Violence in Chicago is reaching epidemic proportions, wrote Heather Mac Donald in the City Journal. In the
first five months of 2016, someone was shot every two and a half hours and
someone murdered every 14 hours, for a total of nearly 1,400 nonfatal shooting
victims and 240 fatalities. Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot,
nearly one per hour, dwarfing the previous year’s tally of 53 shootings over
the same period. The violence is spilling over from the city’s gang-infested
South and West Sides into the downtown business district; Lake Shore Drive has
seen drive-by shootings and robberies.
The growing mayhem is the result of Chicago police officers’
withdrawal 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, Missouri, in August 2014, the conceit that American policing is
lethally racist has dominated the national airwaves and political discourse,
from the White House on down. In response, cops in minority neighborhoods in
Chicago and other cities around the country are backing off pedestrian stops
and public-order policing; criminals are flourishing in the resulting vacuum.
(An early and influential Ferguson-effect denier has now changed his mind: in a
June 2016 study for the National Institute of Justice, Richard Rosenfeld of the
University of Missouri–St. Louis concedes that the 2015 homicide increase in
the nation’s large cities was “real and nearly unprecedented.” “The only
explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” he
told the Guardian.)
Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel warned in October 2015 that
officers were going “fetal,” as shootings in the city skyrocketed. But 2016 has
brought an even sharper reduction in proactive enforcement. Devastating
failures in Chicago’s leadership after a horrific police shooting and an
ill-considered pact between the American Civil Liberties Union and the police
are driving that reduction. Residents of Chicago’s high-crime areas are paying
the price.
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