Yesterday afternoon in reaction to President Trump’s announcement that he would be deploying the National Guard to Chicago, the governor of Illinois, State Attorney General, Cook County Board President, and mayor of Chicago gave a rare joint press conference expressing their anger, dismay, and opposition. At WGN Tahman Bradley and Ethan Illers report:
CHICAGO (WGN) – President Trump renewed his push to send federal help to Chicago and announced Tuesday that he’s made up his mind about a federal surge.
“We’re going in. I didn’t say when, but we’re going in,” Trump said. “If the governor of Illinois would call up, call me up, I would love to do it. Now we’re going to do it anyway. We have a right to do it.”
This comes after Chicago saw a violent Labor Day weekend that ended with 58 people shot, eight of them fatally.
Meanwhile, the city, county and state’s Democratic leaders do not want this, but they’re bracing for federal immigration agents and another state’s national guard.
Also on Tuesday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker spoke at a press conference along with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, saying there is no emergency warranting the deployment of federal law enforcement to Chicago.
Pritzker said he’s learned armed agents are preparing for sweeping federal immigration raids. Those agents, Pritzker said, will be supported by the Texas National Guard.
When I heard about the multiple mass shootings in Chicago over Labor Day weekend, I turned to my wife and said “That’s going to be very bad timing for Pritzker and Johnson”. JB Pritzker is governor of Illinois and Brandon Johnson is mayor of Chicago. Both have been denying vehemently that Chicago had a violence problem.
All of the officials condemned the use of the National Guard as illegal. Mayor Johnson made a lengthy statement blaming violence in Chicago on the lack of national gun control laws or attention to “root causes”, generally maximalist policy positions.
I agree with them that President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to address local crime is illegal. That isn’t the president’s job. I also agree with State AG Kwame Raoul’s observation that effective law enforcement requires collaboration among federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. I wish he had elaborated on how the state’s and City of Chicago’s “sanctuary” status facilitates that but he didn’t.
Mayor Johnson frequently alludes to the “root causes” of crime but has never provided a succinct definition of what he thinks they are so I will. I think the root causes of urban crime are urban black social dysfunction, particularly the erosion of the nuclear family among blacks, decline of entry-level job opportunities for young black men, criminal street gangs, private and public tolerance of street gangs, and weak enforcement of the law.
I do not believe that you can make intelligent comments about crime without referring to race or ethnicity. In Chicago the Hispanic homicide rate is four times the white homicide rate and the black homicide rate is 15 times the white homicide rate. I think that much of the reason for the difference is street gangs.
It is true that there has been a sharp decline in homicide this year over last year. Courtesy of HeyJackass!:
The decline in rate has been sharpest among Hispanics.
Where I come from when something changes it’s prudent to consider what else has changed. Neither gun laws nor the “root causes” of crime have changed materially since last year. What has? I would point to two things. First, President Trump’s enforcement of immigration law and, second, Cook County has a new states attorney, Eileen O’Neill Burke, who is prosecuting crime more enthusiastically than her predecessor.
Ms. Burke was conspicuous by her absence among the worthies in yesterday’s press conference. I don’t know whether that’s because she’s not considered one of the “cool kids”, because she had other commitments, or for some other reason.
We also have tariffs now. Why not claim it was the tariffs? There is just as much evidence and just as much reasoning to suggest that is causal, maybe more. Note that while the number of illegal immigrants in the US grew from 1980-2022 crime decreased by 60%. There just isn’t any evidence that immigration leads to increased crime rates.
Since crime is decreasing rapidly almost everywhere else, back to pre-covid levels or lower, I doubt that your new attorney has made a huge difference and whatever is causing the drop everywhere else is causing it in Chicago, maybe with added local effects. This is especially likely true as you had already had a large decrease. (This is so reminiscent of Giuliani claiming his policies lead to the NYC decrease in crime when it was going on everywhere else also. Then when very liberal deBlasio was elected many on the right predicted a major surge in crime, which didnt happen.)
Steve
How can you say that with a straight face, steve?
Most of the 150 or so major metropolitan areas nearly all are “sanctuary” jurisidictions. That means that the police don’t ask immigration status. That in turn means that we have no idea how many crimes are being committed by immigrants.
Furthermore, downgrading infractions is such a commonplace in major metro areas we have little idea how many serious crimes are being committed. The indirect measures paint a very different picture from the direct measures. When there is even one documented case of downgrading (there are many) and the indirect measures conflict with the direct ones (they do), the burden of proof is transferred to those who assert a real decrease in crime to prove that all of the statistics are true. Good luck. It will be a full-time job for the rest of your natural life.
Are you asserting that tariffs are a reliable indirect measure of crime? I’m skeptical. Please produce evidence.
Lets see. “We have no evidence” about immigrants means that more immigrants means more crime? As I said above, national crime rates, measured many ways including by asking households how much crime they experienced, demonstrated massive drops in crime, especially ones that are hard to avoid reporting like homicides, while the number of immigrants doubled. I will grant that is indirect evidence but you offer none.
“Are you asserting that tariffs are a reliable indirect measure of crime? I’m skeptical. Please produce evidence.”
0
I have now produced just as much evidence as you did in your assertion. (The whole point of what I said.)
Steve
@Dave Schuler
Let me get this straight. You think you know more about crime in Chicago than @steve.
Not quite. I think that nobody can say with high confidence what the heck is going on.
“Furthermore, downgrading infractions is such a commonplace in major metro areas we have little idea how many serious crimes are being committed. ”
NYC officials have recently been bragging about a decline in shootings. Police sources and the Republican candidate for mayor however claimed the classification was changed. If no one is killed/wounded, it isn’t considered a shooting anymore.
steve:
You wrote:
No. It means we do not have the information necessary to make a determination. We certainly cannot determine that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes based on existing information.
This weekend one of the mass shootings took place in Little Village, a Hispanic neighborhood. Videos were actually taken while the shooting was in progress. Based on multiple videos it appeared that one group of Hispanics was shooting it out with another group of Hispanics. My interpretation of that, based on the very limited information, is that one gang was shooting it out with another gang. A bystander was killed.
How could we possibly know whether one group was composed of immigrants and the other of non-immigrants, that both were non-immigrants, or that both were immigrants? My answer is we can’t. Not only are we not able to make that determination but even if they had been apprehended the Chicago police are forbidden by law from inquiring about their immigration status.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that the number of victims of homicides who are Hispanics is about four times that among non-Hispanics. Experience suggests that the perpetrators are Hispanics, too. If whites or blacks were cruising Hispanic neighborhoods killing people I think we’d hear about it.
Which is the more hopeful scenario? That immigrants are committing crimes at a higher rate or that non-immigrants are committing crimes at a higher rate?
I’m old enough to remember when Illinois Governor Blagojevich proposed sending the National Guard to Chicago to help with street violence. I think it caught Mayor Daley flatfooted and nothing much ultimately came from it, but there was a conversation among Democrats about the possibility and their uses, and occasionally renewed calls from Chicagoans for the National Guard for the next several years. The National Guard unit in Springfield is a policing force, and my neighbor has done three tours in Iraq with it. That was one of the angles discussed, they’ve been helping overseas, now it’s time to help at home.
The fact that National Guard units (actually MP’s) are being deployed in three major US cities, including the National Capital, indicates just how far the political, economic, and social rot has progressed in the US. How the collapse will proceed is the only question. Most likely we will become a larger version of Brazil or Nigeria.
The baton has been passed to BRICS+.
You saw some shootings on TV and that is your evidence? Really? I at least gave you some real numbers. We know homicides are hard to hide and we know they decreased while immigrants rapidly increased. No, we dont know how many crimes immigrants commit but people actually spent a lot of time trying to figure it out and best evidence is that they have lower crime rates. On top of that we have secondary evidence like the fact that cities close to the border that have lots of immigrants, legal and illegal, have low violent crime rates.
You offer no evidence yet you claim the increase in deportations is responsible because it’s new. As I said above tariffs are also new. Cutting the NIH budget is new. Falsely accusing schools of antisemitism is new. Lots of stuff is new, but you should have some evidence to suggest it’s causal. Homicides were already decreasing without deportations, same as everywhere else.
Steve
Chinese Jetpilot: NYC officials have recently been bragging about a decline in shootings. Police sources and the Republican candidate for mayor however claimed the classification was changed. If no one is killed/wounded, it isn’t considered a shooting anymore.
There is no evidence for that other than his say so, and the claim has been contradicted by the NYPD, which says that reporting has been consistent. Notably, the numbers of shooting and homicide victims have declined, which are numbers that would be hard to jigger.
bob sykes: The fact that National Guard units (actually MP’s) are being deployed in three major US cities, including the National Capital, indicates just how far the political, economic, and social rot has progressed in the US.
Sure. The police state is alive and well in America.
PD Shaw: I’m old enough to remember when Illinois Governor Blagojevich proposed sending the National Guard to Chicago to help with street violence.
A state using its own National Guard is quite different from the federal government imposing the military on a state. States are sovereign. There’s even a statute (18 U.S.C. § 1385) which severely restricts the deployment of federal troops within the United States.
Dave Schuler: It means we do not have the information necessary to make a determination.
Steve already pointed out an important statistic: over the last few decades, the immigrant population has increased, while the overall crime rate has decreased. Don’t see your response to this.
The distance between the proposition “you can rely on the government’s statistics” and “you can rely on some of the government’s statistics” is a long one.
Reason to doubt some of the statistics has already been shown dispositively. That the statistics are not corroborated by indirect measurements has been demonstrated. The burden of proof is now on Steve to prove that all of the underlying data reported are correct.
PD Shaw:
A big difference is that Blago had the authority to call out the National Guard while I do not believe that Trump does.
Then the discussion is meaningless. We know that none of the numbers the government publishes, pretty much anyone publishes, on large populations are not exactly correct. So it deteriorates down to feelings and unsupported claims. So how do we know any of the numbers you cite, any of them, are correct? What I can ofer you are numbers made by good faith efforts that people with expertise in the fields on all sides fo the political spectrum use and find to be useful. At present, driven by their political beliefs, there are people who doubt some long used numbers.
Note that I am not saying the numbers cant be wrong in any given report. As always you need secondary source confirmation and need to know the trends which are more important than exact numbers.
Steve
Dave Schuler: The distance between the proposition “you can rely on the government’s statistics” and “you can rely on some of the government’s statistics” is a long one.
Gee whiz. You just posted that “there has been a sharp decline in homicide this year over last year” in Chicago, and that the minority homicide rate is higher than the white homicide rate.
Dave Schuler: The burden of proof is now on Steve to prove that all of the underlying data reported are correct.
There are more than the two options of “statistics are perfect” and “statistics are useless”. All statistics are subject to error—and even to systemic bias. However, Steve pointed to a statistical trend over a long period of time over a large geographical area, which is more likely to represent a real trend. Are you claiming immigration hasn’t increased over the last few decades? Or that crime hasn’t decreased?
Or are only the statistics that you think support your position accurate?
steve: We know that none of the numbers the government publishes, pretty much anyone publishes, on large populations are not exactly correct.
That’s the nature of statistics. But large data-sets will generally have lower margins of error than small data-sets.
steve: Note that I am not saying the numbers cant be wrong in any given report.
Trends are often more accurate than the raw data. If a consistent methodology is used, then even with systemic bias, the trend may still be clear. If, say, 1 in 10 violent crimes go unreported, the statistics may still correctly show an upward trend in violent crime.
I find it interesting in this food fight that no one has mentioned age. It is well known that violent crime correlates with age.
Yes, statistics have noise; and liars will use statistics, especially these days – doctored statistics. OK
But median age has increased materially in the last 10 years. Its called the baby boom. Its probably the dominating variable.
But you simply cannot deny that certain places, like Chicago’s south, southeast and near west sides are cesspools of gangs and violent crime. To do so just identifies you as a partisan, not an analyst. And for the record, I went to school in Hyde Park, and crime statistics were doctored all to hell. You went off campus at your peril. Statistical citations be damned.
Drew: It is well known that violent crime correlates with age.
That is correct. (Notably, you believe statistics when it suits you.) However, the drop in violent crime in Chicago over the last few years is largely because the violent crime rate, including homicide, has dropped among young men. And while the drop in the overall violent crime rate over the last few decades in the United States is partly due to the aging population, the violent crime rate has also dropped among young men.
Demographics includes age.