She won’t be around much longer.
The Black Body Count Rises as Chicago Police Step Back
In 2016 nearly 3,000 people have been shot in the city, an average of one victim every two hours.
By Heather Mac Donald
Sept. 11, 2016 5:58 p.m. ET
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‘The streets are gone,” Dean Angelo, president of the Chicago police union, told me last month. The night before, Aug. 14, a Chicago police officer’s son had been killed in a shooting while sitting on his family’s porch, one of 92 people killed in Chicago during the worst month for homicides in the Windy City since July 1993. The August victims who survived included 10-year-old Tavon Tanner, shot while playing in front of his house (the bullet ripped through Tavon’s pancreas, intestines, kidney and spleen); an 8-year-old girl shot in the arm while crossing the street; and two 6-year-old girls.
On Sept. 6, a 71-year-old man was accosted by a teen on a bike while watering his lawn. The robber demanded the man’s wallet and when he refused shot him in the abdomen, then grabbed his wallet before pedaling away.
By Sept. 8, nearly 3,000 people had been shot in Chicago in 2016, an average of one shooting victim every two hours. Five hundred and sixteen people had been murdered. Gun homicides and non-fatal shootings were up 47% over the same period of 2015, which had seen a significant rise in crime over 2014.
Dean Angelo, president of the Chicago police union, Nov. 24, 2015. ENLARGE
Dean Angelo, president of the Chicago police union, Nov. 24, 2015. Photo: Associated Press
“There is no way out of this shooting spree,” Mr. Angelo said. His despair is understandable, because Chicago is the country’s most-glaring example of what I have called the “Ferguson effect.” Chicago officers have cut back drastically on proactive policing under the onslaught of criticism from the Black Lives Matter movement and its political and media enablers.
In October 2015, Mayor Rahm Emanuel told U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch during a crime meeting in Washington, D.C., that the Chicago police had gone “fetal,” and were less likely to interdict criminal behavior. That pull-back worsened in 2016, with pedestrian stops dropping 82% from January through July 20, 2016, compared with the same period in 2015, according to the Chicago police department. The cops are just “driving by people on the corners,” Mr. Angelo says, rather than checking out known drug dealers and others who raise suspicions. Criminals are back in control and black lives are being lost at a rate not seen for two decades.
Read at: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-black-body-count-rises-as-chicago-police-step-back-1473631079