remember you can find more on everything we are covering on the website. the address of that is aljazeera.com. you'll find all the latest comment, analysis video on demand. aljazeera.com. aljazeera.com. use deadly force on the job violence crime including murder is on the rise in some big american cities, like the one i'm in together. 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 scaled back tactics in the face of anti-cop rhetoric. let's look at raw data telling part of the story. chicago saw 161 homicides in the first five months of this year. up 18% from the same period in 2014. it's a more dramatic bump in bament baltimore where murders jumped 33%. m may, 43 people murdered in baltimore, making it the deadliest month in more than 40 years, and in my home town of new york city, 135 murders took place in the first five months of 2015. that is up 20% from a year ago, and is the second straight year of increasing murders in new york city. here is where perspective is necessary, last year there were 333 murders in new york.

down 85% from the more than 2200 murders the city saw in 1990. even so mayor bill de blasio is on the defensive over his move to reduce stop and frisk policing. check out the unsettle headline in an editorial in the next: watch this exchange between jon stewart and the mayor on the daily show. >> you know as well as i do the minute murders go up, political pressure will be immense, get this out of our site. people don't care about the constitution when they don't feel safe. >> the good news in the city is we had a thorough debate and people voted in favor of the constitutional rights while have stronger policing in chicago the spike in murders is putting pressure on

mayor ron emanuel at a time when film-maker spike lee is filming "shyraq", comparing this city to iraq, and it's a possibility of a more violent summer having residents worried, ashar quraishi joins me. >> we are heading into the summer months when shootings and homicides jumps, in 151 days of 2015. there were 161 homicides, an average of one per day, a reason officials say it's time to take draftic measures. a snapshot of how violence can hit the windy city. saturday night, may 23rd, it 12:30am, two males in critical condition after shots are fired into their apartment.

a mother and son shot in their car. that same night, 2:24 aim, one person shot multiple times in the chest. c.p.r. administered. three shootings in less than three hours, all told by the end of the memorial day weekend, a dozen killed. 40 wounded. >> the mayhem day as after ron emanuel used a 2 inauguration street to shine a spotlight. >> when young men and women join gains of self worth, we as a city must do better. when young women and men turn to lives of crime as hope, we as a city must and can do better. when prison is a place to send boys to become young men, we as a city can do better.

>> reporter: cook county senator said... >> we can't sit idly buy and allow this to happen. the blood is on our hands, of innocent children, bystanders, trauma associated with gun violence is on the hands of eelected officials who are not willing to stand up and have the kouj to lead. - courage to lead. >> today we are here to shine a light on terrible darkness of gun violence. >> last week the commissioner introduced a 7-point plan. >> first, parenting workshops. . curfew... >> the center peace, charge shooters with domestic terrorism. why do you think it would work? >> we are?

a state of emergency in certain cities. we have to come up with every available tool in the kit. this is one of them. they shoot babies, grandmothers and innocent people. what do you call them. they are domestic terrorists. they terrorize the community. some legal experts say bringing charges against shooting suspects would be pointless. >> i think it does not fit in with the motion of domestic terrorism. it's not needed. we have the crimes on the books that we need to investigate and put away individuals. >> last july we met tonya birch. she has been searching for the killer of her 19-year-old son deonte smith, and he was gunned down outside a party on the south side. what happened? >> i was told from the time i

passed out the flyers, 150 to 200 people. >> reporter: of all the people information. >> not a one. no one came forward. >> reporter: tonya told us little has changed, a no-snitch code of silence permeates the community. witnesses refused to come forward, the case is unsolved and her pain is raw. >> getting up, he is not here, trying to make it through a day wondering will someone come through and say this is what happened to my son, knowing that he wasn't perfect, but he wasn't a bad child neither. knowing that his case could have been sold if fame kale together. as the weather heats up. chicago are bracing for another season. sni.d the warmer the where,... >> the warmer the weather, the more killing, i'm not friday in anyone else joining the club i'm

in, it's a heartache, you feel you can't get over it. >> august 1st is the shooting anniversary of tania's second of the the homicide clearance rate hovers at 29-30%. many are skeptical. charges, such assist domestic terrorism would do anything to deter crime and point to the fact that before they could prosecute, you have to catch them. they point to a stream of guns. last year, c p.d. recovered 7,000 illegal firearms, and the easy access to gun, apolice, could turp what would have been -- turn what would have been a playground fight into a murder investigation. up next - the ferguson effect. are criminals bolder because police are afraid to make arrests. i'll talk to someone who case the growing antipolice sentiment is to blame. a special ontarget from chicago

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>> we were drugged water boarded, dogs they throw at you the whole book. >> one of the youngest ever held at guantanamo bay >> a guy would go for a few days you'd hear screaming he would come back a destroyed person you can only imagine

what happened to him... >> accused of killing an american soldier at 15... >> i start hearing americans and their screaming and i thought, umm i'm just gonna throw this grenade... >> after 13 years, he's now out on bail an exclusive interview guantanamo's child - omar khadr only on al jazeera america the spike, a theory gaining traction is the so-called ferguson effect. heather mcdonald is a senior fellow at the manhattan institute, and blames the growing crime rate on antipolice sentiment after the shooting death of michael brown in ferguson, missouri last year. i think you probably saw the exchange between mayor bill de blasio and jon stewart on "the daily show." we have been talking a lot about this, that crime is a subject that is about complex combinations of factors. many of which have little to do with how police do their jobs. studies point to the effect of the economy, ageing population and other things. 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, you know, what might be a shooting of somebody? >> sure, that's a good question. there's a lot of series about crime. but i think having been a resident of new york for the last 20 years, it's been, to my - in my experience definitively shown that the explanation for new york's record-breaking crime drop of 80% since the early 90s was policing. the revolutionary idea that the police could stop crime before it happens. because nothing else changed in new york over that period. income equality was not reversed. poverty was not reversed. conservatives out of wed lock child rearing didn't go down, it probably went up. policing changed. and that deterred criminals from getting involved in crime. and now 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 and throwing water bottles and bricks. when police back off, crime goes through the roof. >> let's talk about l.a. the violent crime rate in l.a. is up. in fact, the homicide rate is down. rape is down, robbery - rape is up, robbery is up, aggravated assaults are up, homicides are down, police blame a jump on domestic violence cases. robberies, and a different system used for classifying crimes, again, they are not - this is the year to date, by the way, nobody in - nobody in l.a. is saying this is about an antipolice mentality. >> shootings are up 25%. they had a lot of protests over the shootings in the newton

division in l.a. arrests down 11% division. they may not say that, i can tell us, having talked to cops in l.a. that what they are seeing, again, is just the nonstop rhetoric against them. they are getting involved because of the fear of a cellphone video not capturing the event used against them. >> crime is complicated. i'm not 100% sure. look at the case in north charleston. we are all very glad there was a cellphone video of the event, aren't we? >> sure. that - and that cop was immediately indicted, and removed from the force. >> not immediately, not immediately. he was indicted once they found out there was a video. they didn't do it. the autopsy showed he was shot in the back, i can show you that guy would have been indicted.

i'm in favour of cop cameras, video cameras on cops. i think by and large they'll vindicate cops, because there are enormous lies told about officers. we assume that officers are lying. no one thinks that a civilian would do anything other than speak the gospel truth. the michael brown shooting shows that. that was virtually a hoax on the government still with power to motivate protesters, but the story that michael brown was shot while surrendering was not true. he grabbed officer darren wilson's gun, tried to grab it, assaulted him... >> again, we don't have a disagreement about that sort of thing. i'm trying to determine the connection between whether there are crime increases because cops are scared of doing things, you saw the discussion in new york city. there are people that say crime is up in new york because stop and frisk ended. it's more to do with stop and

frisk than eric garner, right. >> it's part of the same debate. stop and friskss are down because of litigation charging because they were a racist assault on the minority community, there was enormous protests against stop, question and frisk, and mayor bill de blasio ran on the idea that the police from engaged in racist behaviour. >> sure. >> you know, after the eric garner verdict he said this is the product of centuries, racism. the whole thing with the product of centuries, he was accusing his own police of being engaged in racist tactics and agd that he worried about his son at the hands of police. that is bad statistics. the police killed eight people last year, virtually all armed and dangerous. whereabouts hundreds of new yorkers are caring.

>> fear is anecdotal. lots of african-americans told us that they fear the police. most ferns have never been shot by the police, what do you do when there's a fear. we are talking about a fear of the response against the police. i hear what you are saying. what we discover in 2015 is a lot of african-americans have a 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. nobody is talking about markus johnson. if a 6-year-old boy 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 department. this 6-year-old was shot dead in a st. louis park by a stray bullet.

there's 6,000... police. >> to be fair, you are here while we are in chicago covering the story of how many kids are shot by other kids in chicago. it's no a zero-some game. the idea that place might be threatening to african-american's does not excuse the facts that lots are killing those in america and all is abhorrent. >> i would like balance. if you paid attention to the media, you get the impression that the biggest threat facing young black men is the police. the fact is in new york city there's obvious 10 million - sorry, 10,000 young minority males alive today who are - thanks to the policing revolution that brought homicide down from the 1990s levels, and that was thanks to the police. onbalance. i'd like a public discourse that gave credit to the fact that most officers are triing to save

the good people in the community, and they are a force for good in inner city neighbourhoods where other down. >> that sentiment gets a warm welcome on the show. that's why we had you here to make sure we have the public discourse, and the balance is in the discussion. we'll continue to make sure we put that forward. heather, thank you for coming on the show, senior fellow at the manhattan institute. how many americans are killed by police. the truth about who is keeping track. the government doesn't keep an official count. i'll reveal the findings from people that do. a special "ali velshi on target" continues in a moment. >> for 6 months, the road outside the

us embassy in yemen was closed... >> two car bombs exploded this morning... >> three days before the attack it was re-opened without warning. >> they would not have been able to get the car bombs to the front of the embassy. >> did yemeni officials knowingly allow these attacks? >> did you prepare the bomb? >> former al qaeda operative reveals groundbreaking allegations... >> they'd be surprised if the fbi didn't wanna talk to this guy.... >> watch the investigation al qaeda informant only at aljazeera.com

>> this is another significant development... >> we have an exclusive story tonight, and we go live...

those killed by police in america, it may shock you to hear that your government does not keep an official counselled of police shootings, as we have detailed throughout our show, there's a rising tide of violence in big cities across the country that goes beyond police shootings. my last guest made that clear. it's important to never forget the more than 900,000 u.s. law enforcement officers who, as my last guest underscored, risk their lives, their lives protecting the people who life 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 enforcement officers memorial fund, a nonprofit group whose records go back to 1791. the fbi keeps statistics on those kill.

there's no shortage of information on police officers doing the jobs. police? >> it remains impossible to get data on the total number of people who died during police encounters. that's one of many facts to emerge in the aftermath of the deaths of michael brown in ferguson, missouri. eric garner in new york, freddie gray in baltimore, there's no single database with single definitive comprehensive figures. the department of justice compiles data but admits it misses as many as half the amount of homicides caused by police, because police departments are not required to report to the federal government when someone dies in their kust or is shot by police. a recent "wall street journal" analysis found in 105 of the largest police departments in the country, about 45% of killings by officers of the fbi 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 federal bureau of investigation's data. the situation is a growing source of frustration as the nation debates the use of lethal force and the role that race plays in police shootings. debates rely on solid data, telling the whole story. to get the story people that care about the issue are taking matters into their own hands. jacob ward has the story. >> reporter: every weekend journalism students meet here in brian's dining room to crunch data drawn from police reports around the county. bernheart is the favour of fatalencounters.org and is figuring out how many are killed by police each year. there's no agency tracking the

number of people who die. >> okay, so these are the records coming from public records requests in texas. >> the federal government tracks anything that matters, anything. the number of shoes somed. you know. rain fall in death valley. the fact that they weren't collecting this information suggests that it just didn't matter. zeke edwards of the american civil liberties union things the lack of data about police killings is unset bling. >> we need the data to know what the police are doing today, this year, but last year, and the year before. what are the trends, are they shooting more people. are they disproportionately growing. >> reporter: it wasn't supposed to belike this. the death in custody reporting act was passed in 2000 requiring the deaths in custody to be reported. the law had no teeth, and 16

states and the district of participate. >> our knowledge of use of force, officer-involved shooting is patchy, and dependent on departments collecting the data and sharing the data. they don't do that reliability. >> the department of justice says it's only able to identify about half of all whom homicides. the true number pay be as high as 928. brian's organization using police reports, and other research methods positively identified 1,192 lives lost at the hands of police in 2014. estimates. >> i mean, in a perfect world police departments would report it. i don't have faith it would happen. sam is a 25-year-old stamford

graduate creating a website called mapping police violence. analysing data from citizen websites like killed by police. drawing from his background. they have broken down the data by race, gender age and location. and came up with eye-opening conclusions. >> we have learned that what the protests are saying is correct and validated by the data. black folks are 3-times more likely to be killed by police. black folks are likely to be killed if they are unarmed. more black people were unarmed and killed by police than white people, despite the fact that white people are 5-times greater in terms of population. >> his analysis upcovers other disturbing trends. your odds of being killed by police depends on where you loif. if you are black and live in st. louis, you are five times more likely to be killed by police than in new york city. a black person 10 times more

likely to be killed by police in oklahoma than virgin. an african-american is less georgia. a new death in custody reporting act was passed by congress and signed into law by president obama in 2014. experts say it's not enough. you rely on the goodwill of the police departments to be as transparent and accountable, which history shows doesn't seem to come naturally. >> failure to report the death of a prisoner in police custody. >> for now, brian plans to keep his dining room table stacked with bombs of reports. >> most people think human life matters more than what you can be concerned with. for the government to track who to kill or why it's killing them - it's

incomprehensible. that is the show for today, i'm ali velshi in chicago. thank you for joining us. >> previously on hard earned >> i hate walking into the job because i know there's something going to be said. there's something going to be done. i work for a company that is a billion dollar company we doing all the leg work but we haven't seen any of the pay. >> ugh... i need a new job. maybe i should become a nun. do you think they need resumes