Posted on 06/16/2016 12:54:20 PM PDT by reaganaut1
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 years tally of 53 shootings. The violence is spilling from the Chicagos 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.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel warned in October 2015 that officers were going fetal as the violence grew. But 2016 produced an even sharper reduction in proactive enforcement. Failures in city leadership after a horrific police shooting, coupled with an ill-considered pact between the American Civil Liberties Union and the police department, are driving that reduction. Residents of Chicagos high-crime areas are paying the price.
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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 dont have to listen, they say.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
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