessed a sudden, large, and seemingly sustained increase in gun crime occurring in public, involving teens and men in their 20s and 30s, in a small number of distressed neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West sides. Unfortunately, the available data cannot at this time point definitively to what caused the increase in gun violence in Chicago in 2016. Many common hypotheses for the gun violence problem in Chicago—such as proximity to states with less restrictive gun laws, or social conditions —evolve slowly over time and did not change abruptly at the end of 2015. As a result, these explanations are difficult to reconcile with the sudden and dramatic increase in gun violence at the start of 2016. Factors such as weather, city spending on social services or public education, or overall police activity (as measured by arrests) did not seem to change abruptly enough in 2016 to explain the violence increase either, while the effect of disruption to community organizations stemming from the state budget impasse is difficult to measure. We do see declines in 2016 in selected measures of police activity, such as the likelihood of arrest for a homicide or shooting and investigatory street stops. However, the contribution of these changes to the increase in gun violence remains unclear. Other factors that we cannot measure with currently available data, such as the structure of gang activity and social media use, could also have played a role. The fact that many other American cities saw homicides increase in 2015 and 2016 suggests that part of what Chicago experienced this past year may not be unique to our city. Despite the uncertainty about what caused the increase in gun violence in Chicago in 2016, the city need not be paralyzed in crafting a response. The solution to a problem need not be the opposite of its cause. For example, in 1950, the U.S. experienced 22 motor vehicle fatalities for every 100,000 residents. Most of those fatalities were due to some type of driver error, such as speeding, veering into an oncoming lane, and running through stop signs or red lights. But progress in reducing auto fatalities in the U.S. did not come from eliminating all driver mistakes; instead, it came in large part from improving the safety of cars and roadways. The result is that U.S. motor vehicle fatalities per 100,000 people today are less than half what they were in 1950. This example is not intended to illustrate or endorse any particular strategy for reducing gun violence in Chicago, but rather to emphasize that the set of possible solutions the city can consider is broader than whatever turn out to be the causes of the 2016 surge in gun violence.