Trans Women In Chicago Keep Dying; Police Doing 14% Of Their Best
NYT could take some lessons from the Chicago Sun-Times.
Violence against trans people is distressingly common. Even so, it’s possible to look back a generation and believe that progress is being made. Not so fast, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. In a story that has circulated rapidly, the paper calls out the Chicago Police Department for its low clearance rate of anti-trans murders. Sympathetic, but sometimes confusing, the paper bounces back and forth between different research to report a long term clearance rate of only 14 percent for Chicago’s trans victims, when all murders in the US were cleared just over 50 percent of the time in 2022 and the Chicago clearance rate for all murders just a year later was indistinguishable.
Much of this has been known for some time. Brendon Lantz, director of the Hate Crime Research & Policy Institute at Florida State University and a common source for many media outlets writing about violence targeting trans individuals, spoke to Chicago’s ABC-7 in 2022, identifying Chicago as a hot spot of anti-trans murder and saying,
“The clearance rates in our data are far below the national average for non-transgender homicide rates, and the clearance rates in Chicago are much lower than what we are seeing for trans homicides nationally as well.”
The Sun-Times focuses on the stories of a few, specific victims from recent years, out of what the American Medical Association labeled an “epidemic” of violence against trans people during their 2019 annual meeting (ironically in Chicago that year). But it also attempted to contextualize those stories with some numbers, apparently derived from its own past reporting.
As in other coverage, the Sun-Times found that trans victims are overwhelmingly Black or other people of color, and overwhelmingly trans women. ABC-7’s report mentions eight cases, four closed between 2020 and 2022. The Sun-Times seems to be including those cases in its catalog of 14 from 2016 to today, with no additional closed cases. That rate, 28 percent, would still be depressingly low if it held up, but Lantz’s more comprehensive work was the source of that 14 percent number above and in Wonkette’s opinion comes from a data set opened in 2010 that is likely to be more reliable.
No one should be happy with a 52 percent murder case closure rate, but 14 percent is downright obscene — and neither Lantz’s expert opinion nor the individual narratives shared by the Sun-Times would lead anyone to believe this poor showing is an accident. Three mayors — Rahm Emanuel, Lori Lightfoot, and current incumbent Brandon Johnson — have presided over this horrifying trend. Johnson took office only a bit over a year go and appointed a new CPD Superintendent last September, but according to trans activist Zahara Bassett, legitimate trans concerns with violence, inadequate police response, and other issues are ignored outside of election season. The Sun-Times scatters its quotes from Bassett, but permit Wonkette to stitch them together for a better picture of her criticism:
“There’s no follow-up,” trans activist Zahara Bassett said. “I know a few people who have been murdered, and no one knows what happened still to this day.” […]
“[Trans non-profits are] not paid to investigate. We’re paid to support and erase any barriers that people may be going through … trying to be advocates for them and uplifting their voices,” Bassett said. “But it’s the police’s job to investigate these murders.” […]
“The problem that I have with the Chicago Police Department is that they prioritize what they want to prioritize,” Bassett said. “I’ve seen that on numerous occasions; we all see it.”
“If an officer gets shot, all hands are on deck,” she said. “Why are not the same priorities given when a Black life is taken? When a Black trans woman is murdered? Why all hands are not on deck?” […]
“I think we’re just a part of an election or ballot conversation to get people into office, and then we die off,” Bassett said.
None of this is new, which makes it all the more heartbreaking. In 2022, National Black Justice Coalition Executive Director Victoria Kirby York said of Lantz’s research showing terrible closure rates for trans murder victims in Chicago:
“Definitely shows there's a pattern of neglect and a lack of interest in really sending a clear message that murdering transgender women, especially Black transgender women, women in the city is not ok.”
In addition to disinterest or trans women’s “low priority,” there are likely other reasons why Chicago’s numbers are so terrible. The Human Rights Campaign has found deadnaming trans victims is distressingly common. And here we mean deadnaming in its original, most distressing sense. CPD is no exception to this trend. Deadnaming is associated with lower murder clearance rates. While it’s not entirely clear whether this is a cause (asking whether you’ve seen someone last night is more likely to be successful when you use the right name) or a co-effect (if an officer hates trans people enough to deadname us, that officer might also hate us enough to slow walk an investigation), in the words of one wise young woman, “Porque no los dos?”
That disinterest, at least, is well documented by the Sun-Times interviews with family members of trans victims. Its story starts with this slap to the complacent:
It has been two years since Tatiana Labelle was beaten to death and dumped in a garbage bin in Chatham.
No arrests have been made, and her family says they have gotten no real updates from police.
Labelle’s sister Shameika Thomas was terrified when Labelle went missing, and has been living with an open wound ever since:
“I was so heartbroken,” Thomas said. “I fell apart. For someone to beat her and throw her in the garbage, like trash, like she didn’t have no family or nobody that loved her.”
Thomas said detectives were initially responsive but then stopped answering her calls. She complained that Chicago police “don’t care” about victims who are transgender.
“They feel like when (victims) are transgender or out on the street, they feel like nobody really cares about them,” Thomas said. “But they also have families.”
CPD has shown its contempt in other ways. When ABC-7 was reporting on this agonizing state of affairs 20 months ago, it included this telling passage:
For more than a week, Chicago police officials told the I-Team they wanted to do an interview for this report, but never provided anyone to speak on camera.
And murders are horribly common, with Lantz writing:
the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that violent transgender deaths may be at least 40 times greater than those reported in official crime statistics.
Obviously better statistics are needed, and that begins with record keeping. Many are now calling on the CPD to identify cases related to trans people in its database so that both rates of victimization and closure rates can be more easily and accurately tracked. And that would indeed be a nice start for an agency seemingly oblivious to the value of trans lives. But it is also vital that reporters continue to do the difficult emotional and investigative work of bringing stories like Labelle’s to public attention, even — or especially! — when the story remains the same year after year.
Wonkette can’t give much praise to Chicago’s police or mayors today, but thank goodness for the Chicago Sun-Times.
Yeah, I wish the news were better today, folks, but as fucked up as it may seem, having a major newspaper scream at the cops to get off their asses **IS** kind of a good thing. It's not good that the cops are on their asses, but we did get an important advocacy story from a major paper.
In the depressing world of trans policy and politics, just having a paper advocate for better is a welcome change.
There's an element of disposability I think you just get used to growing up trans. The first time I saw people "like me" was on Jerry Springer, being paraded out like a sideshow for a drooling audience, and they were deeply unsympathetic people besides. Damaged and also based on the shows, often hurting others.
At best we were a novelty, to make films like The Crying Game somehow less boring. Not sure if it worked - I'm not cisgender.
I've noticed many of us - even the famousish ones like Kate Bornstein - end up anarchists, or otherwise politically radical, and it makes sense to me - growing up in a world that wants to burn you down tends to make you want to return the favor. Start over with something better, built from the ashes.
It also makes one acutely aware of the sharp corners and hard edges in this world. That barbarism is precious inches away from civilization.
One of the unwritten rules of policing is to keep the "disposable people" in line. The folks that the rest of us are uncomfortable with. The homeless, the seriously mentally ill, the radically queer, or black, even leftist activists have been routinely dehumanized and disciplined and destroyed by our society, and it's cops that do most of the heavy lifting in that regard.
I don't feel like being white, middle class. and trans makes me disposable anymore - things *have* changed somewhat for the better, but not for black trans women. Not near enough by a damned sight. I guarantee you most of these victims were black without even looking it up.
Still, having spent some time there gives one a clearer view of the parts of society we would rather not talk about.