Chicago saw way more robberies in the early 1990s than it's seeing today

But here are some guesses why we're more freaked out by them now

10-5-2023 (issue No. 108)

This week

• Last week’s winning tweet

• On copyright and Artificial Intelligence: A contrary view

• Some theories as to why crime in Chicago now seems more alarming than ever

• News and Views — On the Ruth Bader Ginsberg “forever” stamp; the Republican primary race; convention funding; muzzling victimized lifeguards and more Tribune subscription shenanigans.

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• “Songs of Good Cheer” update — Oh ho the mistletoe?

• Wait, wait? Or go back and stand in line? — Peter Sagal has an airport etiquette question.

• In praise of Amy Dickinson

• John Kelly on Donald Trump; Donald Trump on John Kelly

• “The Mincing Rascals” podcast preview

• Re:Tweets — The winning visual tweet and this week’s contest finalists

• Tune of the Week — “Life During Wartime”

Mary Schmich is off this week

Last week’s winning tweet

Ordered new coats for my kids and for convenience I had them shipped directly to their school’s lost and found section. — @Chhapiness

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

On copyright and Artificial Intelligence: A contrary view

All of us who write for a living — indeed, almost everyone who ever has occasion to write anything from a report to a letter to a text — have been “trained” via years of reading, listening and watching to use words to formulate and present thoughts — stories, ideas, arguments, descriptions and quips.

The phrases and sentences are our own, ideally. But in many ways they’re the synthesized result of the books, articles and plays we’ve read, the speeches we’ve heard, the TV shows and movies we’ve watched and the conversations we’ve had. Our intelligence is rooted in the array of experiences we’ve had as we’ve moved through life.

Artificially intelligent bots are similar. They synthesize input and regurgitate unique outputs. They’re just way faster readers than we are — hoovering up, processing and “learning” from billions of words, more than any one person could read in many lifetimes. True, they have never fallen in love, grieved, laughed at a joke or experienced any other human emotions. But their training on vast quantities of verbiage gives them the capacity to create convincing simulations of those feelings, just as a lifetime of experience gives human creators the capacity to create convincing simulations of that which they have never felt directly.

Creation is the product of knowledge plus imagination. And while imagination is a mysterious concept — as is consciousness itself — it may be vain of us to think of it as something only humans can exhibit, as it was vain of us once to think that only humans could play chess at a world-class level. As the AI technology becomes increasingly powerful, there’s likely to be no recognizable or discernible difference between that which humans write or compose and that which computers write or compose.

If you take comfort in how clumsy and error-prone and ridiculous AI-generated content can be these days, you’re like the railroad barons who took comfort in how rickety and unsafe early airplane flight was.

Authors and other written-content creators are attempting to prevent this inevitability by barring AI bots from “reading” their output to train on it, or using it to write or rewrite literary works. Some have filed copyright claims against companies that are feeding their work into the digital maw for mastication and regurgitation.

Last month,Jeff Jarvis, an author and outgoing director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York’s journalism school posted “Copyright and AI and journalism,” a blog entry on this point:

• Training artificial intelligence models on existing content could be considered fair use. Their output is generally transformative. If that is true, then training machines on content would not be a violation of copyright or theft. … I am no lawyer but I believe training machines on any content that is lawfully acquired so it can be inspired to produce new content is not a violation of copyright. Note my italics.

• Machines should have the same right to learn as humans; to say otherwise is to set a dangerous precedent for humans. If we say that a machine is not allowed to learn, to read, to extract knowledge from existing content and adapt it to other uses, then I fear it would not be a long leap to declare what we as humans are not allowed to read, see, or know some things. …

• Stopping large language models from having access to quality content will make them even worse. 

The technological progress that allows us to live in days of miracle and wonder is based on the invention of tools and machines and programs that are way faster than people at all variety of tasks. It’s wildly hopeful to downright delusional to think that we can wall off creativity and imagination as beyond the abilities of machines to replicate convincingly. Any human “victories” in this area, whether they be in union contracts or court rulings, are bound to be temporary and, in the judgment of history, quaint and naive.

Some theories as to why crime in Chicago now seems more alarming than ever

Over the weekend, the Tribune published “‘Everyone is so freaked out’: Armed robbery crews sweep city as Chicago police task forces struggle with brazen crimes,” by Jason Meisner, Sam Charles and Jake Sheridan.

Yet on social media, Sheridan posted this compelling chart by @minc798 compiled from Chicago Police Department annual reports and the city’s data portal with the number of robberies on the vertical axis against the years back to 1964 on horizontal axis:

Not to make you squint, but there were far more robberies in town from, say, 1989 through 1995 than there will be this year. And as a resident of the city then (as now), I remember concerns about crime but not the freakout we’re now seeing.

The article posits some theories:

• “A disturbing new pattern has emerged in recent months where crews of robbers — many of them juveniles — toting high-powered weapons go on crime sprees, robbing or carjacking multiple victims in a matter of minutes, often using stolen cars and dressed head to toe in black. They seem to be constantly one step ahead of authorities. Before police can even respond to one scene, more have popped up, leaving dozens upon dozens of victims in their wake. The vast majority of the robberies have gone unsolved.”

• “In Ald. Scott Waguespack’s 32nd Ward, robberies have risen 67% this year. The attacks seem to be more violent and brazen, he told the Tribune. ‘They’re not only robbing somebody, but then they’re beating them either into submission or beating them after the fact,’ Waguespack said.”

A vivid example of this brazen violence was the savage midday beating administered to a hapless robbery victim in a Bucktown alley Sept. 25. The brutality was gratuitous and unprovoked, and it was captured on video. This leads me to offer my theories about why this current spike in robberies seems so horrifying:

• Ubiquitous security cameras are showing us mayhem that was previously simply described to us. Seemingly every third doorbell and utility pole is recording images nonstop. This video feeds the media beast and turns what would be smallish items into big stories.

• Online media outlets— such as CWBChicago, which first reported the attack in the alley, along with hyperlocal information sites such as NextDoor — have the bandwidth and interest to report on crime in depth and detail that we didn’t see in the ‘90s.

• Social media platforms amplify and often personalize crimes that might otherwise feel like abstractions. Victims — often people we know — tell their stories in vivid detail.

To gainsay the theory that we’re paying more attention to robberies now because they’re in on the North and Northwest sides, Minc798 posted this chart, again plotting reported robberies by year:

Don’t get me wrong. No one should take particular comfort in the fact that the crime problem isn’t as bad as it has been. Those numbers are still far too high and must come down if Mayor Brandon Johnson is to fulfil his promise to build “a better, stronger, safer Chicago.”

News & Views

News: On Monday, the U.S. Postal Service unveiled a “forever” stamp honoring the late U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

View: How apropos. A forever stamp to honor someone who evidently thought she was going to live forever.

News: Polls in Iowa and New Hampshire suggest Republican voters are not totally sold on renominating Donald Trump for president.

View: It’s time for most of the obvious also-rans — Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott, Mike Pence and the others mired in single digit support — to drop out and see if anti-Trump voters coalesce around Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis. That would probably lead ultimately to a one-on-one match between Trump and Haley, who is generally rising on the basis of strong debate performances.

DeSantis has proven to be an uninspiring candidate and his White House aspirations are looking increasingly delusional.

Eight years ago, I was quietly rooting for Republicans to nominate the obviously grotesque, amoral incompetent Trump because he’d be the easiest candidate for the Democrats to beat in the general election. And though once again conventional wisdom has it that President Joe Biden’s best hope for reelection is to face Trump again, I can’t possibly root for anything that would bring him closer to regaining the White House.

(See Real Clear Politics polling results for the Iowa caucuses and for the New Hampshire primary.)

News: The Chicago Host Committee is hoping to raise some $85 million in donations to fund the 2024 Democratic National Convention here.

View: Political conventions are a silly waste of everyone’s time and money. Of all the causes to donate to, a boring four-day pep rally for a political party is among the most frivolous.

I’m glad Chicago is getting its beak wet this time, but enough with this frivolity. Put that money toward children’s cancer research or food pantries. Or at least directly toward the campaigns of Democratic candidates in contested races.

News: Chicago Park District pays nearly $2 million to former lifeguards who alleged sexual misconduct and buys their silence.

View: It’s outrageous that the “settlements include a clause prohibiting the former lifeguards from disparaging the park district,” according to WBEZ’s coverage. The park district is a public body shelling out public money to make disgraceful allegations go away, and the victims should be free to speak.

News: The flow of asylum-seeking migrants from the southern border is turning into a gusher, with more than 5,000 new arrivals expected to arrive each week on 20 to 25 buses a day.

View: Managing this humanitarian crisis is not exactly what new Mayor Brandon Johnson signed up for, and it appears very likely to thwart many of his ambitions. We are seeing neighborhoods in an uproar as the city attempts to find shelter for these new and severely impoverished residents. The progressive coalition is split on the idea of spending tens of millions of dollars to erect and manage large tent camps — Where? Who the hell knows? — and minority communities, in particular, are wroth over all the money and attention being devoted to the new arrivals when their urgent needs have been on the back burner for decades.

I’ll reiterate what Johnson, Gov. JB Pritzker and many others have been saying: This is a federal problem that demands a federal solution.

News: Ald. Jessie Fuentes, 26th, told a group of her constituents concerned about the uptick in robberies in her Northwest Side ward, “We have to ask ourselves, when someone is robbing someone, what are they seeking to achieve?”

View: Ooo! Ooo! I know! They are seeking money and they don’t want to work for it. Not to be too flip about the root causes of crime — the lack of opportunity, the poverty — that do need to be addressed, but the idea that the marauding groups of brutal youths are just a bunch of Jean Valjeans stealing to ward off starvation is feeble and feckless. What are they seeking to achieve when they mercilessly beat their victims?

News: The Tribune is now informing subscribers that there will be “up to 14” $9.99-a-month “premium issues” for which they will be charged (unless they call every six months to opt out of the charge). Before it was 12 “premium issues” a year.

View: My effort to shame my previous employer out of this sneaky and exploitative practice seems doomed to fail, but I do know from hearing from many readers that my reminders to call customer service at 312-546-7900 to opt out have proved effective in at least some cases.

Land of Linkin’

• The Ringer: “The Oral History of ‘Stop Making Sense’” Some say it’s the greatest concert movie of all time. See the Tune of the Week for a video that might make you say the same.

• “What the Hecke? Bylines at CWBChicago?” in Tuesday’s Picayune Plus highlighted a glimmer of transparency as the city’s secretive crime blog. But it was just a glimmer. Most of the bylines in evidence earlier this week were removed after my item appeared.

• “Stop the Presses” is the title of Mark Jacob’s new must-read Substack newsletter. Jacob is a former editor at the Tribune and Sun-Times and co-author of eight books on history and photography whose columns for Courier I often link to. The newsletter will be “about how right-wing extremism has exploited the weaknesses in American journalism and what we can do about it.”

• Veteran Tribune political reporter Ray Long is also starting a Substack newsletter.

• Slate: “EV charging stations are about to expand rapidly. Some gas stations are screwed.”

• Noah Berlatsky: “The fractured, fascist, grandstanding, irresponsible GOP is the perfect complement to the squawking, thrashing speakership of McCarthy. … The House GOP has been a pit of venomous, constipated vipers for years now. … Only a fool would try to govern a caucus of rabid fools. This really is a case where anyone who wants the job is obviously unqualified.”

• Slate’s Shannon Keating: “You Really Should Be on TikTok.” “I am here to humbly suggest to my fellow Olds that you stop waiting for trends to trickle down to you and instead go straight to the source. If you care about digital culture and how it’s influencing our world, you should be on TikTok.”

• The Huffington Post says, “You're Supposed To Wash Your Bananas Before Peeling Them. Here's Why.” But the Huffington Post is not the boss of me.

• The Picayune Sentinel preview: Tuesday at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

Squaring up the news

This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square:

■ McCarthyisnt: With Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy out in a historic vote driven by reactionaries, historian and Substack superstar Heather Cox Richardson observed: “Wow.”

■ “An epic takedown”: At Republicans’ first hearing on allegations of corruption at the Biden White House, Texas Democrat Jasmine Crockett stirringly turned the spotlight back to the indictment of Donald Trump: “These are our national secrets—looks like in the shitter to me.”

■ Politico: Trump wasn’t at the Republican presidential debate—but his wardrobe was. And columnist Mark Jacob said of Sen. Tim Scott’s performance then: “Racists love it when a Black person says slavery wasn’t as bad as LBJ.”

■ Columnist Robert Reich allows himself to entertain the notion that “the fever of Trumpism may be starting to break.”

■ A “long-standing pattern of child sexual abuse”: The Guardian reported the FBI’s interviewed people who’ve lodged that complaint against a secretive Christian sect whose lifelong members include Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

■ ‘We’ve all now seen what happens when non-professionals are trusted with the written word.’ Celebrating Hollywood’s writers for victory in their strike, “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver returned from his strike hiatus to take special aim at Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy’s hapless confrontation last month with Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias.

■ CandyStore.com ranks the top three most popular brands of candy in every state—and its No. 1 for Illinois might leave a sour taste in your mouth.

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

Cheer Chat

Last weekend’s “Songs of Good Cheer” cast meeting was devoted mostly to coming up with a set list for the 25th annual winter holiday caroling party at the Old Town School of Folk Music. We mix old and new, familiar with fresh, all with an eye (ear) toward enhancing the singalong experience.

Fred Campeau introduced a slightly new take on the gorgeous Joe Newberry song “On This Christmas Day,” which involves more audience participation than seen here in the 2019 show:

And I may have succeeded in getting “Holly Jolly Christmas” into the program for the first time ever. There are still skeptics in the cast, so no promises!

Yes, it’s just October with August temperatures, and SOGC weekend— Dec. 7-10 — seems far off. But tickets tend to go fast. Here is the link. Come sing with us!

Airport etiquette question

On Facebook, “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” host and author Peter Sagal asked the following:

You’re in boarding group one. You arrive at the gate a little late …. Do you get in line with everyone else, because you missed your chance to get on first? Or do you walk around the line right up to the gate, reveal your special status, and waltz on?

I feel strongly about my answer, but I’ll put it at the end of today’s issue so as not to influence any votes:

Meanwhile, I’ll admit to some puzzlement about the boarding groups. What is the logic behind who is in group 2 as opposed to who is in group 6? “Here's how each airline determines boarding order” in USA Today is somewhat informative:

Airlines continually tweak the order in which they board passengers. They’ve tried everything from a free-for-all to window-seats-and-back-of-plane first, to random boarding. One airline has even tried boarding passengers without carry-on bags first, which makes sense since pausing to find overhead bin space jams up the boarding of everyone behind. … Why is this an issue? Overhead bin space. If you’re the last to board, then the chances increase that the cabin crew will make you gate-check your carry-on bag as the bins get filled by those who boarded ahead of you.

The balance of the article describes various boarding priorities that don’t appear to be maximized for quickest boarding, but rather arranged to reward certain customers. When I don’t have a carry-on bag to shove into the upper compartments, I usually try to be the last person to board — why spend any more time on the airplane than necessary — and if I’m in one of the last groups to board, I preemptively check my overhead bag with the gate agents (it’s free!) and strive to be the last person to board.

Right on, Amy!

A great clapback from Amy Dickinson in her “Ask Amy” syndicated advice column Sunday:

Dear Amy: You should have told “Teen With No Experience” that she is a gem. When the right man comes along, what a gift to him her virginity will be. — Mary in Wisconsin

Dear Mary: A person’s virginity is not a gift to be offered to another person. The “gift” is to own your sexual choices, with joy.

Former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly issues a reminder of what a sociopath his former boss is.

In case you haven’t seen this elsewhere, here, from former President Donald Trump’s longest serving chief of staff, is a statement that confirms what all but the most blinkered cult followers must surely know:

“What can I add that has not already been said? A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family — for all Gold Star families — on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason — in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

“There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.”

Not Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes or a member of “the Squad” or Michael Moore. But John freakin’ Kelly, retired U.S. Marine Corps general, former head of United States Southern Command and former secretary of homeland security who often, to his shame, had Trump’s back.

A splenetic Trump fired back on social media:

John Kelly, by far the dumbest of my military people, just picked up the theme of the radical left’s lying about Gold Star Families and soldiers, in his hatred of me. He was incapable of doing a good job, it was too much for him, and I couldn’t stand the guy, so I fired him like a “dog.” He had no heart or respect for people, so I hit him hard—Made no difference to me. … Nobody loves the military like I do! He's a lowlife with a very small brain and a very big mouth.

How does any Republican who considers himself or herself to be a decent person support such a horrible human being as Donald Trump as their party’s standard-bearer? God help all of you.

Minced Words

Hannah Meisel, state government and politics editor for Capitol News Illinois, joined the panel partway through this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast. Brandon Pope, Austin Berg, host John Williams and I rounded out the group. We talked more than usual about national political issues — the clusterevent among Republicans in the House of Representatives and Donald Trump’s civil trial in New York City. Meisel joined us to talk about the problem — excuse me, the challenge — of the influx of migrants into the city and some bureaucratic changes in Springfield.

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Re: Tweets

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

The new nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• To the organizations that send me news alerts: However interested you think I am in the private life of Taylor Swift, I promise you, it’s less than that. — @JohnLyonTweets

• To further deepen cross cultural understanding, I am hoping that Taylor Swift's next boyfriend is Simon Armitage, the British Poet Laureate. —  @wildethingy

• I love fall. The crisp air, the radiant colors, the bleak realization that everything dies. — @Cpin42

• Sometimes I wish I could nonchalantly lick myself clean in front of everybody, the way my cat does. — @greek_heanen

• Adult life blows. Friends don't even ask to see how fast you can run in your new shoes anymore. — @MisterD78UK

• Since RIP is rest in peace, can we use BIH for Burn In Hell? — @wildethingy

• {To the person sitting next to me at the movie theater]: You here for the movie? — @coolmathgame_

• I’m super glad this box of pasta says “store in a cool dry place” because I usually keep all of my groceries in a bog. — @ErinChack

• From Gingrich to Hastert, Boehner to Ryan to Kevin McCarthy: Republican Speaker of the House has become the Spinal Tap drummer of political jobs. — @JohnFugelsang

Vote here and check the current results in the poll.

Usage note: To me, “tweet” has become a generic term for a short post on social media.

For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Tune of the Week

I received some pushback from Jim Croce fans recently when I chose “Time in a Bottle” as the tune of the week to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Croce’s death in a single-engine plane crash. Not his best! What about “Operator”? “I Got a Name”?

Fair enough. And I expect to get some pushback for choosing “Life During Wartime” to highlight the Talking Heads’ remastered concert film “Stop Making Sense,” now playing in local theaters. The show — recorded live at Hollywood's Pantages Theatre in mid-December 1983 — went from hit to hit, but no number better represents the raw energy and joy that frontman David Byrne brought to the band better than this cut:

If you liked that — and how could you not? — check out the “Burning Down the House” excerpt or “Slippery People” or, heck, go watch the whole thing, like we did last weekend, where audience members at the Music Box Theater were dancing in the aisles. It’s striking how modern Talking Heads’ sound still is.

Some say “Stop Making Sense” is the greatest concert movie ever. I haven’t seen enough concert movies to evaluate that claim, but it’s by far the greatest concert movie I’ve ever seen.

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

My answer to Peter Sagal’s question above: You’re late. That’s on you. Get in line with everyone else.

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