I agree with Clarence Page’s proposal for ending the carnage on the South and West Sides of Chicago. From his most recent Chicago Tribune column:
What to do? The most glaring and long-running issue in my view as a former Chicago police reporter may be the city’s low clearance rate, meaning crimes that have led to at least one arrest. After some improvement in recent years, CPD’s clearance rate dipped in 2020 from 50.3% the previous year to 44.5%.
That shortfall in arrests sounds even worse when you count by race.
An analysis of murder investigations in Chicago by WBEZ radio in 2019 found that “when the victim was white, 47% of the cases were solved. … For Hispanics, the rate was about 33%. When the victim was African American, it was less than 22%.â€
In other words, the killer of a Black victim has more of a chance of getting away with it — and overwhelmingly most of those killers are also Black. As an African American, I have seen much too often how too little policing in your neighborhood can be just as dangerous as having too much. As the mayor says, we Chicagoans have met our common enemy — and to a shocking degree, as Pogo might say, it is us.
but I don’t think he has thought it through all the way. To what does Mr. Page attribute the difference in clearance rates? He doesn’t and I don’t think it’s due to racism or, at least, not just to racism. I think it’s more due to the bad relationship between the police and the people in the most affected neighborhoods. For the people in those neighborhoods to get more effective protection they need to trust the police more than they do now—more than they trust the thugs who are killing their children. The problem is that many of those thugs are their children.
How easy is it to trust police who cover up when they kill someone? When they cover up other stuff besides shooting people, which is uncommon? There have been a number of investigations of the Chicago PD? How do those usually turn out? Is there good reason to believe the Chicago PD is more trustworthy than other parts of Chicago govt?
Steve
For the people in those neighborhoods to get more effective protection they need to trust the police more than they do now—more than they trust the thugs who are killing their children.
Why would they trust the police to protect them? I would not, and I doubt anybody else would. Instead, those that can leave have moved, and those that cannot are stuck.
In those neighborhoods, the people who trust the police to protect them are dead or soon will be. Nobody outside those neighborhoods would trust the police, either.
As to the police, I suspect they are dirty, and if the police are not running the drug gangs, they are providing protection and, possibly, other services.
Regarding racism, there is a black mayor, a black police chief, and black city council. I think the police force is majority black. The criminals are black. The victims are black. The DA is black. The judges are black, and the jurors are black.
In the 1980’s, the crack wars lead to the harsher sentences for dealing crack, not racism. The liberal justice system lead to the “three strikes” laws, not racism. Apparently, being a progressive means never remembering anything, and so, we will go around, once more.
I was a Deputy Sheriff in New Orleans during the 1980’s crack wars, and there was a discernible difference between the young crack dealers and the older heroin, cocaine, and marijuana dealers. Those young gangsters did not give a fuck. They thought they would die young, and it was just part of the game – a cost of business.
NOPD was not much better. In the worst neighborhoods, they were as bad or worse than the gangsters. It went beyond just “shaking down” the drug dealers, and in the 1990’s, they were running the drug trade. Reporting them to Internal Affairs was a death sentence, really.
The only way to make these neighborhoods safe is to lock-up the thugs, for a long time. The gun problem will be solved when the police take away the guns from the gangsters and send them to prison, for a long time. Unfortunately, this has been deemed racist by our most enlightened.
Anybody who thinks that legalizing drugs is the answer, you should adopt a gangster. You can provide mental support, job training, and empathy for the “structural racism” that lead to their plight.
“Regarding racism, there is a black mayor, a black police chief, and black city council. I think the police force is majority black. The criminals are black. The victims are black. The DA is black. The judges are black, and the jurors are black.”
’nuff said
“Anybody who thinks that legalizing drugs is the answer, you should adopt a gangster. “
I understand all you say in your comment, Tasty. And bad people will be bad people. But how do you deal with the fact that if you take the profit out drugs people won’t be killing each other over market share? Gangsters don’t kill each other over the right to sell spearmint gum.
We had the same issues in Prohibition, and we were talking Italians, Irish and white Americans.
Legalizing drugs won’t eliminate gangs. They’ll just turn to other illegal enterprises. Human trafficking, weapons, gambling, etc.
If you legalize gambling, prostitution, weapons trade, etc., it won’t eliminate gangs. They’ll turn to extortion. Or something else. Gangs don’t exist because of laws against illegal substances and commodities. They exist because of social dysfunction.
steve, that’s the tragedy. The alternatives are to trust the police, let the gangs continue to kill people, or leave. Increasingly they’re choosing the last alternative.
To paraphrase Chou En Lai gangs are the fish and the people in the communities with gangs are the sea.
An exaggeration. The membership in the city council is roughly proportionate to the percentage blacks, Hispanics, and white who are registered voters in Chicago. About 20% of the Chicago police force is black. In fact the police force is disproportionately white (50%).
@Drew
Drug addicts will still exist, and they will still need money to pay for their addiction. I doubt you will hire them.
Do you legalize prostitution so the crack whores (male & female) can earn money? Do you allow their clients to park on the street while getting a blowjob? Would removing the restrictions on OxyContin reduce the opioid crisis? Would you allow Fentanyl to be sold, and would a warning label be required?
Most people have not thought through the run-on effects of legalizing drugs, and libertarians are even worse. There are reasons for taboos, laws, and customs. It is not just you. I was once a full-blown Objectivest, and compared to me, libertarians were communists.
Regardings gangs, @Dave Schuler is correct. Prohibition did not create them, and ending it did not stop them. Jimmy Hoffa learned this the hard way.
@Dave Schuler
Honestly, you are being trifling. Like New Orleans, there are enough black people on the council and police force to eliminate white people being racist. In reality, the most racist cops are black. The shit that came out of their mouths would make a klansman cringe.
Nobody gives a damn about those neighborhoods – black, white, hispanic, asian, etc. I realize all the residents are not “salt of the earth” type people, but they are not all supporters of gangs. There are many other problems, and many of them think taking @Drew’s money is the solution.
From what I have read, you know it is not as simple as @steve thinks it is. You have lived in and around these types of places, and you should know that it is more than racism, dirty cops, and drugs being illegal.
@steve
Progressives have a good solution, actually. Moving the people into your neighborhood will generate a solution, quickly. Of course, progressives will immediately exempt themselves.
“If you legalize gambling, prostitution, weapons trade, etc., it won’t eliminate gangs.”
I know that’s the standard response. And I yield to no one in observing that some people are just plain bad, or socially dysfunctional. But I wonder if just positing that one vice would be substituted for another is really an accurate assessment. Most importantly it ignores the strength and magnitude of demand for the end product. Drugs, alcohol and gambling demand revolves around social setting and addictive demand drivers, and have huge markets. Yet gangs are involved in drugs, but no longer alcohol and not nearly as much gambling. Mexico trafficked in marijuana relatively quietly from a US perspective for quite some time. Yet it was cocaine, and the desire to control distribution routes (read: immense profit) that created the bloody cartel wars. And here, it was the need for retailers and product scarcity that created the increase in gang activity with its attendant violence.
The lesser demand for prostitution I think foretells less gang activity.
And weapons trade? Really? The guns are necessary to conduct the drug related gang activity, not as a substitute for the product.
I don’t think anything will “eliminate” gang or gang activity. But it is hard to imagine it would not decrease if profit or size of market was not reduced.
With that I agree completely. IMO the gangs are a long term outcome of Jim Crow and the malconstructed welfare system. In the 1920s practically all of the black kids born lived with their biological parents who were married. When they moved North and into the cities women could get jobs but men couldn’t. Men became a liability to families rather than breadwinners. So they became expendable.
Now most black families have female heads of household and kids are frequently reared by their grandmothers. Once boys reach their teens, they’re becoming liabilities.
I don’t know what it’s like growing up in a neighborhood on the South Side these days but I do know what inner city neighborhoods were like 60-70 years ago. For boys the regular every day after school pastime was fighting. One of the reasons my parents moved us out of our old neighborhood was they were afraid I would join a gang.
@Dave Schuler
What caused the Italian, Irish, Asian, and Mexican gangs?
@Drew
Legalizing drugs would lessen the territory wars, but ending prohibition did not end gangsters, and it did not end bootlegging. (In the 1950’s, my father-in-law would run moonshine on the weekends. At the time, he was a Navy corpsman stationed at Camp LeJeune.)
Alcohol has been around for thousands of years, and its usage and regulation has become a part of society. In places where opium is more acceptable, I suspect it is similar.
In any case, the gangsters killing each other have no regard for life. They expect to die young, and they intend to take as many people with them as possible. Until they are eliminated, the problem will persist.
Illegal weapons are affected by the violence and gun laws. In these neighborhoods, many law-abiding citizens own illegal weapons because that is all they can get or afford. A lot of times, the person fleeing the police is an otherwise law-abiding citizen with an illegal firearm, and this illegal firearm was most likely involved in another crime.
I do not believe that it is better to have physicians prescribing OxyContin to opiod addicts. Drug dealers are drug dealers, and making it legal does not make it right. Should we make all drugs over-the-counter? If not, why?
Similarly, social dysfunction. The difference is that the Italian, Irish, Asian, and Mexican gangs were fringe groups and not as self-perpetuating as the black gangs of the last 50 years have been.
Tasty –
Maybe I’m not correctly articulating the point. Its a matter of degree. During Prohibition there was wonton turf related killing. Not now. It doesn’t eliminate or reduce the tragedy of alcoholism. It doesn’t mean one is an advocate of alcohol abuse. But it took away a lot of the profit motive, and therefore the additional, knock on tragedies. And the continuing bootlegging was a byproduct of continuing scarcity. I’ve lived in two states that still have remnants of that: N and S Carolina.
(BTW – I think Dave incorrectly weights causalities of social dysfunction for black families. Black families were making slow and steady progress all through Jim Crow. It was really when the “malconstructed welfare system” took hold that men became expendable. Those facts and figures are well documented.)
I think there is a bottom line here. The goal should not be to eliminate gangs. That’s a fools errand. Its to minimize them and to minimize the lethal knock on effects on neighborhoods and innocent bystanders. We have gifted the gangs with a large and profitable market. From where I sit I’m hearing mostly perfection is the enemy of the good arguments. I think its a social policy error, and I have not heard a persuading argument that murders and shootings would not be lower in a market that eliminated scarcity. In the sole test case I know of, and the only one of similar magnitude – alcohol – the empirical evidence is in.
@Drew
There have been multiple gang turf war post-prohibition. Usually, they involved the Italian or Irish gangs, but they were not constantly ongoing. I am not a historian, but it seems like today is far worse than Prohibition.
I do not discount Jim Crow as an overall contributing factor, but I agree that the welfare state has done a lot of harm. Before anybody gets their panties in a twist, it is possible that black people were doing better under Jim Crow and that Jim Crow should never have existed.
Since your standard responses are not racism, police misconduct, and liar’s loans, I am not dismissing you out-of-hand, but I do not see legalizing drugs as a solution. We will see how the marijuana experiment goes.
Again, what drugs will be legalized? If I can buy methamphetamine over-the-counter, why do I need a prescription for Adderall or antibiotics? Will I be able to cook meth in my kitchen for personal use? Will there be an age limit? Will a pilot be able to smoke crack?
If you think your brother is bad, wait until your waiter or doctor is a crackhead. Most of the problems will not affect you, and when cars
are parked in front of your house with crack whores giving blowjobs, you will move.
It might be better to reduce the demand. Most of these drugs are not benign. They are highly addictive, and addicts of any type are rarely productive members of society. If you think that Democrats want your money now, just wait until they want to subsidize the addicts.
I think it was a one-two punch; synergy. Prejudice and Jim Crow prevented black men from getting jobs that would enable them to support their families and AFDC provided money to their families as long as they weren’t around. Without decent jobs or families to provide social support and affirmation what do you do? Turning to gangs is one possibility.
Agreed.
Tasty/Dave –
No sane person would argue that Jim Crow was good, or that blacks were doing better because of it. However, it is indisputable that slow and steady progress was being made. It was the notion of speeding things up that really drove the welfare debacle. And I can’t think of a more boneheaded policy with such predictable results. The results have been disastrous.
I understand the problems with administering the drug issue. But I think we are saving precious few from themselves with law. Legal or not, do you have a desire to go out and take meth or load up on opioids? Me neither. There are gun laws, but people get them. There are drunk driving laws, but we let people have numerous DUI’s. Crack is illegal, but addicts will be addicts. But I’d say the death count in Chicago alone tells us we need to look at the other side of the issue and think long and hard about creating a business opportunity for gangs.
I think Portugal legalized drugs 20 years ago. There should be some results in on that by now.
That is a post hoc propter hoc argument, i.e. you have yet to prove causality. IMO in the 1960s multiple things happened all at the same time which worked synergistically to create the situation we have now: desegregation, black nationalism, greater acceptability of drugs in the broader society, loosening of sexual mores in the broader society, and expansion of the welfare system.
We should be able to agree that segregation was reprehensible; the remainder have been not just institutionalized but industrialized. The tightening of welfare requirements under the Clinton Administration is even now trying to be reversed by progressives. IMO loosening of sexual and substance-related mores are luxuries that benefit the rich but which the poor and middle class can ill afford.
You argue for drug legalization without producing any evidence it will have the effects you cite. It’s a common view among libertarians and anarcho-capitalists. I think their notion of human behavior is flawed. We have plenty of experience with it already and the results are at best mixed. If it has had an effect on gangs, it’s those I have pointed out.