you think at aljazeera.com/americatonight. talk to us on twitter or facebook and come back. we'll have more of "america tonight" tomorrow. tonight" tomorrow. >> i'm ali velshi. "on target" tonight. cops guns and violence in america. fear of a new crime wave that some call the ferguson effect. plus the troubling truth about who's not keeping track when police use deadly force on the job. violent crime including murder is on the rise in some big american cities like the one i'm in tonight chicago. coming up we'll look at how leaders here are responding to the problem including a proposal to charge shooters with domestic terrorism.

and later i'll debate someone who says higher crime rates are partly the result of a so-called ferguson effect where police departments scale back aggressive tactics in the face of anti-cop rhetoric. but first let's look at some raw data that tells part of the story. chicago has seen 161 homicides in the first 75 months of the year. that is up 18% from the same period in 2014. it is a far more dramatic jump in baltimore where murders have jumped 43% this year. in may alone 43 people were murdered in baltimore making it the deadly eggs month deadliest month in 2015. and in new york city, the second straight year of increasing murders in new york city. here is where some perspective is necessary last year there

were 333 murders in new york and that is down 85% from the more than 2200 murders the city saw in 1990. even so, mayor bill deblasio is on the defensive over his move to reduce so-called stop and frisk policing. listen to this. how many must die before the mayor brings back stop and frisk? and the john daly show. >> you know the minute murder go murders go up, get this out of our sight. people don't care about the constitution when they think it's not safe. >> in this city we had a real thorough debate and people did vote in favor of constitutional debate and having strong policing. there is no die cot dichotomy here.

>> it comes at a time when film maker spike lee is shooting a movie called chiraq. ash-har quraishi joins me with more. ash-har. >> ali we are heading into the months when the suicides and shootings tend to 800 number. 2015 there were 161 time to take drastic measures. just a snapshot of how fast and furious violence can hit the windy city. >> my baby, my baby. >> saturday night may 23rd, 2012:30 a.m., two males are left

in critical condition. one hour later 1:28 a.m. a mother and son shot in their car. that same night 2:24 a.m. one person shot multiple times in the chest cpr administered but the victim is unresponsive. three shootings in less than two hours. all told by the end of memorial day weekend a dozen killed and over 40 wounded in shootings concentrated in chicago's troubled south and west side. >> i rahm emanuel. >> the mayhem erupted just days after rahm emanuel's emanuel's inaugural speech. >> when young men and women turn to life of crime we as a city must and can do better. when prison is a place we send

young boys to become men we as a city can do better. >> the elected leadership starting with the mayor who should be doing better. >> we can't sit idly by as elected officials and allow this to happen. the blood is on our hands. the blood of innocent children, the blood of grandmothers. the blood of innocent bystanders the trauma that's associated with this gun violence is on the hands of elected officials who are not willing to stand up and have the courage to lead. >> today we are here to shine a light on the terrible gun violence of chicago. >> the governor announced a seven point plan. >> parenting workshops strict enforcement of curfew. three an expansion of drug courts. >> controversial center piece charge shooters with domestic

terrorism. >> why would you think that would work? >> we are in a state of emergency in certain communities of chicago. we have to col come up with every available tool in the tool kit. they shoot babies they shoot grand moghtsdz andgrandmothers and they shoot innocent people. what do you call them? they terrorize the community. >> bringing domestic terrorism where charges against shooters would be pointless. >> it is not the historic notion of terrorism but we have all the crimes on the books in order to investigate and put away individuals who create this mayhem. >> a lot of people say he was an old soul. >> last year we met up with tanya bimp. shebirch. her son was shot down on

chicago's south side. >> when i was passing out my flier i was told at least 150 to 200 saw it. >> and no one came forward? >> not a one no one came forward. >> tanya told me, nothing has changed, a sense of incommunication, a no-snitch mentality. >> trying to make it through a day, thinking about i wonder is someone going to come forward saying this is what happened to my son? he wasn't perfect but he wasn't a bad child neither. knowing that his case could be solved if people would come together and say what happened. >> and as the heat starts, chicago residents are bracing or the another summer season. >> i'm not looking forward to

any parents joining this club that i'm in since i lost my son. it is heartbreaking seeing you can't get over it. >> august marks the sixth anniversary of the shooting of tanya birch's son. the clear rate for homicides many are skeptical that any further charges would do anything to deter crime. they pointed to a civilian fact that before can you prosecute these perpetrators you have to catch them. police point to a steady stream of guns as being the core problem. 7,000 illegal firearms, and that could turn a playground fight into a murder investigation. ali. >> ash-har quraishi here in chicago with me, thanks ash-har. next the ferguson effect, are criminals becoming bolder because police are atrade to

make arrest? 18th police sentiment to blame? special segment from chicago continues in just two minutes. tblpminutes. minutes.

>> we've been talking about the surge in crime in many big cities in america. the question is what is causing the spike. one theory gaining traction is the so-called ferguson effect. heather, with the manhattan institute, she blames the growing crime rates on antipolice sentiment after the shooting of michael brown last year. i think you saw the exchange between mayor glais deblasio and jon stewart on the daly show. complex factors many of which have little to do with how police do their jobs. studies have pointed to the effects of the economy the aging population, lots of other

things. why -- what makes you comfortable putting a lot of that aside and saying this is to do with cops being afraid to arrest and get involved in what might end up being a shooting of somebody? >> sure that's a good question ali and certainly there's a lot of theories about crime. but i think having been a resident of new york for the last 20 years it's been in my experience dwiflt twix shown that the explanation for new york's record crime drop, is policing, the aspect of it can be changed poverty wasn't reversed, conservatives root cause out of wedlock child-rearing probably didn't go down, it went up but policing changed. that deterred criminals from getting involved in crime.

what we are seeing especially in baltimore which is a shining example of this, when arrests are down over 50% the police are really scared to engage, every time they go out to make a lawful arrest they are surrounded by crowds, jeering at them sometimes throwing water bottles and bricks at them, when this is deterred, crimes go through roof. >> the violent crime rate in l.a. is up but in fact the homicide rate is down. rape is up, robbery is up, aggravated assaults are up, homicide is down. police are blaming a jump on domestic violence cases a different system to classify crimes. again they are not -- this is year-to-date by the way in l.a. no one in l.a. is saying this is about an antipolice mentality. >> yes shootings are up 20%.

they had a lot of protest over the shooting of ezel ford, in the newton division of l.a., they may not be saying that but i can tell you having talked to cops in l.a. what they are saying is just the nonstop rhetoric against them and the reluctance to get involved because of the fear of a cell phone video that would not capture the full event being used against them. but there are -- crime is very complicated. >> i'm not 100% sure -- you look at the case in north charleston, right? we're very glad there was a cell phone video of that event. >> absolutely. >> aren't we? >> oh sure. and that cop was immediately indicted and removed from the force. that was a tragic shooting. >> not immediately he was indicted after it was found there was a video.

>> the autopsy found he was shot in the back. i'm in favor cop cameras. i'm in favor video cameras on cops because i think by and large they will vindicate cops because there are enormous lies that are told by officers. we all assume officers lying no one thinks a civilian would only speak the gospel truth but the michael brown shooting certainly disaffects that, while surrendering, michael brown was not true, he had grabbed officer darren wilson's gun tried to grab it assaulted him -- >> again we don't have any disagreement about that sort of thing. i'm just trying to determine the connection between whether there are crime increases because cops are scared of doing things. again, you saw the discussion that's going on in new york city. there are people say there are

crimes up in new york city because stop and frisk has ended. it's got to do more with stop and frisk rather than eric garner right? >> that could be part of the same debate. stop and frisks were down because cops saying they were a minority assault on the community there was enormous protest against stop and frisk and mayor deblasio ran on the idea that the police were engaged had racist behavior. >> sure. >> you know after the eric garner verdict he says this is product of centuries of racism. he was accusing his own police of being engaged in racist tactics and alleged that his son, he worried about his son every day at the hands of the police. that is simply bad statistics. the police killed eight people last year. virtually all of them armed and dangerous.

whereas hundreds of new yorkers are saving -- >> fear is anecdotal lots of african americans have told us they fear the police. most african americans we've spoken to have never been shot by the police but what do you do when there is that real fear? we're talking about a fear of the response against police and i hear what you're saying. but what we're discovering in 2015 is a lot of african americans have a real fear of police. >> it doesn't help when the media amplify a handful of questionable and sometimes outrageous police shootings. that do not represent the norm. and nobody is talking about marcus johnson a six-year-old boy who was killed in st. louis on march 11th, the same day that protesters were converging on the ferguson police department demanding the resignation of the entire department. this six-year-old boy was shot dead in a st. louis park by a

stray bullet. there's 6,000 -- over6,000 blacks who are killed every year and not killed by the police . >> to be fair you're here while we're actually in chicago covering the story of how many kids get shot by other kids in chicago. so i don't think it's a zero sum game. the idea that police might actually be threatening to african americans the thing that people are killing people in america all of it is abhorrent. >> if you paid attention to the media you'd get the impression the that the biggest threat against the people is the police. there are 10,000 young minority males who are alive today who thanks to the policing revolution that brought the homicide rate down from the early 1990s levels. that's thanks to police. on balance on balance i'd like a public discourse that gave credit to the fact that most

officers are trying to save the good people in the community. >> yep. >> and they are a force for good in inner city neighborhoods where other social controls have broken down. >> that sentiment will get a warm welcome on our show and that is exactly why we've had you here, to make sure with we've got that public discourse and that balance is in our discussion and we'll make sure we put that forward. heather mcdonald is a senior fellow. incredibly the government don't keep an official count but i'll reveal the startling findings. a special ali toorg ali velshi "on target" continues. in just a moment. in just a moment.

>> welcome back to this special edition of ali velshi "on target." from chicago. it may shock you to hear that your government does not keep an official comprehensive count of shootings. as we have detailed throughout our show tonight there is a rising tide of violence in big cities across the country that goes well beyond police shootings. my last guest made that clear. don't forget the more than 900 900,000 police officers who risk their lives protecting the people who live in america's cities. we cannot do without them. last year, 117 police and other officers died in the line of duty. that's according to the national law enforcements officers memorial fund.

that is a nonprofit fund whose records go back to 1791. now, the fbi also keeps thorough statistics on officers killed during felonies and by accident. in other words there's no shortage of information on police officers who die on the job. but how many americans are actually killed by police? it remains impossible to get complete data on the number of people who died during police encounters that. that's one of the uncomfortable truths that emerged after the shooting ever michael brown in ferguson, freddy gray in baltimore, the federal government admits it misses half of the homicides committed by police because the police are not required to report to the federal government when someone dies in their custody or is shot by police. a recent wall street journal

investigation, 45% of shootings of civilians by police officers went unreported between 2007 and 2012. one reason for that, records from the three large states, florida, new york and the one i'm in illinois are not in the fbi's data. the situation has become a growing source of frustration as the nation debates the use of lethal force and the role that race plays in police shootings. informed debates rely on solid data that terms whole story and is not just a shot in the dark. to get that full story people who care about this issue are taking matters into their own hands. jake ward has the story. >> every weekend journal students meet here to crunch data to crump numbers.

i brian berg is using old school journalism to figure out how many people are killed by police each year in this country. that's because there's no government agency that comprehensively tracks the number of people who die in police custody. >> okay so these are all the records that scale from our public records request in texas. the federal government tracks anything that matters. anything. the number of shoes sold, you know rainfall in death feal. thevalley. the fact that they weren't collecting this information suggests it just didn't matter. >> zeke edwards thinks this is unsettling. >> we need this data not only to know what are the police doing today in this year but what did they do last year and what did they do the year before? are they shooting more people, are they disproportionately african american, are those rates growing? >> it wasn't supposed to be like

this. back in 2000 congress passed the death in custody reporting act which requires authorities to report any death while in custody. but the be legislation had no teeth. >> our use of shootings is very patchy and it's dependent on departments collecting that data and sharing those data and they don't do that necessarily reliably. >> the department of justice believes the true number of people killed by police may be as high as 928. but brian berghart's fatal encounters organization which use he police reports media accounts and other research methods has positively identified 1192 lives lost at the hands of police, in 2013,

28% higher than official estimates. >> in a perfect world police agencies would be reporting this. i don't have faith that would happen. >> sam is a university graduate who has created a website called mapping police violence. he has analyzed the data from the website and other websites like killed by police. drawn from his analysis, he has broken down their data by race gender age and location and has come up with some eye opening conclusions. >> what we have learned is what they are saying is validated by the data. black folks are three times more likely to be killed by police than white folks and more likely to be killed if they are unarmed, in fact more black folks wesh were killed by police than white folks unarmed killed by police. he found that your odds of

being killed by police depend on where you live. if you are black and live in st. louis you are five times more likely to be killed by police than if you live in new york city. a black person is ten times more likely to be killed in oklahoma than virginia and despite georgia having nearly twice as many african americans than georgia, an african american is less likely to be killed in georgia. a new death in custody act was signed into law by president obama in 2014 but many experts say it's not enough. >> the reason why it's insufficient it's not reliability. top as transport as possible doesn't seem to come naturally. >> for now brian berghart plans to keep his dining room table stacked with police reports. >> most people think human life

matters more than just about anything you could be concerned with. and for our government not to care enough to track who it's killing and why it's killing them is incomprehensible. >> jacob ward, al jazeera, san francisco. >> be sure to join me on ali velshi "on target." eight people killed, take a very close look at this picture. you didn't see this all over the place. ask yourself this question: how much worse could it have been, you see those are oil tankers sitting just yards from where that amtrak train wound up. oil tankers that routinely travel through residential neighborhoods filled with hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting citizens. >> a100 car trains of crude oil unit strains to keep this secret wok like having elephants tip through tulips. this is absurd.

>> residents of american cities are asking what if. that is tomorrow night 10:30 right here on ali velshi "on target." that's our show tonight. i'm ali velshi. in chicago. thanks for joining us. ng us. a prescription for trouble. children in foster care given psychiatric drugs at an alarming rate. >> on on two at first. then i went to a group home and they added more and more. >> what the state of california is doing to put a stop to the practice secret communications. the federal bureau of investigation warns congress about the rise of extremists on the dark web. >> the ability to know what they ar