National Review Online
Wednesday, September 07, 2016
Thirteen people were shot to death in Chicago over Labor
Day weekend, bringing the city’s gun-homicide total to 512 since the beginning
of the year. Already, the city has exceeded last year’s gun-homicide total
(491), and it is on pace to see its deadliest year since 1998 (704 dead).
Meanwhile, August was the city’s deadliest month since June 1996; 90 people
were gunned down — and another 382 shot non-fatally, a rate of one shooting
every 95 minutes. With the violence that generally has been confined to the
gang-ridden South and West Sides of the city reaching the central business
district, it is not an exaggeration to say that Chicago is experiencing a
crisis of law and order. And it is a crisis that is almost entirely
self-inflicted.
Chicago is perhaps the most obvious example to date of
the “Ferguson Effect,” the previously mocked hypothesis that, in the wake of
the hostility toward law enforcement that sprang up following events in
Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, police in minority neighborhoods have backed off
interacting with residents when not absolutely necessary. Last year saw
homicide rates spike in cities with aggressive anti-police movements — St.
Louis, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Chicago, etc. — and even Ferguson Effect–skeptics
such as Richard Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri–St. Louis were forced
to change their minds. Rosenfeld has declared that the Ferguson Effect is “the
only explanation that gets the timing right.” In October 2015, even Chicago
mayor Rahm Emanuel said that police in his city were going “fetal.”
But Emanuel and the rest of Chicago’s left-wing city
government have only compounded the problem. Public anger over the hideous 2014
shooting death of Laquan McDonald by Chicago Police officer Jason Van Dyke —
who is now facing first-degree murder charges — and the subsequent mishandling
of the shooting by the police department led Emanuel to establish the “Police
Accountability Task Force” last year. Preventing shootings like McDonald’s
should be a priority of any department. But the Task Force, filled with police
critics, inevitably declared this spring that the Chicago Police Department is
a cesspool of “racism,” and suggested that Chicago’s record of police shootings
gives “validity to the widely held belief that the police have no regard for
the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.” The body recommended a
host of accountability measures, some of which are potentially promising
(expanding the force’s body-cam program), but several of which are predictably
ludicrous (a “Deputy Chief of Diversity and Inclusion” in the police force, and
a “Reconciliation Process” in which the police superintendent would “publicly
acknowledge CPD’s history of racial disparity and discrimination”). Emanuel has
taken up these suggestions with alacrity.
That is not the city’s only sop to left-wing activists,
though. In March 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union charged that the
Chicago Police Department’s investigatory-stop policy was racist, since the
percentage of blacks being stopped was significantly higher than the percentage
of Chicagoans who are black (never mind that the relevant standard is the rate
at which blacks commit crime). By autumn, the city had struck an agreement to
allow the ACLU to review all
investigatory stops beginning January 1. In the first quarter of 2016, stops
decreased by almost 90 percent. The result is not just a markedly diminished
police presence, but a loss of much of the intelligence-gathering that is
regularly used to solve crimes.
The consequence of these “reforms” has been to make life
more dangerous for exactly the people the ACLU, Black Lives Matter, and similar
groups want to protect. It’s not police targeting young black men; it’s other
young black men, generally killing on behalf of gangs, who become more
aggressive when law enforcement retreats. As a local explained to the BBC:
“It’s every man for himself. You better get you a motherf***ing gun before you
get your a** shot.” Is this really preferable to an active police presence?
Chicago’s notoriously high crime rates are the result of
decades of municipal mismanagement and social breakdown, which will likely take
decades to turn around. But there is no excuse for Rahm Emanuel & Co.’s
exacerbating these problems by basing policy on knee-jerk outrage and
unsubstantiated accusations of systematic racism. Chicago’s leaders seem to be
more interested in accommodating left-wing interest groups than in saving
lives.
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