How Bloody Will Christmas Weekend Be?

Chicago is closing in on 800 homicides for 2016. Year-to-date 771 have been murdered in the city of Chicago. The editors of the Chicago Tribune declaim:

This is where we’d like to write a fat passage about how seriously Chicago’s elected officials take the carnage on their watch, about all they’re doing in their respective fiefs to respond.

Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson certainly takes the carnage seriously. He speaks often about people who wind up on the business end of a bullet. He speaks, too, about the crime-ravaged neighborhoods where law-abiding citizens wonder who’ll be the next youngster to fall — neighborhoods that many residents have fled, often to Chicago’s suburbs.

Most Chicago legislators and aldermen, though, are in hiding. They know what’s happening in their districts or wards, yet take no ownership — except to complain that they want more cops in their neighborhoods. Don’t we all.

A few politicians, including state Sen. Kwame Raoul, D-Chicago, are on the case. Raoul, with encouragement from Johnson, has pledged to introduce legislation that would lengthen sentences for repeat gun offenders. We’ve long supported that, proposing that for every casket of an innocent who is buried, a casket should be transported to the steps of the Illinois Capitol and neatly stacked in a pyramid until lawmakers act.

But we also remember what happened the last time a proposal comparable to Raoul’s briefly had traction. That was in autumn 2013 — a bill backed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and then-Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez. The bill failed because African-American lawmakers were concerned that increased incarceration would hurt their communities. Speaker Michael Madigan adjourned the House to avoid a potentially fiery debate pitting black and Latino lawmakers against mostly white Chicago-area and Downstate lawmakers. That would have exposed philosophical fissures among Madigan’s Democrats.

In a companion commentary piece the Tribune is publishing today, Raoul and three other Chicago-area lawmakers explain the legislation they’ll push in 2017. We hope the General Assembly will follow through this time.

And the feckless aldermen? We’ve written of their assets — their local prominence, their bully pulpits, their resources that should be focused on building stronger anti-crime efforts in their respective wards. The aldermen are uniquely positioned to help rebuild trust between civilians and police officers. We’ve urged aldermen to step forward instead of pointing fingers anywhere but at themselves. And we draw their wrath when we ask them three questions:

Have you insisted that parents in your ward search their dwellings for guns? Have you organized your constituents, block by block, to occupy hot intersections? Have you demanded that your constituents cooperate with law enforcement to help stop the bloodshed?

There’s a reason you haven’t read about Chicago aldermen crusading on this brief agenda in their wards. It’s easier for them to curse the violence than to risk alienating some voters by calling more attention to it.

The evidence that greater police presence as such will reduce the number of violent crimes is weak at best. It’s more dependent on the nature of that presence and the relationship between the police officers and the community and, frankly, in the neighborhoods where most of the murders are taking place that relationship is very bad. Police corruption over a period of decades will have that effect.

An unseasonably cold December is probably the only thing shielding Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel from the number of homicides hitting 800 this year. The homicide rate per 100,000 population is already at historic highs.