Chicago and other big cities - havens for criminals?

More and more reports out of Chicago suggest that the city - or, at least, parts of the city - are becoming havens for the lawless, secure areas for criminals to prey on others as they please.  Furthermore, it's apparently not alone in that.

Heather MacDonald recently reported on 'How Chicago's streets became the Wild West', and claimed that pressure from the Black Lives Matter movement and the ACLU was responsible.

Someone was shot in Chicago every 150 minutes during the first five months of 2016. Someone was murdered every 14 hours, and the city saw nearly 1,400 nonfatal shootings and 240 fatalities from gunfire. Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot, nearly one an hour, topping the previous year's tally of 53 shootings. The violence is spilling from Chicago's gang-infested South and West Sides into the business district downtown. Lake Shore Drive has seen drive-by shootings and robberies.

The growing mayhem is the result of Chicago police officers' withdrawing from proactive enforcement, making the city a dramatic example of what I have called the Ferguson effect. Since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014, the conceit that American policing is lethally racist has dominated media and political discourse, from the White House on down. Cops in minority neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities have responded by backing away from pedestrian stops and public-order policing; criminals are flourishing in the vacuum.

. . .

Police officers who try to intervene in this disorder often face virulent pushback. "People are a hundred times more likely to resist arrest," a police officer who has worked a decade and a half on the South Side told me. "People want to fight you; they swear at you. 'F--- the police, we don't have to listen,' they say. I haven't seen this kind of hatred towards the police in my career."

Antipolice animus is nothing new in Chicago. But the post-Ferguson Black Lives Matter narrative about endemically racist cops has made the street dynamic much worse. A detective told me: "From patrol to investigation, it's almost an undoable job now. If I get out of my car, the guys get hostile right away." Bystanders sometimes aggressively interfere, requiring more officers to control the scene.

. . .

On Jan. 1 [Chicago's Police Department] rolled out a new form for documenting investigatory stops to meet ACLU demands. The new form, called a contact card, was two pages long, with 70 fields of information to be filled out. This template dwarfs even arrest reports and takes at least 30 minutes to complete. Every card goes to the ACLU for review.

The arrangement had the intended deterrent effect: Police stops dropped nearly 90% in the first quarter of 2016. Criminals have become emboldened by the police disengagement. "Gangbangers now realize that no one will stop them," says a former high-ranking official with the department. People who wouldn't have carried a gun before are now armed, a South Side officer told me. Cops say the solution is straightforward: "If tomorrow we still had to fill out the new forms, but they no longer went to the ACLU, stops would increase," a detective said.

There's more at the link.

Even upscale areas of the city are vulnerable to the upsurge in crime.  CWB Chicago reported earlier this month:

A robbery crew targeted people along the Lakefront Path near Belmont Harbor yesterday afternoon—repeatedly tossing bikes in front of oncoming bicyclists in an effort to knock people down so they could be robbed according to multiple witnesses and one known victim.

Again, more at the link.

Karl Denninger's response was trenchant and uncompromising:

Why would anyone continue to live in such a ****hole?  Why does anyone put up with the wildings on Michigan Avenue, assaults near North Avenue on the beach, problems at Navy Pier and now, it appears, the inability to ride a bike worth more than $100 on the Lakefront path -- unless you want to be assaulted and robbed.

Time to leave folks, if you're one of the producers, and let the city implode into a writhing mass of dependency, rot, ruin and crime.

More at the link.

Back in 2013 Chicago Magazine claimed that 'Chicago’s Criminals Are Getting Away With Murder'.  Looks like they weren't just reporting current reality, but prophesying future trends as well.  Chicago's far from alone in facing that problem, of course.  Large cities all over the country are facing an upsurge in violent crime - and their law enforcement departments and officers are often hamstrung by 'politically correct' leadership.

I ascribe a lot of this to what I've come to call the 'entitlement generation' - those who are used to having everything given to them, and who've been brought up without even the faintest concept of a sense of responsibility for their actions.  That's spread down even to young criminals, who seem to genuinely believe that if they want something, it's all right to simply take it, or to steal something from others, sell it, and use the money to buy what they want.  Witness the complete lack of respect for the law, or conventional moral or ethical standards, in the reaction of his cousin to the death of a teenage thief, earlier this year, at the hands of his intended victim:  “You have to understand, you have to look at it from a child's point of view that was raised in the hood. How he gonna get his money to have clothes to go to school?"

Contrast that with the attitudes of this young man - also black, also from an economically stressed and socially challenged area, but doing things the right way.  I wish there were more like him . . . but I fear there aren't enough.  The moral and mental vacuum demonstrated by the two girls in the video above is becoming more and more prevalent.  It - and the ACLU's support for and tolerance of those who espouse it - is, I submit, a big part of the reason why Chicago's crime figures are going through the roof.

That sort of social abyss is one of the most important reasons why Miss D. and I moved away from a big-city environment earlier this year.  We now live in a smaller community, in a much more self-reliant area with pretty solid attitudes towards crime, law and order, and we feel much more secure for it.  If any significant group of people around here began to behave as the hoodlums in Chicago appear to be doing, they'd damn soon be straightened out - not by the cops, but by local residents, who wouldn't tolerate such conduct for a skinny minute.  They'd only call the cops to clean up the mess after they'd finished!

Peter