Shootings Set Records in Chicago as New Police Rules Inhibit Enforcement

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, April 25, 2016:  

New rules, new training (especially sensitivity training), and fear of additional mandates coming when the Department of Justice completes its investigation into the shooting of Laquan McDonald in 2014 are forcing members of the Chicago Police Department to hunker down and hide behind those new rules rather than risk their careers in Chicago’s politically correct and criminally volcanic West and South sides.

By the end of March, the numbers of people being shot were already setting records. Three weeks later, a “grim milestone” was reached: more than 1,000 Chicagoans have been shot so far this year, with nearly 200 of them dying from their wounds. The Chicago Tribune has been tracking the violence, starting in 2012, and noted that the 1,000 marker was reached on June 9 that year. A year later it was hit on June 26. In 2014 it was hit on June 15 while last year the milestone was reached on June 4.

Translation: violent crime in Chicago is between six and nine weeks ahead of schedule.

What’s sad for observers and painful (often fatal) for citizens in the Windy City is that the police know who the perps are and where they live. Yet the crime spree continues, apparently unabated. The official line, as expected, is the “easy availability of guns, and intractable gang problem, and conflicts sparked by social media.” The real reason is the ACLU, the Department of Justice, Mayor Rahm Emanuel (pictured above), the “McDonald effect” and, until last month, the state’s attorney general Anita Alvarez. The primary igniter is the unraveling of the cover-up of the dash-cam video of the shooting of Laquan McDonald in October 2014 and its consequences.

The ACLU determined that, thanks to the shooting of McDonald by Officer Jason Van Dyke, there is a determinedly racist taint to the CPD’s approach to crime prevention and law enforcement: some 72 percent of arrests and “investigative stops” involved blacks, and, to the ACLU, that is decidedly unfair. The fact that most crimes are committed by those blacks didn’t seem to register, nor did it with the Illinois legislature, which went along with various new rules and regulations that every cop on the beat must now follow. Every stop must be recorded on a “contact card” with a full explanation of why the stop was initiated, what caused the officer to confront the individual, what the conversation was and how it ended.

This certainly slowed down the process. In January, CPD officers made 6,818 arrests, down from nearly 10,000 the year before, and only 9,044 “investigatory stops,” down from more than 61,000 in January a year earlier. This relaxation naturally led the criminal gang element to step up their murderous activities. As the Chicago Tribune noted at the time, law enforcement officials are “much less aggressive on the street out of fear that doing even basic police work would get them into trouble. [As a result] criminals [are] taking advantage of their passive approach.”

In addition to having to complete those euphemistically named “contact cards,” each officer must attend sensitivity training classes in order to understand and appreciate the criminals’ point of view more completely. The classes, unbelievably, are being taught by black radicals supportive of the criminal element, all in the name of political correctness.

It’s called the “McDonald effect,” with its roots in the corruption in Chicago emanating from the Mayor’s office on down. Journalist Ben Joravsky makes his living investigating and reporting on that corruption. Writing last November in the Chicago Leader, he traced the timeline, and the self-serving corrupt behavior of the Mayor, from the time of the shooting in October 2014 to November 2015:

[CPD Officer Jason] Van Dyke shot McDonald on October 20, 2014 – almost six months before the general election.

By February, word had already emerged about the tape of the shooting.

As impossible as this sounds, just imagine if Mayor Emanuel had released the video in, say, November – without being forced to by a lawsuit.

Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez probably would have quickly responded with an indictment [against Van Dyke] – just like she did earlier this week when the tape was actually released….

If the mayor had done that, we wouldn’t be the villain in this sordid story. He’d be the hero. Or at least the guy who finally, for once in his life, did the right thing….

But of course, he didn’t do the right thing. He buried the video. He allowed officials to mislead the public. He hid the tapes because most likely he … assumed that it would hurt his reelection campaign.

Thus he not only did the immoral thing, he did the politically stupid thing.

It nearly cost him his reelection. For the first time in Chicago’s history he was forced into a runoff in order to retain his chair. Alvarez never made it that far, losing in the primary in March.

The real effect of the corruption, the enforcement of political correctness, the intervention of the ACLU, and the state’s new rules – not to mention those likely to come down from AG Loretta Lynch at the DOJ when they have finished their investigation into the shooting – is likely to show up with more records like these being broken. If nothing is done, and it looks like nothing will be done, it’s probable that more than 3,000 Chicagoans will have been shot by the end of the year, with possibly 500 of them losing their lives as a result. Especially upsetting is the inability of innocents caught in the crossfire to defend themselves thanks to Chicago’s incursions into their Second Amendment rights, making it all but impossible for low-income citizens to purchase, own, and use firearms.

Sources:

RT.com: Fastest pace in decades: 1,000 victims suffer from Chicago shootings in 2016, and counting

Chicago Tribune: Grim milestone: Chicago tops 1,000 shootings weeks earlier that recent years

TheBlaze.com: “A Grim Milestone”: Chicago sees Shocking Increase in Number of Shootings This Year

The shooting of Laquan McDonald

The New American: Chicago Gun Violence Up More Than 70 Percent This Year

Bio on Anita Alvarez

ChicagoReader.com: Rahm could’ve been the hero in the McDonald shooting

Bio on Ben Joravsky