EDITOR'S NOTE: Journal & Courier reporters Mikel Livingston and Steven Porter, assisted by data editor Jennifer Christos, spent more than four months reporting and researching this series. They conducted nearly 50 interviews; analyzed more than two dozen U.S. Census databases containing demographic and migration data; reviewed usage data for Section 8 vouchers and local homeless shelters; parsed CHA reports and sociological research studies; and interpreted IRS migration data. In addition, they analyzed a massive crime data set compiled by Lafayette Police Department crime analyst Steven Hawthorne containing details of 165,490 arrests in Tippecanoe County from 1999 through Sept. 20, 2014.
The statistics relating to race and crime in Tippecanoe County may not lie. But they can often obscure the larger truth.
That's the inescapable conclusion of an extensive Journal & Courier investigation into the Great Chicago Myth — the prevalent belief across Greater Lafayette that waves of low-income African-American families displaced from Chicago public housing projects over the last 15 years headed down Interstate 65 to move to Lafayette, bringing with them crime and other social ills.
Such a mass migration never actually happened, an analysis of census and housing data shows.
But official crime statistics do show that the number of African-Americans arrested in Tippecanoe County who previously lived in Cook County, Illinois, has increased in recent years. And overall, blacks are arrested for crimes in Tippecanoe in numbers that are out of proportion to their percentage of the county's total population.
Those facts have made it easier for some to typecast people moving here from Chicago as being prone to criminality, despite cautions from social policy experts, academics and local law enforcement officials that such typecasting is unfair.
"I believe certain people in our community see the Chicagoans here, then they see Chicago people commit a crime; therefore, they just jump to a conclusion, and that's wrong," said Tippecanoe County Prosecutor Pat Harrington. "It doesn't matter where you're from or who you are, you can't stereotype."
Four local police agencies arrested more than 59,500 people in Tippecanoe County between Jan. 1, 1999, and Sept. 20, 2014, according to arrest records released to the Journal & Courier by Lafayette Police Department Crime Analyst Steven Hawthorne.