By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, November 29, 2015
A Chicago police officer has been charged with
first-degree murder in the shooting death of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager
who was wielding a knife and who had PCP in his system. Chicago authorities
apparently went to some trouble to sweep the case under the rug: A $5 million
settlement to his family already had been approved; the officer wasn’t charged
until nearly a year after the fact; a police-camera video of the shooting was
suppressed for more than a year, until an FOIA lawsuit forced its release.
Chicago is a city under impeccably progressive
governance. Its mayor is Rahm Emanuel, former right hand to President Barack
Obama. So in response to the shooting of a young black hooligan by a police
officer in one of the nation’s most corrupt cities and the dodgy handling of
that by the city’s Democratic mayor, we have a thousand protesters harassing
shoppers and blocking retailers’ entrances down on the Magnificent Mile,
wherein is found Neiman Marcus and Cartier.
It takes a special kind of nose to detect the connection
between Cartier shoppers, police shootings of young black criminals elsewhere
in Chicago, and the municipal maladministration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, but such
a nose has the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who can sniff out a payday with the
reliability of a French hog hunting truffles. Our friends in the
community-organizing racket — whether from Chicago’s South Side or the campus
of Yale — are a remarkably consistent bunch: Whatever the real or perceived
social problem, the answer is the same: Write a very large check that
eventually will make its way into the pockets of such people and organizations
as those that organize these protests.
Protesters are chanting “16 shots,” in reference to the
number of police bullets that struck McDonald. But the criminal question as
regards Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, who is charged in the shooting,
isn’t whether he was justified in shooting the young man 16 times, but whether
he was justified in shooting him once. Lethal force is lethal force, and the
standard practice in most police departments is to aim for the target’s center
mass and keep firing. Chicago police commonly carry the Glock 17 pistol, which
has a magazine capacity of 19 rounds. If the first shot was justified, then 16
shots were justified.
It is much more difficult to think of a justification for
the way in which the Emanuel administration has handled the episode. In the
words of the Reverend Jackson, authorities “sat on the tape for more than a
year, buried the killing in an unending investigation, gave the officer a pass,
and got through the elections.” Rahm Emanuel, who is incompetent, faced a
strange situation in his election this time around: an unprecedented mayoral
runoff that found him “limping” to eventual victory. Big-city Democratic
coalitions are a tricky thing: It is difficult to win in a place such as
Chicago or Philadelphia without the black vote, but it also is difficult to win
without the support of the city-workers’ unions and other public-sector
special-interest groups — the police prominent among them — who provide much of
the financial firepower and ground-game foot soldiers that a successful
campaign needs. In the post-Ferguson age, those groups often see themselves as
something other than natural allies.
This is where progressive urban governance leads: The
combination of over-promising and under-delivering, corruption, institutional
ineffectiveness, and clientelist politics ruptures the relationship between
so-called public servants and the public they purport to serve. Chicago isn’t
Detroit or Cleveland: It isn’t some lost city that has in effect been left to
weed over. But employing the same kinds of institutional approaches with the
same values and the same assumptions will produce — surprise — the same
results. The Jesse Jacksons of the world instinctively respond by threatening
to immiserate the functional parts of Chicago. But Jackson et al. shouldn’t be
leading a march on the high-end retail district — they should be leading a
march on the Democratic-party headquarters, which is the actual locus of malice
in this sorry affair.
Republicans for the moment are pleased to be a
non-factor. But that eventually is going to have to change. There is no city in
the United States larger than San Diego with a Republican mayor. A Republican
and a pseudo-Republican were, for a time, able to thrive politically in New
York owing to the unusual character of Rudy Giuliani and the fact that the
millionaire residents of an economically resurgent Manhattan wanted to be able
to travel from a Broadway theater to a Soho restaurant without passing through
Beirut. (New Yorkers, alas, have short memories, and thus have turned the city
over to Bill de Blasio, with predictable results.) Conservatives as such are
not players in the real-world politics of our largest cities: New York, Los
Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia. They are a relatively minor
factor in some large metropolitan aggregates such as greater Houston and the
DFW metroplex, but as for the cities themselves — not really. Consider that
even in conservative Texas, the big urban political fight this season was
whether Houston’s crusading lesbian mayor could subpoena church sermons as part
of her campaign to pass a city law guaranteeing certain toilet privileges to
men who pretend to be women. That bespeaks a certain battiness, to be sure, but
it also suggests an operative political model that should not be that hard to
beat: Houston, which is largely working-class and overwhelmingly non-white,
rejected that ordinance by a wide margin.
Non-whites, lower-income workers, and those whose
economic condition has necessitated welfare dependency at some time do not much
trust Republicans, because they believe that Republicans do not have their
interests are heart. Republicans have over the years given them some reason to
believe that, too. But it shouldn’t be too hard to look at a place such as
Chicago and ask: “Does Rahm Emanuel really act in your interest?” The answer is
obviously not. Crime, corruption, dysfunctional schools, unsatisfactory public
services from transit to sanitation: There’s a great deal of fertile ground for
Republicans and conservatives there. Rudy Giuliani won in New York on a single
issue — crime — and delivered on it. On a smaller scale, Rick Baker had a very
good run as mayor of St. Petersburg, and won 90 percent of the vote in the
city’s low-income black precincts on his second go-round.
In the long run, conservatives need the cities. And the
cities need conservatives right now.
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