Crime and Punishment

 

Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot visited LA and San Francisco to see how they handle smash-n-grab.  That’s a bit like sitting down with Elizabeth Holmes, formerly of Theranos to see how she did product development.

Major cities across the US are in the midst of a crime wave, enabled in large part by Woke DA’s whose elections were financed by George Soros and Woke “bail reform” efforts that have led to violent criminals being released without bond.  

Chicago, in particular, is under siege, having eclipsed 800 murders so far this year, some of them quite heinous.

·        A 70 year old retired special ed teacher slain on the way home from a White Sox game on the Dan Ryan Expressway.  The shooter was identified but never charged.

·        A 36 year old female graduate student was stabbed to death just blocks from Sears Tower on a Sunday morning.

·        Most recently, a 71 year old former restauranteur was executed in Chinatown.

·        A University of Chicago student was slain on the way home from his internship last summer and a recent graduate was murdered in the middle of the day for $600 worth of goods.

This is just a sampling of the horrific occurrences over the past year in Chicago, which has seen over 4,300 shootings, 1,600 carjackings, beatings, muggings and numerous other organized smash and grabs.  The spike in crime has devastated these cities.  Restaurants, retail establishments and tourism are taking a beating.   Large retailers like Target have gone to Congress asking for help.   Joe Perillo, owner of Gold Coast Exotic Motor Cars in Chicago, a one-time supporter of Lightfoot publicly lashed out, “Enough is enough.”

Ironically, during the same week as Jussie Smollett was convicted of staging a fake hate crime, Woom Sing Tse was randomly shot and killed in broad daylight.

In the midst of all this, I raise some important issues:

1.      Why was Darrell Brooks, the driver of the SUV that mowed down 60 people in Waukesha, not charged with a hate crime?  Why was Alphonso Joyner similarly not charged with a hate crime for the murder of Mr. Tse in Chicago? You can bet that if races were reversed, charges would be brought.  If we are to invoke hate crime statutes, shouldn’t they go both ways?

2.      Isn’t a fake hate crime actually worse than a hate crime?  A hate crime is directed at one or more individuals.  A fake hate crime, however, is directed at societal cohesion as a whole.  It is calculated to create racial animus where none exists.  Moreover, in the cases of Bubba Wallace and Jussie Smollett, those perpetrators had accomplices.   Politicians and the media were more than willing to make judgments before any of the facts were known.  In the case of the actual perpetrator, the correct punishment should be

3.      What do we do about “feral youth?”  This is perhaps the most difficult and vexing question our society must face with regard to criminal justice.  One of the teens involved in the robbery and murder of 18 year old Tessa Majors in NY was only 13 at the time and was sentenced to a mere 18 months in juvenile detention.  The teen girls that killed the Pakistani Uber Eats driver received an easy plea deal.  In Chicago,  young Adam (Li’l Homicide) Toledo was killed by a Chicago patrolman when he turned with a gun in his hand in a dark gangway in the middle of the night.  Carjackers are often 10-16 years old and I saw one film clip of a 5 year old kid that was part of a carjacking team.   What is to be done with these rogue youngsters.  In the case of youths that would be convicted of murder or attempted murder, as the girls that killed the Pakistani driver, I would be hard pressed to have hopes for a future for them, or that they could be rehabbed.  

4.      The explosion of crime in major cities simultaneously leads one to question whether this is simply a wrongheaded set of policies or whether something more nefarious is going on.   Is there intent to  purposefully force professional class and working class citizens (mostly white) people out of urban areas—deport them, if you will, or rather lead them to self-deport?  In Chicago, it seems to be backfiring, as professional class and working class blacks are exiting the city.

These are not easy issues to discuss but they must be faced head on if we are to save our great American cities.