Chicago Backs Off Policing, Murder Rate Skyrockets

One person is shot every two hours.

12.29.2016

In an article for the New York Post, Manhattan Institute fellow and The War on Cops author Heather Mac Donald notes that Chicago’s yearlong shooting rampage gathered momentum over the Christmas weekend, leaving 61 people shot, 11 of them fatally. Seven were killed on Christmas Day alone, more than on the three previous Christmases combined, according to the Chicago Tribune.

With another holiday weekend to go in 2016, 4,334 people -- almost all them black -- have been shot in Chicago so far this year. That comes to one person shot every two hours. As Mac Donald points out, "The police have shot 25 people, virtually all armed or otherwise dangerous — less than .6 percent of the total. That disparity between civilian and police shootings hasn’t stopped local Black Lives Matter activists from continuing to claim that it’s the cops who are the biggest threat facing Chicago’s young black men today."

"Chicago is Exhibit A," she continues, "in what happens when the police back off from enforcing public order, having been told that maintaining control of the streets constitutes racial oppression."

Good work, Black Lives Matter.

Mac Donald goes on to report that arrests in Chicago are down 28 percent this year, the lowest since at least 2001, and less than half what they were in 2010. Drug arrests are down by half.

Anti-cop activists and academics maintain that cops gratuitously harass residents and engage in what is called Broken Windows policing, which is aimed at minor offenses like disorderly conduct, street drug trafficking and loitering. Such critics urge that cops focus instead on “serious crimes” -- and Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson seems to agree. He is de-emphasizing Broken Windows policing in order to target gun violence.

But Mac Donald argues that the distinction between serious crime and "less urgent breakdown in public order is specious. The best way to get gangbangers under control is to maintain street order":

When cops walk past low-level forms of disorder, they send the message that the thugs control the streets. That’s why law-abiding residents of high-crime areas routinely beseech the cops to intervene.

Ideally, mothers and fathers would rein in their children and instill discipline and self-control. But in the absence of two-parent homes, it falls to the police to maintain civil society. Chicago will not put a lid on the growing violence until the police believe they’ll be supported in their mission of bringing public order to the thousands of upstanding, hard-working residents of the South and West Sides.

And if other law enforcement agencies continue the de-policing trend, which has produced a 14 percent spike in homicides this year in the 30 largest cities, Chicago levels of violence may become the new norm.