One safe block in Chicago

You will be glad to learn that Mayor Lightfoot has made sure that one block in Chicago will be kept safe while the murderers and looters continue to do their thing. From the Chicago Tribune:

Lightfoot and Chicago police Superintendent David Brown were asked at an unrelated news conference about a Tribune report noting police have banned protesters from demonstrating on her block in the Logan Square neighborhood, ordering officers to arrest anyone who refuses to leave.

The directive surfaced in a July email from then-Shakespeare District Cmdr. Melvin Roman to officers under his command. It did not distinguish between the peaceful protesters Lightfoot regularly says she supports and those who might intend to be destructive, but ordered that after a warning is given to demonstrators, “It should be locked down.”

Read more here.

Not having it!

Chicago police aren’t having it anymore

pic.twitter.com/QRfarDaVtM

— ELIJAH RIOT (@ElijahSchaffer) August 17, 2020

Chicago local news

From the satirical Babylon Bee:

Chicago Weatherman Predicts Another Huge Murder Front This Weekend

Animation by @AXECOP
Narrated by Babylon Bee fan, Austin Robertson pic.twitter.com/s5HzOYk5M1

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) August 15, 2020

That'll do it!

A lovely Chicago afternoon

Chicago: pic.twitter.com/hQ7OmvV1b0

— Kyle Kashuv (@KyleKashuv) July 24, 2020

War zones

Syria, Chicago

War zones

Gun-controlled Chicago

AWR Hawkins reports at Breitbart,

At first, the 2016 murder figures for gun-controlled Chicago drew attention by hitting 500, which was 32 higher than the total number of murders in 2015. Then the number of murders rose to 700, followed by a Chicago Tribune report that the number of murders between January 1, 2016, and December 6, 2016, hit 731.

...Now the figure sits at 768 and gun-controlled Chicago is fast-approaching 800 murders for the year.

For those paying attention, the carnage–and the possibility for more carnage–in Chicago has been evident for quite some time. After all, Chicago is a gun control experiment gone wrong; a city which enacted a total handgun ban in 1982, thereby guaranteeing that the only people who had handguns were the criminals. Law-abiding citizens were reduced to using baseball bats, sticks, pitchforks, etc., for self-defense. And the results were easy to predict–the Tribune reported the decade following the implementation of Chicago’s ban saw “murders [jump] by 41 percent, compared with an 18 percent rise in the entire United States.”

...Moreover, gun control remains the go-to solution for Chicago city leaders and many state politicians who refuse to admit it is actually gun control’s failure that caused this death epidemic to begin with. So state representatives like Sonya Harper (D-6th) react to 2016’s relentless murder spree by sponsoring a bill that would require serial numbers to be placed on every bullet and bullet-casing. Would Harper’s plan reduce crime or murder? No. But it would drive up the price of ammunition, thereby putting one more burden in the way of law-abiding citizens trying to acquire the tools they need to defend their lives.

...Seventy individuals were shot over Thanksgiving weekend and, more recently, over 40 were shot during the Christmas weekend. In fact, the murder rate in Chicago is so high that it is skewing national murder figures for 2016. Yet the media is largely mum on the soaring death rate, as covering it honestly would mean admitting that gun control has actually endangered lives, rather than saved them.

Read more here.

Happy Thanksgiving? Not so much.

AWR Hawkins reports at Breitbart,

Violence raged in gun-controlled Chicago over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, with 62 people shot and wounded, another eight people shot and killed.

...According to the Chicago Tribune, the Thanksgiving holiday weekend violence brings Chicago to nearly 4,000 shooting victims for the year. That figure includes fatal and non-fatal shootings.

...Chicago has long been a gun control experiment gone awry. The city enacted a ban on handgun ownership in 1982 and the Tribune reported that the next 10 years witnessed “murders [jump] by 41 percent, compared with an 18 percent rise in the entire United States.” And this jump made sense. After all, when bans are enacted only the criminals remain armed.

The ban was overturned in 2010 via the Supreme Court ruling in McDonald v Chicago, but city leaders have worked diligently to preserve the vestiges of the ban at every turn in road. And municipal and county limits on the number of gun stores allowed in Chicago, together with rules on the locations of those stores and a ridiculous amount of regulation on acquiring and carrying guns for self-defense, have coalesced to guarantee that criminals maintain an advantage similar to what they enjoyed when the ban was in place.

The latest proposed requirement for Chicago is to mandate serial numbers be placed on all bullets and bullet casings. This is being pushed by state representative Sonya Harper (D-6th) as way to combat crime. In the real world such a requirement will not do anything to stop crime, but it will drive up the cost of ammunition, thereby making it even more difficult for law-abiding citizens to acquire the tools they need to defend themselves and their families.

Read more here.

But they have strict gun control regulations!

They can't find their tongues

John Kass writes in the Chicago Tribune,

Sometimes, what politicians avoid, what they won't say, is more compelling than their dog and pony shows and photo ops.

He is referring to the fact that neither Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton has said one word demanding justice in the Laquan McDonald case in Chicago. Why?

The guy who runs Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, is their guy.

Were Emanuel a Republican they'd be all over this town. But since he's theirs, a Democrat who was Obama's chief of staff and served President Bill Clinton as an aide, they've decided not to engage.

Chicago roils. Protesters — white, black, brown — take the streets. And calls continue for the mayor to resign over the monthslong suppression of a police video showing a white cop shooting black teenager McDonald 16 times until dead.

For national Democrats, this should be a perfect storm: race, politics, anger, cops, black votes and the politics of grievance or social justice.

This is the irresistible combination Democrats have used for decades. It is the stuff that drives the Democratic Party's political theater. And of course, Obama, Clinton and other national Democrats certainly remember what a smart political operative famously said a few years ago:

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste."

You know who said that. Rahm said it.

...Obama has had much to say in other cities when things go wrong between communities and police. He's involved himself in the debate a number of times.

He had his say about the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida, and later, the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

Obama even called race into question without having the facts, as in 2009, when Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home after a neighbor reported a break-in.

Gates had forgotten his key, and he and his driver were trying to push open the door when white police Sgt. James Crowley arrived. Gates said he lived there. Crowley said he couldn't take his word alone for that.

Obama weighed in, and didn't bother with a spokesman to maintain a safe distance. The president used his own mouth, and forcefully, and Gates hadn't been shot 16 times.

"Now, I've — I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that," Obama said. "But I think it's fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry; No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And No. 3, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact."

But when it comes to McDonald and Rahm and what's happening in Chicago, Obama and Mrs. Clinton speak to us by proxy.

They don't hold speeches. They don't discuss it publicly. They won't say a word on television. They don't want to talk about Rahm and Chicago and McDonald on camera.

A Clinton spokesman said she was "deeply troubled" by the killing. And the president's press secretary, Josh Earnest, said Thursday that the president is "concerned."

"I think the mayor himself has acknowledged that a lot of work needs to be done to rebuild trust between the Chicago Police Department and the citizens of that fine city that they were sworn to serve and protect," Earnest said.

Asked if the president and the mayor had spoken, and if Obama still had confidence in Emanuel, Earnest said:

"The last that I heard, which was a few days ago, the president had not spoken to Mayor Emanuel. But — so I'm not aware of any conversations at this point. OK?"

OK, we get it. Nobody knows nothing. That's a Chicago thing, too.

Read more here.

Life in the hood

Homocides. What is the first thing you think of when you hear that word? Baltimore and Chicago? Blacks? Baltimore has surpassed Chicago as the city with the highest homocide rate. There is a website called HeyJackass that keeps track of Chicago homocides. Did you know that there is a shooting every 2:51 minutes in Chicago? A homocide every 16:45 minutes? 79.1% of victims (311 people) are Black. 17.0% (67 people) are Hispanic. In 290 of those cases, there has been no suspect charged! 2397 persons have been shot so far in 2015 in Chicago. 359 of those have been killed; the rest wounded.

The sad situation of Chicago

Why do we have to rely on British media to find out what is going on in America? The Guardian has been investigating the failures of Chicago's blue state model. The American Interest reports,

Last February, an investigation revealed that Chicago had a detention facility that lawyers claimed was “the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site”; those in the Homan Square site experienced a number of abuses, including being held without access to an attorney and suffering beatings by police. In a followup to its February investigation, the Guardian has released more information on the scandal. Some of the key findings from the new report:

Between September 2004 and June 2015, around 3,540 people were eventually charged, mostly with forms of drug possession – primarily heroin, as well as marijuana and cocaine – but also for minor infractions such as traffic violations, public urination and driving without a seatbelt.
More than 82% of the Homan Square arrests thus far disclosed – or 2,974 arrests – are of black people, while 8.5% are of white people. Chicago, according to the 2010 US census, is 33% black and 32% white.
Over two-thirds of the arrests at Homan Square thus far revealed – at least 2,522 – occurred under the tenure of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former top aide to Barack Obama who has said of Homan Square that the police working under him “follow all the rules”.

Read more here.

Why isn't this front page news?

Dan from Madison writes in Chicago Boyz that

Moody’s has downgraded the rating of the debt of the City of Chicago to “junk”.

...Every single thing that has happened in Chicago has come under the Democrats’ watch. There is no way out for them. They created it, they participated in it, and they kicked the can down the road for the current generation to watch it all implode.

Read more here.

Freebies

Instapundit links to an abstract by two economists. It is about prostitution in Chicago. Among the findings:

A prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one. We estimate that there are 4,400 street prostitutes active in Chicago in an average week.

The transaction-level data we collected suggests that street prostitution yields an
average wage of $27 per hour. Given the relatively limited hours that active prostitutes
work, this generates less than $20,000 annually for a women working year round in
prostitution. While the wage of a prostitute is four times greater than the non-prostitution earnings these women report (approximately $7 per hour), there are tremendous risks associated with life as a prostitute. According to our estimates, a woman working as a prostitute would expect an annual average of a dozen incidents of violence and 300 instances of unprotected sex.