During World War II American soldiers from Illinois, when they mentioned they were from the Sucker State to a foreigner, would usually have the person making tommy gun shooting motions in response, since the only thing they knew about Illinois was that it had Chicago in it, and the only thing they knew about the city of broad shoulders and narrow brains was Al Capone. Chicago and crime have gone together like the Cubs and losing for a very long time indeed. Father Z notes that this long time association is becoming very troublesome indeed:
I saw this astonishing and yet not at all surprising piece by Rich Lowry.
But will anything useful be done about this? Who wants to bet?
Chicago suffering social meltdown
For most of the country, July Fourth weekend means hot dogs, fireworks and relaxing time with family. In certain neighborhoods in Chicago, it means something very different. For the second year running, Chicago saw a spate of violence over the long holiday weekend that would generate headlines if it happened in Kabul.
“It’s Groundhog Day here in Chicago” is how Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy put it. This year, the tally of shame was more than 80 people shot and 14 killed. Last year, a slightly longer July Fourth weekend — the holiday fell on a Thursday — saw 75 people shot and 12 fatalities.
The astonishing numbers underline how Chicago, despite recent progress on crime, is still a byword for gunplay and urban chaos. It is a city where life, at least among young men living in the most dangerous neighborhoods, is cheap.
Chicago’s killings can’t readily be interpreted through a racial prism, so they don’t provoke gales of outrage from the nation’s opinion-makers. Only very rarely do they become national causes, as in the heartbreaking case of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, shot to death shortly after performing at President Barack Obama’s inauguration last year.
Chicago saw its homicides soar from roughly 430 in 2011 to more than 500 in 2012, before it got them back down below 2011 levels last year, thanks to more aggressive policing. They are running slightly lower again this year, although they are still higher than in New York City, even though Chicago is a third of the size.
Why is Chicago the nation’s murder capital? [BTW… Honduras, where Card. Rodriguez Maradiaga is prelate, is apparently the murder capital of the world.] Its officials always want [pointlessly] to talk about gun laws, and Superintendent McCarthy complained about their laxity after the latest shootings. This is bizarre, since Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and has been slapped down in the courts for trampling on the Second Amendment in its zeal to make it all but impossible to own guns. Chicago is a running illustration of the cliche that if you ban guns, only criminals will own them. [Exactly.]
Gun laws are beside the point. The tony Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park could have the same laws as gun-friendly Vermont and it would still be extremely safe. What Chicago is suffering from is not a random citywide phenomenon, but a specific, highly concentrated one.
Overall, according to Chicago magazine, the rate of nonfatal gunshot injury in Chicago was 46.5 per 100,000 from 2006 to 2012. But it was only 1.62 per 100,000 for whites. For blacks, it was 112.83 per 100,000. For black males, 239.77, and for black males aged 18-34, 599.65, or “a staggering one in 200.”
A study by sociologist Andrew Papachristos shows that the shootings overwhelmingly occur among a small network of criminal offenders.
Chicago is grappling with the profound social breakdown of certain neighborhoods, where the two-parent family has been obliterated and where, too often, young men consider lawlessness the norm. It is here, as Heather Mac Donald of City Journal writes, that gang members define themselves not by “family, or academic accomplishments or interests, but ruthless fealty to small, otherwise indistinguishable, pieces of territory.”
Go here to read the rest. The attempt to erase our Southern border is premised on the contention that the illegal aliens from Central America are really refugees fleeing from crime in their native lands. (Why such “refugees” do not take shelter in nearby nations like Costa Rica, Panama and Mexico is left unanswered.) Well, there are plenty of inner-city neighborhoods in this fair land of freedom where the murder and crime rates are truly abominable. Perhaps a program should be started to provide funds to the inhabitants of such crime-ridden urban death mazes so they can start life over in new countries, Canada for example, or in areas in our nation that are safe from crime. “Mrs. Pelosi, ten thousand Chicagoans are setting up a tent city in your vineyards! Should we release the hounds? ” “Senator Warren, hundreds of Chicagoans are occupying your estate and the Cambridge cops are terrified of them!” You know, this refugee from crime meme could be awfully amusing….
“…gang members define themselves not by “family, or academic accomplishments or interests, but ruthless fealty to small, otherwise indistinguishable, pieces of territory.”
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Wow. Now there’s food for thought
Gun control always works for the criminals. Thus do the Democrats advocate gun control. They are no different than their Stalinist and Maoist forbearers.
This c
Gangs are made up of people who are not very bright. Very violent but not very bright. The Mafia was infinitely smarter.
Sorry about the error on earlier post. I often find after I have submitted a post that auto correct and/or human error in using my phone results in mistakes.
My comment was that this post contains information, re: black on black violence and violence occuring mostly among a specific subset of the population who are gang members/drug lords over given areas of the city territory–that is backed up by my experiences teaching in the inner city schools.
PF said: “Gangs are made up of people who are not very bright. Very violent but not very bright. The Mafia was infinitely smarter.”
Gangs in our areas are made up mostly of single minority males under the age of 25 who are very street smart and who have often not graduated from high school. They are not concerned about being smart. They want to have respect on the street and quick easy cash. They do not expect to live to be 30.
Comparing these inner city gangs of today with the Mafia is like comparing apples and oranges.
“Gangs are made up of people who are not very bright”
It has become almost a cliché of social science that criminals have a significantly lower IQ that the average. It is certainly true that convicts do; whether these are a representative sample of criminals in general is not obvious.
A similar study of the lower ranks of the detective police, largely drawn from the same social milieu, might be revealing.
Cities as different as Glasgow and Paris have pretty well succeeded in quarantining the criminal classes in public housing schemes on the city outskirts; one think of Drumchaple and Easterhouse, Clichy-sous-Bois and La Courneuve.
The fact that the Glaswegian underclass is almost wholly indigenous seems to make little difference. One has the same feral underclass, with inter-generational unemployment and breeding like lice.
MPS said: “It has become almost a cliché of social science that criminals have a significantly lower IQ that the average. It is certainly true that convicts do; whether these are a representative sample of criminals in general is not obvious.”
1. The criminals who are caught & repeat their crimes,because getting caught does not alter their behavior, at a very high rate (as the recidivism rate is very high) would of necessity not be very bright. Lol
2. A very large percentage of our prison populations here in the US have been raised in a home without their biological father–which correlates to a high percentage of the criminals not graduating from high school, etc.
3. There is also correlation between prison populations and those individuals with cognitive disabilities/mental illness. The correlation is particularly high when the incarcerated population under consideration consists of juveniles.
A similar study of the lower ranks of the detective police, largely drawn from the same social milieu, might be revealing.
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No it wouldn’t.
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MPS, do you think perhaps industrial psychologists have not addressed the question of what sort of psychometric scores are associated with what sort of employment? That aside, police officers in this country of all stripes have to pass civil service examinations. They’ve been gutted for reasons of political patronage many places, but people still fail them. “Detectives”, lower-rank or no, have to pass promotional examinations. (IIRC from articles I’ve read, a half-standard-deviation below the median is lower bound for a cop and a standard deviation above the median is lower-bound for a physician).
I did have the advantage in my life of working with low IQ people who taught me a lot about the potential for good OR evil in all of us. Though I worked in a state/ county government agency, I also have been blessed by working a bit with L’Arche. The deep spirituality and unadulterated goodness of some of the people I met!
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As far as the gang violence goes, I was struck by the territoriality! I though when I first read it, of the beautiful song from the movie Exodus- “this land is mine, God gave this land to me!”
Of course people can move away, but then who would they be?! Their identity is tied up there.
We take our identity from God our Father and He has given us the whole world!
We also need the affirmation of belonging to a group… So he gives us each other and we have to work it out from there.
When Mary appeared in Wisconsin to Adele Brice, she called on her to do her mission here – in this “wild” place. Adele had planned earlier in her life to be a missionary- when Mary called her on it , she began walking the wooded area to teach the catechism. Could that happen in gang territory ?
By the way, MPS, police officers are not drawn from the same milieux as gang members in this country, but from the homes of skilled tradesmen and common-and-garden bourgeois who very seldom are found in slums. (Dale Price’s brother is a federal police officer, IIRC. If I’m not mistaken, he has a sidearm, in case you’re tempted to try smuggling single malt scotch through Sault Ste. Marie).
Art Deco wrote, “police officers are not drawn from the same milieux as gang members in this country, but from the homes of skilled tradesmen and common-and-garden bourgeois who very seldom are found in slums.”
In this country, there has long been a policy to target disadvantaged areas for recruitment. It is seen as central to the concept of “community policing,” where officers are drawn from the areas they police and have strong local and family ties there. It is seen as essential to the notion of “policing by consent,” based on management and negotiation, rather than conflict and confrontation.
The old practice of external recruitment for senor ranks, largely from the military, has long been abandoned, although there have been some tentative moves to encourage and fast-track university graduates into leadership and administrative posts.
“If I’m not mistaken, he has a sidearm”
The thought of arming our police force, as at present constituted, would appal, not only the public, but their own senior officers.
“By the way, MPS, police officers are not drawn from the same milieux as gang members in this country, but from the homes of skilled tradesmen and common-and-garden bourgeois who very seldom are found in slums.”
That doesn’t keep them from being criminals frequently–just the same. If their intelligence is higher, it must be their morals that are corrupt.
When I was a teenager, the FBI came into our home town & “encouraged” our chief of police to resign in order to avoid an unveatigation.
Then when I was in college in another town, a police officer involved in a crime ring allowed his fellow police officer to be shot–& then made sure his fellow officer was good & dead before he let anyone know about the shooting.
Then when I started to work after college (3rd town) the sheriff had to be threatened with a state police investigation in order to take 2 of my female students (11& 13 years old) out of their home where their DEA informant father was using his daughters to service the men who were purchasing drugs at their home.
Then my next job out of college led me to a county in which the sheriff was chargers with drug money laundering.
Currently, the town in which I live has a local officer charged with rape–yes during his official duties.
I currently live in a county where the county prosecutor not only used cocaine but also was convicted of running a drug ring. Currently our newly ex-sheriff is facing multiple felony accounts re: his actions in office–along with some of his staff–and was forced to resign around Christmas because he had to be arrested for public drunkenness & resisting arrest by a city police officer.
Then their was the recent unpleasantness of the officers transporting drugs across the state based out of West Memphis.
One might understand such things if these law officers had lower intelligence.
Barbara Gordon
Criminals come from all sorts of backgrounds, of course.
I recall a dispute over a will and one middle-aged lady – very county, twin-set and pearls – was being examined by her own counsel. He knew her credibility would be challenged and that the other side had done their homework, so he tried to lessen its impact by asking, in smooth, level tones:
“And, it’s right, isn’t it that you have one, and only one, criminal conviction and that was for murder and it was a long time ago?” The witness assented.
The Lord Ordinary, who was taking a note of the evidence, actually broke the nib off his fountain pen.
Criminals come from all sorts of backgrounds, of course.
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If you pay attention to British detective serials you know most murderers are provincial late-middle aged bourgeois (except for the one’s Jane Tennyson is after).
I have been following the adventures of Endeavor Morse and I had no idea that Oxford Dons were so addicted to murder! Of course, as an American officer during World War II told Inspector Foyle in an episode of Foyle’s War, he had heard that the English were murdering each other all the time, but he never thought he would become involved in one! (If only real life murders were as intriguing as fictional ones. Alas, those that I have been involved in, purely in my professional capacity of course, have tended to be simple to solve, overwhelmingly sad, and the murderers not at all interesting.)
I was involved in one rather intriguing murder trial, a spin-off of the Glasgow Ice-Cream wars. Arthur “Fat Boy” Thomas, the son of Mr Arthur Thomson, a well-known entrepreneur was shot three times outside the family home (The Ponderosa) and suspicion fell on one of Mr Thomson’s former enforcers, Paul Ferris, who was now operating on his own.
On the day of “Fat Boy’s funeral, and after the procession had passed it, police discovered a car containing the bodies of two associates of Paul Ferris, Robert Glover and Joe Hanlon. They had been shot in the posterior and in the back of the head. The officer in charge of the “Fat Boy” murder enquiry confirmed to reporters that they were treating the deaths as suspicious.
In the fullness of time Paul Ferris was charged with the murder. Some 300 witnesses were called, but what gave the trial an unusual degree of interest was that a number of the Crown witnesses were given “Tipperary Alibis” by the defence. In other words, the defence called witnesses to prove those Crown witnesses had not been where they claimed to be. After 54 days, the jury found the charge not proven. He now has interests in the cab and private hire trade in Edinburgh.
I have been following the adventures of Endeavor Morse and I had no idea that Oxford Dons were so addicted to murder!
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Only after 1986. Back in 1963 when Morse started with the Oxford police, it was pretty much townies.
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Most recent discovery was a department store manager inadvertantly kills his wife then goes off on a serial killing spree making use of imported panty host to strangle three adulterous women he hardly knew from a cord of wood, stabbing a stock clerk in his establishment to death when said clerk caught him nicking the panty hose, and then caught in the act of trying to dispatch one of his staff with the panty hose (she was long separated from her husband and dating). After that, an old flame of Morse’s supervisor commits suicide a propos of nothing in particular. (Yes, they need better writers).
MPS said: I recall a dispute over a will and one middle-aged lady – very county, twin-set and pearls – was being examined by her own counsel. He knew her credibility would be challenged and that the other side had done their homework, so he tried to lessen its impact by asking, in smooth, level tones:
“And, it’s right, isn’t it that you have one, and only one, criminal conviction and that was for murder and it was a long time ago?” The witness assented.
The Lord Ordinary, who was taking a note of the evidence, actually broke the nib off his fountain”
Bbbbaaaahhhhhaaaaa!!!! 😀
Art Deco wrote, “Yes, they need better writers.
But Barrington Pheloung’s score makes up for everything
” After that, an old flame of Morse’s supervisor commits suicide a propos of nothing in particular. ”
Thought maybe it’s the ‘modern’ way of ascribing ‘humanity’ to a character. Thursday is such a just, intelligent man (with a remarkable voice). The woman he used to know turned his head momentarily so, of course by modern standards, her death would be the only way for him to remain totally loyal to his marriage and, as well, give the viewers a touch of something to emote ‘sympathy’.
The Dons seem to be in the target of ‘Endeavor’ with the revelations of traits that are emphasized.