Chicagoans still lack the will to fix their city
Washington Examiner
Alas, we were too optimistic about Chicago.
When Chicagoans ousted Mayor Lori Lightfoot, giving her only 17% of their votes in the first round of this year’s mayoral election, it seemed that the city might be about to turn a corner. Voters seemed to be rejecting the grievance-mongering and anti-police ideology that have made life in the Windy City so much more dangerous and less tolerable than it was even 10 years ago.
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In particular, Lightfoot’s permissive attitude toward criminal behavior and extreme hostility toward the police have helped fuel Chicago’s crime wave. During her tenure, Chicago’s police force shrank by more than 19% due to attrition. Would you want to work such a thankless job for a mayor who was always prepared to put a knife in your back? Police work is in demand everywhere, and there are better and safer towns to work where people appreciate the benefits of law and order. (To be fair, Lightfoot had a lot of help from useless pro-criminal prosecutors in creating a hostile environment for police.)
Low police morale and the accompanying police exodus help explain why murder was up 40% last year over 2018 levels, theft up 33%, and motor vehicle twice what it was just a year earlier. The Chicago PD reportedly lacks the personnel for patrols.
Unfortunately, after wisely throwing Lightfoot out, Chicagoans have elected an even more radical police defunder. Brandon Johnson, a former teachers union organizer who supported defunding the police right up until he started running for mayor, is the wrong answer to Chicago’s violent crime wave and its worsening population loss. Police union President John Catanzara made the grim prediction to the New York Times that another 1,000 police officers may soon quit because of Johnson’s win. This would cut the force to two-thirds of its 2018 levels.
Chicago lost 50,000 residents last year, and its population is now far below 2010 levels. It is still not Detroit, but its world-famous corruption and further descent into lawlessness send the same message to the police and to the businesses up and down Michigan Avenue. There’s nowhere else to find real deep-dish pizza, but some sacrifices must be made — there are better places to make a living and to live.
The mayoral election reveals a depressing truth about Chicagoans’ lack of standards for their politicians. Chicago pols used to line their pockets, but at least they had the good sense to make sure city services were delivered. Today, there are no such silver linings. Despite initial appearances, the voters didn’t throw Lightfoot out because she was destroying their city. It’s just that they didn’t like the tone she took as she was doing it. Now, they’ve picked someone else who will do the same damage, perhaps more rapidly.
This is a problem for urban liberals nationwide. They are destroying many of the cities they rule uncontested — Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and many others. Even when they get upset about the decay that their policies are causing, they refuse to do what’s necessary to restore their cities. In this case, it only would have required voting for a less extreme Democrat. That was too much to ask.
Residents these left-wing culture warriors are harming most are overwhelmingly working class and nonwhite. In the last 15 years, the share of U.S. murder victims who are black has gone from an already ridiculously disproportionate 48% to more than 60% in 2022, according to FBI data. (Black people comprise only about 13.5% of the population.) The annual tally of these victims is literally a thousand times greater than the number of unarmed black men killed by police each year.
The shocking increase in black murder victims in such a small span of time is not an accident; this spike coincides with the Left’s embrace of the racialist and pro-crime ideologies that are shaping the way most major cities are run.
That entire strain of thought, which holds that the police are the problem and criminals mere victims of systemic racism, is intellectually and morally defective. Only delusional and naive people believe they are helping black Americans by giving extra latitude to the predators who murder and plunder them at ridiculously disproportionate rates.
Chicagoans are about to get what they voted for. It’s a shame because not all of them deserve it.