By Jeffrey Blehar
Wednesday,
February 14, 2024
Chicago
hasn’t been doing too well recently — if by “recently” we mean “roughly since
the Holocene” — to the point where it sometimes seems pointless as a Chicagoan
to shovel even more dirt (or spent shell-casings, which are more easily found
around here) into the open grave. Taxes, violent crime, the murder rate, the
Bears, that overrated TV show The Bear — it’s a city that
can’t catch a break primarily because it stubbornly refuses to allow itself
one.
And
then of course things got even worse when, little less than a year ago, the
city narrowly elected ultra-progressive ex-teacher’s union lobbyist Brandon
Johnson as its mayor, granting us even ampler opportunity to demonstrate the
truth of H. L. Mencken’s maxim about the voters getting their “democracy” good
and hard. Johnson has been as bad as feared — helpless and cow-eyed in the face
of a mass youth-crime explosion he refused to condemn, and drowning in the
flood of illegal aliens draining the city’s resources — and he already sports a
record-breakingly low 20-percent approval rating among voters.
Your
question might be the same as mine, especially if you live here: Who on
earth are the remaining 20 percent? Johnson has an African-American
voting base, yes, but it’s not quite as solid as people assume; his real
remaining support comes from the progressive class and the rich (and largely
white, north-side) voters who share their cultural views. So he owes them
favors, and today he “delivered” on yet another one of his rancid campaign
promises to the activist woke Left: Johnson has announced that he is finally getting rid of
ShotSpotter, one of the few effective systems for responding to the plague of
gun crime in the city.
The
first thing to establish about ShotSpotter is that it works: It is an elegant
technology whereby a network of strategically placed microphones (placed around
the statistically highest-crime neighborhoods of the city) can be used to
triangulate the origin point of gunfire and direct police response to there.
This technology is critical for the cops because, to put it politely, residents
of neighborhoods where gunfire regularly breaks out at all hours of the day
without surcease are also statistically disinclined to dial 9-1-1. (There are
many overlapping reasons for this, all of them the proper subject for a book
nobody will read rather than an article nobody will read.) This technology
alerts CPD immediately to shots fired, enabling them not only to respond
themselves but also — crucially — to direct emergency medical care there as
well. Oftentimes, the alternative is simply dying in the street.
It
has been a boon to the city. It is doubtless not a perfect geolocator, but its
baseline accuracy is not what is in dispute; it is the police response that
activists are enraged about. They hew to the line (now hardened into
an archetype post-George Floyd) that the police are forever an oppressive force
unwelcome in the black community on principle alone. And since ShotSpotter is
the ultimate snitch to activists who have internalized “stop snitchin’” as an
actual core ideological plank, it had to go. (That this is done in defiance of
the actual residents of crime-ridden neighborhoods on the south and west sides,
who would very much appreciate more cops on the streets and less crime, is one
of those ghastly ironies that is often commented upon but rarely acted upon.)
Getting
rid of ShotSpotter in a city drowning in gun crime seems like such a violation
of common sense that one is almost tempted to say that Johnson isn’t engaging
in the worst and most depraved sort of political horse-trading imaginable —
mortgaging the safety of his poor black and Hispanic constituents to please the
desires of a rich, mostly white, and out of touch activist base. Maybe he
genuinely just is an authentically rote-programmed progressive lunatic.
But,
you see, he’s not. For, as the Chicago Tribune notes, Johnson’s
announcement yesterday was tellingly couched: He’s not getting
rid of ShotSpotter quite yet; he is in fact renewing its
contract until the end of September, after which point it expires. Why continue
using it through September, when it is apparently a tool of racial oppression
whose suspension is long overdue? Anyone with a working brain and an eye on the
political calendar knows why: The Democratic National Convention is being held
in Chicago this year. (Surely there is no danger whatsoever of Chicago 2024
turning into a replay of Chicago 1968, this time with pro-Hamas goons waving
Palestinian flags.)
The
hypocrisy is staggering and contemptibly revealing. When it comes to the needs
and desires of national Democrats, who desperately do not want to be humiliated
by rioting outside the convention, Johnson is willing to forget all of his
supposed convictions and actively renew ShotSpotter. Why? Because it is understood
by all that ShotSpotter actually helps police in addressing violent
crime. (In particular, given the inevitably boosted police presence downtown
for the convention, the ability of a reduced force to respond with speed and
precision to gunfire in traditionally crime-heavy neighborhoods is all the more
important.)
But
once Joe Biden and the Democratic circus are gone? Then to hell with the actual
residents of the city. Brandon Johnson — who by his actions knows that
ShotSpotter works; otherwise why renew it for the DNC? — is happy to consign
them to be subjects of his newest progressive experiment. If Johnson genuinely
believes ShotSpotter is a racist blight on the city, then he ought to do the
morally correct thing and cancel it now instead of renewing it
for a few months. But of course he knows (or at least deeply fears) that it
will be a disaster, and an ill-timed one for the national party. So we in the
city have been granted a temporary reprieve. But that won’t stop him from
toying with the lives and well-being of Chicagoans for the sake of testing
nonsensical progressive ideas that will get people killed; no, it will only
delay the date.
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