Cite as: 527 U. S. 41 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
nated areas." Id., at 68a-69a. The city, however, does not release the locations of these "designated areas" to the public.5
II
During the three years of its enforcement,6 the police issued over 89,000 dispersal orders and arrested over 42,000 people for violating the ordinance.7 In the ensuing enforcement proceedings, 2 trial judges upheld the constitutionality of the ordinance, but 11 others ruled that it was invalid.8 In respondent Youkhana's case, the trial judge held that the "ordinance fails to notify individuals what conduct
5 Tr. of Oral Arg. 22-23.
6 The city began enforcing the ordinance on the effective date of the general order in August 1992 and stopped enforcing it in December 1995, when it was held invalid in Chicago v. Youkhana, 277 Ill. App. 3d 101, 660 N. E. 2d 34 (1995). Tr. of Oral Arg. 43.
7 Brief for Petitioner 16. There were 5,251 arrests under the ordinance in 1993, 15,660 in 1994, and 22,056 in 1995. City of Chicago, R. Daley & T. Hillard, Gang and Narcotic Related Violent Crime: 1993-1997, p. 7 (June 1998).
The city believes that the ordinance resulted in a significant decline in gang-related homicides. It notes that in 1995, the last year the ordinance was enforced, the gang-related homicide rate fell by 26%. In 1996, after the ordinance had been held invalid, the gang-related homicide rate rose 11%. Pet. for Cert. 9, n. 5. However, gang-related homicides fell by 19% in 1997, over a year after the suspension of the ordinance. Daley & Hil-lard, at 5. Given the myriad factors that influence levels of violence, it is difficult to evaluate the probative value of this statistical evidence, or to reach any firm conclusion about the ordinance's efficacy. Cf. Harcourt, Reflecting on the Subject: A Critique of the Social Influence Conception of Deterrence, the Broken Windows Theory, and Order-Maintenance Policing New York Style, 97 Mich. L. Rev. 291, 296 (1998) (describing the "hotly contested debate raging among . . . experts over the causes of the decline in crime in New York City and nationally").
8 See Poulos, Chicago's Ban on Gang Loitering: Making Sense of Vagueness and Overbreadth in Loitering Laws, 83 Calif. L. Rev. 379, 384, n. 26 (1995).
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