Free Republic

CHICAGO (STMW) — Four people were killed and at least 18 others wounded in shootings across Chicago throughout the weekend.

I bring you shocking news, gentle readers. If you take thousands of incarcerated felons and turn them loose on society, and you then allow the federal government and cultural elites to demoralize the police officers charged with keeping these liberated hoodlums in line, you end up with higher crime. Who would have dared imagine it?This is the state of affairs in California, where a succession of imprudent decisions by judges [1], lawmakers [2], and the electorate [3] have combined to throw open the prison gates to swarms of men who in a sane world would have remained locked away...

What does it mean to be springtime in an odd year in America? As the snow begins to melt, the birds chirp and sing; the trees and bushes bud with new growth. The sun reemerges from its long vacation behind the clouds, and the study of economics takes a holiday. True, this last part probably doesn’t apply to everyone. Texans, Oklahomans and Montanans don’t forget everything they ever learned in school, just because it’s time for mayors and city councilmen to seek reelection to their valuable positions at the public trough, but here in the rust belt, where we hold...

Kill Stop and Frisk, attack police for doing their jobs and promote the grievances of criminals… and strangely enough more shootings happen. The murder rate in New York City has spiked an alarming 20% in the first two months of the year, prompting NYPD brass to rethink strategy to curb the deadly trend.Since Jan. 1, 54 murders have been recorded in the city, up nine from the same period a year ago, according to the grim stats released Monday.Shootings have also climbed 20% — with 149 so far in 2015 compared with 126 in the first two months of 2014....

The good thing about a book like Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America is that it's real reportage about murder in the African American ghetto; it's not just narrative from the usual social justice warriors. Author Leovy's angle is that routine murder in African American ghettos is invisible, in the sense that individual murders don't get a write-up in the paper. So she decided to do something about it, The Homicide Report, a blog that documents each and every murder in LA. Each murder, routine as it is, devastates a family, but the cops only arrest a suspect...

The proponents of currently fashionable planning doctrines favouring density promulgate a variety of baseless assertions to support their beliefs. These doctrines, which they group under the label of “Smart Growth”, claim, among other things, that from a health and sustainability perspective, the need to increase population densities is imperative. With regard to health these high-density advocates have seized upon the obesity epidemic as a reason to advocate squeezing the population into high-density. This is based on a supposition that living in higher densities promotes greater physical activity and thus lower levels of obesity. They quote studies that show associations between...

There is an independent site that tracks homicides in Chicago.  There are not affiliated with the police, and they use public sources to determine the number of homicides.  The numbers that they give include justified homicides and homicides by police. The numbers are very similar in 2014 to what they were in 2013.                                        2013   2014 Homicides by shooting      375     388 Woundings by shooting    1810   2231 Total Homicides                455    456 It is interesting to note that ratio of wounded to killed went up form 4.82/1 to 5.75/1 in one year. The site has a lot of great graphics depicting...

Silence isn't something people usually associate with middle school, but twice a day the halls of Visitacion Valley School in San Francisco fall quiet as the sixth, seventh and eighth grade students meditate for fifteen minutes. And school administrators tell NBC News that the violence outside of the school, which is situated in one of San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods, was spilling into the school and affecting the students' demeanor. "The kids see guns on a daily basis," the school's athletic director, Barry O'Driscoll said, adding, "there would be fights here three-to-five times a week."

FULL TITLE: Dallas Pastor Urges Black Megachurches to Fight Sprawling Planned Parenthood Complex With 8 Foot Concrete Wall Stephen Broden, pro-life activist and pastor of the Fair Park Bible Fellowship Church in Dallas, Texas, is urging black megachurches to join him in protesting a sprawling 17,000 square-foot Planned Parenthood abortion center with an 8-foot concrete wall he believes was intentionally placed in their predominantly black neighborhood. "Planned Parenthood has built a wall to shield their clients from the presence of God's prayer warriors who pray to end abortion at one of Texas' largest abortion facilities. This death trap is located...

Apparently smear ads during campaigns can sometimes tell the truth. Compare Republican Joe Lhota’s ad from the 2013 New York City mayoral campaign to the big, fat Drudge header captured below. The article linked reads in part: New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton said Monday that tensions in the city are echoing those in the 1970s — a fear he expressed only days prior to the ambush killings of two police officers.“Who would’ve ever thought déjà vu all over again, that we would be back where we were 40-some-odd years ago,” Bratton said in an interview on NBC’s “Today.”...

The family of a Milwaukee man who was fatally shot by a city police officer say they aren't giving up hope that the officer will be charged. Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm announced Monday that former Officer Christopher Manney, who is white, acted in self-defense when he killed Donte Hamilton, who was black. But later in the day, U.S. Attorney James Santelle announced that the Department of Justice, his office and the FBI will review whether Manney violated federal civil rights laws....

The teenage son of Mayor Rahm Emanuel was the victim of a robbery outside the mayor’s Lakeview home Friday night, a spokesperson from the mayor’s office confirms. Police were called to the 4200 block of North Hermitage at 10:05 p.m. Friday for a report of a robbery on the street where there would normally already be a police presence. Emanuel’s 17-year-old son went out to make a phone call when he was jumped by two men who stole the teen’s cell phone.

Two uniformed NYPD officers were shot dead Saturday afternoon as they sat in their marked police car on a Brooklyn street corner — in what investigators believe was a crazed gunman’s execution-style mission to avenge Eric Garner and Michael Brown. “It’s an execution,” one law enforcement source said of the 3 p.m. shooting of the two officers, whose names were being withheld pending family notification of their deaths. The tragic heroes were working overtime as part of an anti-terrorism drill when they were shot point-blank in their heads by the lone gunman, who approached them on foot from the sidewalk...

(CNSNews.com) – In New York City, 77.56% of the abortions in 2011 were performed on Black and Hispanic babies, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The Abortion Surveillance report published by the CDC, for which the latest abortion numbers are for 2011, show there were 76,251 abortions in New York City that year. For that total, 9,550 abortions were of white babies, which is 12.5% of the total; 35,188 babies were black (46.1% of total); 23,959 were Hispanic (31.4%); and another 7,554 “other” abortions, 9.9%, which includes Asians and Native Americans, as...

Two people were killed and and at least 14 other people were wounded in weekend shootings across the city. The most recent fatal shooting happened Sunday afternoon in the North Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side.

Could Ferguson happen here? Some would say it already did — nearly five decades ago. Days of sometimes violent demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., erupted after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen, was shot dead by a police officer Aug. 9, allegedly in self-defense. At the height of the civil rights movement, the Watts riots were triggered after a young black motorist was pulled over and arrested by a white California Highway Patrolman on Aug. 11, 1965, on suspicion of drunk driving. The struggle to arrest him sparked six days of rioting that claimed the lives of 34 people, injured more...

The Reverend Jesse Jackson is, to the surprise of all thinking people, right about something: “A spark has exploded,” he said, referring to the protests and violence in Ferguson, Mo. “When you look at what sparked riots in the Sixties, it has always been some combination of poverty, which was the fuel, and then some oppressive police tactic. It was the same in Newark, in Chicago, in Detroit, in Los Angeles. It’s symptomatic of a national crisis of urban abandonment and repression, seen in Chicago.” A question for the Reverend Jackson: Who has been running the show in Newark, in...

Sometimes - but not always - news reporters get exactly what they are looking for when covering a story. For one news crew from CBS News affiliate WUSA in Washington, D.C., they got a little more. The news crew's vehicle was burglarized while they were working on a story about a controversial app that alerts people to "sketchy" neighborhoods, WUSA reports. The crew had locked their news van on a street in Petworth in Northwest, D.C. while they were out in the neighborhood conducting interviews. When they returned they found the lock had been popped out of the door of...

A quarter of a century ago, Washington DC had a fearsome reputation for crack abuse and rampant gun violence - it was the "murder capital" of the US. But now, once-blighted neighbourhoods close to the centre of the capital are thriving. When Ruben Castaneda moved to the US capital in 1989 to take up a job with the Washington Post, he was struck by how easy it was to score crack. Days after arriving in the city, he was taken to S Street Northwest by a "strawberry" - a streetwalker who offered sex in return for drugs. "The moment she...

Bel Kaufman, a former New York City schoolteacher whose classic first novel, “Up the Down Staircase” — shot through with despair and hopefulness, violence and levity, all manner of bureaucratic inanity and a blizzard of official memorandums so mind-bendingly illogical as to seem almost Kafkaesque — was hailed as a stunningly accurate portrait of life in a gritty urban school when it was published in 1965, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 103.