Posted on 03/02/2023 4:25:03 AM PST by MtnClimber
In Chicago on Tuesday, current Mayor Lori Lightfoot lost her bid for re-election. In a race where only the top two finishers would advance to the final round, Lightfoot finished third, with 17.1% of the vote. Of nine total candidates, the top two vote-getters were Paul Vallas (33.7% of the vote) and Brandon Johnson (20.3%). Those two will now compete in a runoff in April.
The New York Times, which provided those voting data, described Lightfoot in its February 28 report as someone “whose outsider status and promises to enact sweeping reforms propelled her to office four years ago,” but who “saw her popularity plunge as homicides reached generational highs and as Chicago struggled to rebound from the pandemic.”
It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person. A fair summary of Lightfoot’s term is that she totally failed to deal with Chicago’s most pressing issue, which is crime — particularly the horrifying rate of murders of young black men. And when called out on that issue, she reacted by accusing anyone who opposed her of racism. Frankly, she is despicable.
Charles Blow of the New York Times — a progressive and very sympathetic to Lightfoot — interviewed her four days before the election, and reported on the interview in a column today. Needless to say, Lightfoot took the opportunity of speaking to Blow to accuse the apparent frontrunner in the race, Paul Vallas, of racism. (Vallas was the only white candidate among the nine in the contest.). From Blow’s piece:
Vallas had run a tough-on-crime, law-and-order campaign in which he told one crowd that his “whole campaign is about taking back our city, pure and simple.” Lightfoot called the remark “the ultimate dog whistle.” In our interview, she was brutal in her racial assessment of Vallas: “He is giving voice and platform to people who are hateful of anyone who isn’t white and Republican in our city, in our country.”
And in the immediate aftermath of the election, the New York Post quoted Lightfoot as follows:
“I’m a black woman in America. Of course,” she replied when asked by a reporter if she had been treated unfairly.
Sure, Lori. And just how bad is the carnage among young black men in Chicago? The data are not necessarily easy to find, because this is one of those subjects that is systematically suppressed by the government press. But if you take time to do some research, what you find is truly astounding.
In March 2019, the Children’s Research Institute of the Children’s Hospital of Chicago put out a big Report with the title “Adolescent Firearm Homicide in Chicago 2013–2017: Young Black Males at High Risk.” Admittedly, this Report came out just as Lightfoot was getting elected four years ago, and it uses data from a five-year window before she was in office. However, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment, there is every reason to believe that things got even somewhat worse on her watch. Key finding:
In 2016, Chicago’s overall adolescent firearm homicide rate was about three times the national rate, while Chicago’s black male adolescent firearm rate was nearly 50 times the national rate.
They provide the following chart of homicide rates for the five years analyzed:
Now 365.3 per 100,000 is a truly astounding homicide rate. The overall homicide rate for Chicago has run around 25-30 per 100,000 over the last decade, which is very high, but less than a tenth of the 365. The nation’s true murder capitals — places like Detroit, Baltimore and St. Louis — rarely exceed an overall homicide rate of about 50 per 100,000. A rate of 365 per 100,000 means that over a five year period a black male adolescent in Chicago stands nearly a 2% chance of getting murdered.
The Children’s Hospital Report also provides maps by year of the neighborhoods in Chicago where the murders of black adolescents took place. Here is the chart for 2016, the worst of the years in the study. Colored shading indicates higher homicide rates, with the darker colors designating the highest rates:
If you know your Chicago neighborhoods, you will quickly recognize that all the most dangerous neighborhoods are the most heavily black areas.
Did things improve on Lightfoot’s watch? There is every reason to believe that things got even worse. Station WTTW provides the following chart of murders in Chicago by year from 1999 to 2022:
Chicago had set a then-record of 778 murders in 2016. But after some declines before Lightfoot took office, the number of murders went back up to 776 in 2020, and then hit a new record of 802 in 2021 — both on Lightfoot’s watch. There was a modest decline in 2022, although WTTW reports that other categories of crime continued to increase. There is every reason to believe that the proportion of the murders involving young black men did not improve during Lightfoot’s mayoralty.
As noted many times previously on this blog, in the late 1980s and early 1990s New York City had a murder rate in the range of 25-30 per 100,000 — comparable to Chicago’s rates over the past decade. During the Giuliani and Bloomberg mayoralties from 1994 to 2013, the murder rate here went all the way down to 4 per 100,000 (before rising back to about 6 per 100,000 under Mayor de Blasio). New York has shown how it is done. If New York can do it, Chicago has no excuse. Approximately 400 +/- murders of young black men in Chicago each year over the past four years are blood on Lori Lightfoot’s hands.
Meanwhile, in a piece at Outkick, also from today, Ian Miller notes a few of Lightfoot’s other “accomplishments”:
-“She supported defunding the police, asking for an $80 million budget cut after the summer of 2020.”
-“Her COVID authoritarianism was outrageous, embarrassing and disgraceful. Beyond many other mandates, she seemingly took joy in eliminating the ability of unvaccinated people to ‘live life’ as they wanted.”
-“She was also, unsurprisingly, an early believer in the Jussie Smollett hoax which came just before the 2019 election.”
And it goes on and on from there. It would be very hard for Chicago’s next Mayor to be worse than Lightfoot.
Let’s hope that Chicago can be turned around from becoming the “South Africa of North America”.
More like Somalia if you ask me but I get your point.
Also, “Lightfoot finished third”......unbelievable she got enough votes to finish THAT high. Make me wonder about the intelect of 17% of the Chicago population. SMH
I really don’t care as much about the high murder rate of young black men as by young black men.
In New Orleans, 1 in.14 black.men will be murdered by the age of 35 at present rates. The converse is that roughly 1 in 14 black men will kill by that age. 7% of the black men are on the murderer track, 7% on the murdered track, and it’s actually higher because not everyone choosing the thug life kills or is killed, but the potential is there.
Likewise in Chicago. To speak of the young black men as victims is to ignore them as moral actors who.chose that life.
Our moral outrage belongs with the innocent victims, be they white, black, male, female, old, young.
Every decent person would save young black from the thug life if we could, but we don’t know how.
Murder is a race in Chicago. Who can kill the fastest?
Education?
________
You can lead a horse to water...
If Chicagoans keep voting liberal there will be serious problems, so suck it up.
Seems like they need Ranked Choice Voting.
Actually, we do. Most of the crime and violence is driven by out-of-wedlock births by poor women. One factor is obviously welfare subsidies for being an out-of-wedlock mother.
But the main cause is that there are no marriageable young men, and the main cause of that is there are no jobs for "unskilled" young black men that pay enough to support a household. The same is increasingly true in former white working class areas, which is why you see the same phenomenon of high out-of-wedlock births, crime and drugs spreading to white areas as well.
What's the solution? Halt immigration and tariff imports to the point that more business must be done in the US to operate. Basically, raise the portion of national income going to labor back to what it was in the late 1960s, only this time with black males having an equal chance to share in it.
You know, Trump's policies.
I agree that welfare and the loss of good blue collar jobs wrecked the black family, but I don’t think the political will to reverse those trends exists, not among the powerful. Restarting factories wouldn’t be easy, we have lost so much know how, ie machinists. And if we did have the factories and the jobs open, do people brought up for three generations of resentment and dysfunction have it in them to go to work and marry?
Let’s start there but it is not going to be easy at any step. Hard to put broken things together again.
Abolish welfare.
Why do boys join the thug life? Because that’s what gets them laid. Because girls are excited by thugs, and welfare allows them to not need guys with jobs to support them.
Take welfare away, give girls an incentive to prefer stable guys with jobs, and you will reduce thug-life.
There are no marriageable young men because lower-class young women prefer exciting thugs to guys in stable, but low-income, jobs. Because welfare allows them to.
If young men saw that getting skilled and getting a job was the only way to have a woman date him, then they would be more likely to strive to get job skills.
Middle-class and working-class women would oppose it. They don't want underclass women having an incentive to poach on the men in THEIR dating pools.
When I was young, such jobs were almost exclusively reserved for teenagers getting the first work experience. Adults were never expected to support a household on such wages. Now, it's just about impossible in any urban area. And if all the goof off young males suddenly decided to find such jobs, where would they be? Maybe if you booted out all the Mexicans they'd find work. When I moved to the city where I live now 30 years ago, almost all service jobs were held by blacks and few working class whites. Now most are Hispanic. Plus the influx of immigrants has raised housing costs tremendously.
Of course welfare contributes to the problem, but there's also a biological impulse. If there is no economic framework to support the bourgeois virtues, don't expect any community to learn them. We learn a lot from the discipline and social skills needed to work. But that also requires a carrot as well as a stick.
We have consistently chosen the worst economic, tax, trade, regulatory, and immigration policies beginning with Nixon's going off the gold standard in 1971. Yet even small improvements as we saw with Trump show how quickly the US can recover if those policies are changed.
I agree it won't happen overnight. But if we do nothing, the US will look like Brazil in 20 years. The biggest problem right now is, How do we get rid of the illegitimate regime in DC?
There is a finite supply of jobs that can be done by low-IQ/low-education people. Those jobs have been taken by illegal immigrants. We need to evict the illegals.
We also need to figure out ways to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US.
In addition, half the population has a below average IQ: what are they supposed to do? Starve? Sit on the dole their whole lives?
If they can't find work I'll tell you what they will do: vote for socialism.
By low-IQ I meant the average IQ of the “inner city”.
The average black IQ is 85, but I’m guessing the “inner city” average, if measured, would be below 85.
There ARE jobs for such, doing yardwork, day labor, and such, but those jobs are currently held by illegals.
Only works with those who are willing to be taught and have some capacity for learning.
Otherwise, it's just a waste of time and money.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.