Posted on 08/13/2018 8:04:53 AM PDT by yesthatjallen
We await the newspaper reports and shootings statistics with a sense of foreboding. Just how many young men of color were slaughtered on the streets of America’s “Second City” over the past weekend?
If we didn’t have such empathy for the victims and families they leave behind, there would be Chicago punchlines galore: Progressive mayor who has made no secret of his disdain for aggressive and proactive policing and a municipality with some of the strictest gun laws in the nation succumbs to gun violence as its “new norm.”
Chicago has a population of just over 2.7 million. Last year it suffered a staggering 650 murders, with the “good news” being that those sobering numbers were a 16 percent reduction from 2016. New York City, three times the size of Chicago with some 8.5 million inhabitants, suffered fewer than 300 and saw crime plunge to levels unseen since the 1950s.
And just why is that? If Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s mayor, is uber-progressive, well, New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio spent part of his mid-twenties as an ardent supporter of Nicaragua’s Marxist revolutionaries — and he has endured some high-profile dustups with his own police department following cop assassinations and an impolitic warning he gave to his biracial son about the NYPD’s predatory cops.
So why, then, is New York City viewed as a shining example of the synergy between the police department and those it is sworn to protect and serve, held up as one of the safest large cities in the world, while Chicago resembles a city under siege — more perilous for young men of color than serving in a war zone like Afghanistan?
Even the president’s lawyer and the former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, weighed in on Twitter, trolling Emanuel and a former president before this past weekend’s statistics had been recorded: “17 shootings 2 dead in Chicago so far this weekend. Hopefully that’s it. Hopefully Democrats will join in demanding Mayor Emanuel’s resignation. Obama’s [sic] has sure turned his back on his city. By the way where is he living? Does he have anything to say?”
No big-city politician had a larger effect on crime reduction during the 1990s than Giuliani. His trolling of Emanuel goes beyond pettiness; it highlights the deleterious effect liberal policies can have on public safety.
But one can argue that New York City is led by a progressive. Yes, but he replaced two essentially Republican mayors in Giuliani and “independent” Michael Bloomberg. The latter embraced Giuliani’s convictions by toning down but continuing to ascribe to the “broken windows” construct, focused on disorder and quality-of-life crimes that often lead to a proliferation of serious crime. The “toning down” came in the form of a more sustained community-outreach program. This coupling didn’t just sustain the continued drastic reduction in crime; it fostered a cooperative relationship with the inner-city community by forging an alliance on crime-reduction efforts.
De Blasio famously refused to appeal a foolhardy decision by federal judge and activist jurist Shira A. Scheindlin, who viewed the policing methodology of “stop, question and frisk” as a “policy of indirect racial profiling.” When she ruled it unconstitutional, the city prepared to fight the ruling, but then de Blasio was elected. Scheindlin, however, later was found by an appeals panel to have “compromised the appearance of impartiality surrounding [the] litigation.”
Less than five years later, it may be premature to counter the argument of the sustaining of declining crime statistics. In fact, what may ultimately plague a city like Chicago is less the lack of New York City-style police tactics. (And, lest I forget, my arrival in New York as a newly-badged FBI special agent in 1991 was met with the prior year’s mind-boggling 2,245 homicides.)
No, the stubborn relationship Chicago has with the coroner’s office ultimately may be related to the fact that it has been led by Democrats since 1931 and to the “Ferguson Effect.”
Following the police shooting of an unarmed African American teenager in Ferguson, Mo., in the summer of 2014, violence erupted in a number of American cities. Coupled with revenge-assassinations of police in New York City, Dallas and Baton Rouge, La., and the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement, then-FBI Director James Comey appeared at the University of Chicago Law School on Oct. 23, 2015, and introduced the idea of the “Ferguson Effect.”
It’s a concept not based on empirical data nor rooted in statistical analysis. It’s anecdotal. And Comey received flak for it — even from his boss, President Obama. The theorem is predicated on the notion that uber-scrutiny of police after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson precipitated an emboldening of criminals and reluctance by police to confront them. The corollary to the “Ferguson Effect” is the “Viral Video Effect,” posited as an explanation for rising crime and less proactive policing – essentially, the fear of having your every movement or encounter videotaped and uploaded for slow-motion, stop-action dissection of your real-time judgments.
Some may argue that what really is at the root of Chicago’s ills is more complex. Garry McCarthy, the 25-year NYPD veteran and Chicago Police superintendent fired by Emanuel in December 2015 following another high-profile police shooting of an unarmed black male, attributes Chicago’s difficulty in reaching New York City’s level of success to “the city’s historically segregated neighborhoods, a longstanding culture of hostility between law enforcement and minority communities, and the absence of strict mandatory jail sentences for illegal gun possession.”
McCarthy may be accurate in identifying social factors as synonymous with Chicago as deep-dish pizza and flying the “W” after a Cubs victory. But we cannot discount the idea that proactive policing has become anathema in cities led by Democrats in 2018 America. Cops are fallible human beings and they understand when politicians don’t have their backs. It’s not that they’re not doing their jobs — it’s that they’re not going the extra mile and being proactive, which engenders more voluntary, subjective encounters with the populace that can always go sideways.
The “Ferguson Effect” must be considered in the assessment of just why lawlessness in Chicago appears to have reached pandemic levels.
I have this image of him considering running for mayor and he says to to himself, 'I'm a liberal progressive Democrat and Chicago is a Democratic city.
All I have to do is run the city like a progressive liberal Democrat with progressive liberal Democrat policies and I'll be a hero.
How difficult can it be?'
I’m pleased that Fergusen is election the protesters in the Michael Brown event. Won’t be long until they are like Baltimore where cops won’t patrol and the streets will become like the S side of Chicago.
Not just that. The cops are unable to stop all crime, so that is not the full explanation.
The murders are done by street savages who have no respect for life. The politicians have allowed violent criminals to keep their guns even as they have taken guns from non-violent individuals.
And it got that bad because Rahm listened to the advice from progressive liberal Democrats who told him the way to stop crime is to stop treating criminals as criminals.
No. It’s because they have come to the point where they realize they cannot serve two masters: social justice vs law & order.
Don’t expect law enforcement to help you when you need help, only to be accused of racism and needlessly picking on people. Cops will retreat, and rightfully so.
Bad guys will not be rounded up, if the citizens refuse to identify them. The bad guys will continue to RULE over them. There is no exception to THIS rule, btw.
I would ensure every willing citizen of Chicago to be trained and armed.
And this problem will solve itself in about 6 months.
RE: Is the ‘Ferguson Effect’ to blame for the carnage in Chicago?
If you want to look at cause and effect -— ask the question, what was the murder rate in Chicago BEFORE Ferguson?
What the 2nd city needs is a CPD made up of 10,000 Sgt Voights with no oversight committees to answer to.
#Stayfetal
For sure! SJWs, media, and demonrats are on the side of the thugs...they enable them...
Think of the results. If officials in Chicago did decide to go the law and order route, the numbers of riots, lootings and shootings would be 100 times worse than Ferguson. Given that Chicago is 100 times bigger than Ferguson.
Officials are right to ignore the mass murders ongoing every weekend in Obammie-land. After all, its just blacks killing blacks. In no-go zones set apart for that activity.
You could have 50,000 ‘helpers’ if there were a bounty on drug dealers & other known trouble makers with NO QUESTIONS asked.
Thousands dead in Chicago with thousands more wounded due to democrat policies.
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