According to polling for the coming General Election, if you are a Democrat, you view Abortion, Climate Change and the environment as you big issues in deciding who you will vote for. If you are a Republican your issues are Crime, the economy and illegal immigration.
Where it gets really interesting, is if you ask a Democrat if there is a crime problem, the say no. They may say there is a police problem in dealing with crime or a homeless problem.
My personal observation is that there is a huge gang drug problem that is the cause of most of the violent crime and the way to stop that violence is to get the police to arrest and the justice system to try, convict, and put these gang members in jail for a long, long time.
The liberal's I talk to in the Soviet of Washington say it is a societal problem based on institutional racism. Society has failed to educate, find good paying jobs, and has used the police as a tool to place oppressed people of color into jails. They are fighting to reduce the size of the police force and keep them from arresting as many people as possible. Then they want those arrested to not have to post bail, even for violent felony charges. They want to decriminalize most drug crimes. They want people charged with crimes to be diverted into community court programs that don't require jail time and finally they want to close as many jails as possible and pardon or release as many from “correction centers” as possible.
What is happening in Chicago is not unique. It can be found in most large Democratic Party controlled cities. Most large cities are at a breaking point, where business leaders have given up on trying to get liberal democratic politicians to at least provide a basic level of law and order. That is why large businesses are leaving Chicago.
Oh, and tax policy is another factor. Why should a business pay high taxes and its executives pay high “income” or “stock transaction” taxes, when the money is not even used to provide public safety?
Like all pendulums, this one will swing back to over-correct the lawlessness. When that happens the correction centers will become prisons, the gangs will be dealt with harshly and brutally, the mentally ill homeless will be institutionalized, the addicted homeless will be jailed to dry out, and the rest of the homeless will be treated as vagrants and made to leave or at least hide in areas they aren't seen.
That won't be “better” but it will be a “correction from the situation now.
“...the gangs will be dealt with harshly and brutally, the mentally ill homeless will be institutionalized, the addicted homeless will be jailed to dry out, and the rest of the homeless will be treated as vagrants...”
Of course he says this like it’s extremism.
I would say harsh and punitive measures to terrorize the inevitable human garbage are always better. Best would be straight up extermination, as was the norm in Europe for many centuries. Much of any population only obeys the laws of society if they are afraid of the consequences of breaking the law. Harsh, relentless punitiveness is an absolute necessity to protect the normal people. The fixation with the destructive myth that ‘all life is sacred’pushed by all religions is just psychological unilateral disarmament. The openly transgressive need to be terrorized and often killed as an example to their like. Also it provides some satisfaction to the normal people that obey the smelly little rules of society and endure the normal dogshit of human life that there is some sort of order in their universe. The opposite is the Hobbesian universe the so called compassionate people are creating.