Criminal justice reform activists simply want to make things easier for criminals while making normal people’s lives harder. Chicago is a prime example.
Mayor Brandon Johnson is not renewing the city’s contract with SpotShotter, a system that helps police identify the origin of gunshots. As the executive director of United Working Families boasted, “Elections matter. Organizing matters. Today is a new day, where investments in evidence-based, holistic solutions that don’t just respond to violence but prevent it are driving our city’s public safety policy. We know a safer Chicago is on the horizon.”
Cut through the activist gobbledygook, and you begin to understand how they reach that conclusion. “Holistic solutions” mean things that do nothing to track down, arrest, and prosecute criminals but throw money at the community (or, more specifically, at activist organizations) because activists claim crime is just the result of a lack of community investment. They claim that responding to violence is not good enough when their policies indicate they don’t want to respond to violence at all.
A member of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America gave away the real game. “Every single day, there are about 61 ShotSpotter-initiated police deployments,” Adwoa Agyepong said. “This means that 61 times a day, police come to black and brown communities on high alert, assuming that every single person there is a person who is armed and dangerous.”
Tracking gunshots is not equitable because those gunshots are coming from minority communities, as do a disproportionate number of homicide victims. The goal isn’t to make things “safer” in those communities by tracking down shooters and getting them off the streets. The goal is to make things “safer” by pretending that spending money on activist groups will solve the epidemic of bad people committing crimes while removing police officers from those communities.
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Whether the dyed-in-the-wool left-liberal activists actually believe police arresting murderers is more dangerous to minority communities than ignoring people getting gunned down is anyone’s guess, but the politicians humoring them know better. That is why Johnson is waiting until after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to shut the system down even though the contract will expire this week. Johnson knows this will not help the city’s crime crisis and that, if anything, it will make it worse.
All of the pontificating about “holistic solutions” or how anything that doesn’t prevent violence is bad even if it puts the violent offenders behind bars is meant just to cover the reality that most of these criminal justice reform activists do not want criminals to be put in jail. They do not want arrests or prosecutions, and so you end up with people like Johnson shooting the city in the foot to please activists while hoping no one knows from where the shot is coming.