At the New Yorker Benjamin Wallace-Wells remarks on Chicago’s spike in crime:
For at least three years, two stories about crime and police in Chicago have been unspooling, each only intermittently acknowledging the other. The primary one has been about escalating gun violence, which has spread across the city’s West and South Sides. Though the city has added hundreds of cops, launched intensive programs to improve the enforcement of gun laws, and experimented with predictive algorithms to identify who is most likely to commit acts of violence, the crime wave has proved alarmingly resistant to efforts to control it. Last year, seven hundred and sixty-two people were killed in Chicago—three hundred more than the previous year, representing the largest one-year increase in any of America’s biggest cities in the past quarter-century.
The second story has been about police excess in dealing with suspects and passivity in dealing with civilian reports of crime. In 2015, the Guardian revealed the existence of Chicago Police Department “black sites,†where suspects were routinely denied civil liberties. The police shooting of Laquan McDonald, a black teen-ager, and the release of dashboard-camera video showing that the officer’s claim that he acted in self-defense was obviously false, elevated concerns about accountability in the department. Meanwhile, Chicago homicide investigators have identified suspects in only twenty-nine per cent of cases, a rate that is less than half the national average. In October, 2015, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said that his officers, who feared becoming the next face of police violence, had taken a “fetal†position. Apparently, that fear has persisted. “The major thing you hear from Chicago cops,†Eugene O’Donnell, a former N.Y.P.D. officer and prosecutor for the Brooklyn and Queens District Attorneys, who is now a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said this week, “is to stay fetal—go fetal, stay fetal.†Arrests were down twenty-eight per cent this past year.
On Friday, in what may be the last major act of the Obama Administration, the Department of Justice issued a hundred-and-sixty-eight-page report into the failures of the Chicago Police Department. One measure of the authors’ alarm is that they used the word “unconstitutional†twenty-two times, often to describe the department’s patterns of using force. The D.O.J.’s investigation began in December, 2015, shortly after the video of McDonald’s death was released. Much of the report it produced shows how the department’s internal investigations following complaints of police misconduct are systemically biased toward cops. But the report also connected departmental abuses like McDonald’s shooting to a breakdown in trust between police and the community, and linked the collapse in trust to the increase in violent crime. “The City and CPD acknowledge that this trust has been broken,†the report said, by “systems that have allowed CPD officers who violate the law to escape accountability. This breach in trust has in turn eroded CPD’s ability to effectively prevent crime; in other words, trust and effectiveness in combating violent crime are inextricably intertwined.â€
What is the relation between the number of police officers and the crime rate? Virtually the entirety of Mayor Emanuel’s policy with respect to crime in Chicago has been predicated on the belief that more police officers result in less crime.
Does more crime occur despite more police officers on the streets, because of more police officers are on the streets, or are the two irrelevant to one another? Chicago has one of the highest ratios of police to population of any major city in the United States. We might start considering that what police do when they’re on the streets is at least as important as how many of them there are. Could it be that a high enough police presence changes how police officers do their job, possibly not in a good way?
Good policing, like good parenting, good teaching, being a good/successful soldier, and so on, depends less on quantity than the quality and reasonable ability to exercise your best during the implementation of these roles. If too many unrealistic constraints are placed on people, doing their “best” is often constrained as well.
I think nationally police have been under so much scrutiny, ridicule, and oftentimes unfair or misplaced criticism that they have become demoralized and unmotivated to do their “best.” The “Ferguson Effect,” for example, has been publicly cited by Comey as a factor taking a toll on active police involvement, especially around big metropolitan areas. Therefore, I think, when seeking better police effectiveness, one should start first with a non-politicized national reevaluation as to what constitutes police brutality and/or bias versus what serves as responsible police tactics in discouraging crime, confronting criminal acts, and adequately protecting neighborhoods – especially those considered high crime areas. Currently, though, many actions taken and attention given are concentrated on racial components of policing rather than a broader picture of the actual underpinnings that may be enabling recent increases in crime, not only in Chicago, but across the country.
In short, if we don’t let the police run wild, they won’t arrest people and try to stop crime. Must be those police unions.
Steve
Not really, Steve. That was a bit of hyperbole wasn’t it?
I do not have a very high opinion of law enforcement, the justice system, or government in general, but not every individual is bad or evil. I saw how things worked from the inside, and it has only gotten worse. I do not advocate anarchy, but there are serious problems. These problems have been around for a long time.
The problems used to be are mostly confined to the poor and lower income sectors, and in the case of black people, there is a racial element because of Jim Crow. It is difficult for many people to separate the two, and it is further complicated because actual racism is able to hide within this toxic mix. Actions by the government – Tuskegee Experiments and Malaga Island – somehow never happen to the majority race.
This is all a prelude to a story I ran across that will probably not get much attention in the white progressive media and none in the right version. The incident does not end with a dead body, and there have been and probably will be no protests or riots. It is an incident that is common in the poor and lower income black areas, and it is not uncommon in the white versions of the same.
The following link is from the original source I picked up on it. I am using it instead of the primary source because it is a professional black man’s blog, and the comments are usually a vile soup of racist trolls. (Many of you white people will be offended by the comments, but I tend to cut affected people some slack. Rep. Lewis gets extra leeway on racial matters. Sen. McCain gets extra leeway on torture designation. It is not a blank pass, though.)
(At Christmas, my cousin’s wife was taken aback when I said, “All you white people …” The look on your faces is priceless, and in mixed company, the black folks are astonished by what I usually say next.)
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter”~ Martin Luther King Jr (At the end “[Source]” links to a Washington Post article.)
(I would advise the white political right to visit the comments of a blog like this one, and if your stomach does not want to turn, there is something wrong with you. The political left might want to think about what these animals would be like in their natural habitat, especially if that included a racist community, and if that does not make you want to sh*t on yourself, there is something wrong with you.)
There is no actual footage until he is pulled over, and without seeing what he was doing, I am not condemning the white woman who called in the incident. I do not expect the police to assume that they are about to encounter a non-criminal because a white person does not want to be perceived as racist.
Everything up until the police charging him seems to me to be a set-up, but I cannot imagine any black person being that stupid. On the other hand, he does jump out of his car as soon as it stops, and at the end, he keeps yelling about his rights.
(My suggestion is to keep your mouth shut. Once you are in cuffs, it is highly unlikely you are getting out until you are behind bars, and then, you will need a lawyer to undo the mess you made by running your mouth. The people in the criminal justice system get paid to put people behind bars. If they lock-up fewer people, the budget can be reduced, and people can be laid-off.)
When you cannot understand why black people get upset over a criminal taking a well deserved beatdown or taking a bullet for his stupidity, this is what many of them are seeing. A law abiding young black man trying to do everything the police are telling him, and they still bum rush him as if he were public enemy number one.
Either they perceived him as a legitimate threat, or they are a bunch of racists who wanted to dogpile a black mother f*cker because he would not give them a reason to kill him. I am going with the former, but the next question is whether skin tone made any difference.
Other in poor white areas, I have not heard of very many incidents like this where the person was white, and black law enforcement officers treat black people worse than most of their white counterparts. There is something amiss, and it does not need to be racism to account for these results. Eventually though, it will lead to viewing certain people as exempt from basic humans, and skin tone is the easiest way to distinguish these “equal but not quite as equal as normal humans”.
It has been increasing in white communities, and I can now find white people who do not look at me like an albino black militant. All you white people can think that the police are your friends, and like many black people, you will never have any first hand knowledge of mistreatment. Just like with free-trade and big business, a lot of people are learning the hard way that they are part of the “not quite as equal” portion of society.
I have no doubt that law enforcement officers have pulled back because of the Ferguson Effect and assassinations, but it is not like it was “back in the day”. Thirty years ago, you could do almost whatever you wanted to a criminal as long as you did not get caught, but if you got caught, there was a potential 983 lawsuit. (@P D Shaw has gone into them.) Apparently, these lawsuits do not have the same weight they once did.
Criminals are not coddled snowflakes who have an emotional meltdown because they saw the name of a political candidate they disliked written in chalk on a sidewalk. When they trigger something, it usually results in macro aggressions, and coloring books, bubbles, and puppies ain’t gonna fix nuthin’.
Treating criminals like they are good people gone astray is insane. In the video of the Chicago jail fight, I saw a lot of people concerned about the welfare of the inmates, and the slow response of the prison personnel. The reason you do not go rushing into something is because it could be staged, and the inmates could get control of the jail. Contrary to popular belief, big city jails are not Mayberry, RFD with a bunch of Otis’s sleeping off a drunken stupor. All the criminals in the paper and TV news are in there.
To get into a gang, you take a beatdown. Criminals are used to violence. It is part of the game, but the game has rules. Coddled progressives and Pajama Boys have no idea what it is like on the streets with these animals.
By the way, criminals lie. In prison, they have nothing to do, and when some dumb assed researcher asks them a lot of dumb assed questions, they play games. It is a way to amuse themselves. If you want to get the real answers to your questions, you need to go into their world or f*ck with their heads.
That being said, police running a f*cking black ops site in a US city is mind blowing, but I guess because it is a Democrat black ops site there is nothing to see, move along. There is nothing normal about what is going on in Chicago, and it is not racism or police brutality.
When law abiding folks refuse to help the police there are two, possibly three reasons why. First, they do not think the police can protect them from retaliation by the criminals. Second, they fear the police more than the criminals. Third, they do not trust the criminal justice system.
In Chicago, I would say that the second is most certainly a reason, and I strongly suspect that the first is also a reason.
One aspect nobody ever talks about is that, as a cop, at some point it becomes easy to start seeing the world like the criminals see it. For criminals, the world is not complicated. It is black and white with no gray, and to anticipate their moves, you need to think like them. If you are not careful, you begin to view people and actions as good and bad, and what is not good must be bad. Before long, the end result is all that matters.
(Hopefully, it is not too disjointed. I have been in and out, and my edits may have jumbled up a few things.)
The Evanston Police are usually better than that. The incident reminds me of the one that took place in Texas (highly publicized here since it involved a Chicago woman) in which, sadly, the young woman died, allegedly a suicide although it smelled to high heaven.
In both cases the actual crime was insufficient deference to the police. I’d recommend that when stopped by the police to remain calm and express yourself in a polite and deferential manner regardless of your race or ethnicity. It’s always a good policy when dealing with someone who’s armed and trained in subduing people.
I’m not defending the police here. I think they acted wrongly. But I think I understand what happened. It shouldn’t have to be that way but it is.
The comment thread ensuing from that post is typical Internet fodder. Anonymity brings out the worst in many people. I use my real name, never assume anonymity, and assume everything I write will be posted in the public square.
My experience has been that most police officers divide the world into two groups: police officers on the one hand and criminals on the other so your observation isn’t quite as comforting as it otherwise might be.