The State of Law and Order in Chicago

Civilization is built on law and order. In Chicago law and order is breaking down. Do we think it is different in other parts of the country, or is it just that Chicago has news organizations that are not captive of the Democrats running the cities?

The following three stories are from CWB Chicago, one of two news organizations in Chicago that don't do exactly what City Hall tells them to do, so one of the only places to get real information on the state of crime in the city. The three stories are from two days this week, the 14th and the 15th. Crime is generally down in cold weather, though maybe we can blame global warming.

• Gunman robs woman as she walks dog in Lincoln Park, steps from where Dakotah Earley was shot and robbed this spring

  Shocking video from a Lincoln Park homeowner shows a woman being robbed at gunpoint as she walked her dog in the Lincoln Park neighborhood Wednesday morning. And, in a sickening twist, the robbery crew is also seen splitting up and driving away in two vehicles on the very same street corner where Dakotah Earley was nearly killed in an armed robbery this spring.

• Chicago men unleashed ‘an unmitigated crime spree’ of ‘robbery after robbery after robbery after robbery’, judge says. Aside from having her metaphors twisted around, the judge has a point.

  Four men who allegedly committed a string of armed robberies in Chicago that culminated in a fiery crash on the North Side acted “as an animal surrounds its prey … in a herd mentality,” a Cook County judge said as she ordered two of the accused men held without bail.

• Armed carjackers who targeted 70-year-old in Lincoln Park have struck again (and again and again), officials say

  The armed robbery crew that targeted a 70-year-old woman in Lincoln Park on Wednesday afternoon has committed several similar holdups and carjackings in the past five days, including at least one more on Wednesday night in Bucktown, according to Chicago police and a law enforcement source.

And what is the reaction of the State's Attorney for Chicago and Cook County? Make life harder for cops by increasing their paperwork. From Chicago Contrarian: Kim Foxx’s War on Law & Order in Chicago Expands Unopposed.

Similar to her decision to essentially decriminalize retail theft by imposing a host of new requirements for felony upgrade, a decision that has been catastrophic for business owners throughout the city, Foxx has now imposed a series of hurdles making search warrants throughout Chicago all but impossible for police to execute without any protection from her predatory prosecutors.

As I said, civilization is based on security. If stores are being constantly robbed they will close. If people are being constantly robbed they will eventually leave the city, those who can, anyway. The tax base will crumble, and politicians will do the only thing they know how to do, raise taxes, which will push even more people out of the city.

These stories are about Chicago. But I guess that similar stories could be written about Baltimore, or Saint Louis, or Philadelphia, or New Orlean, and the rest. Iowa, and Nebraska, and South Dakota cannot bailout Chicago, and New York, and the rest.

There is a long-standing principle of economics: something that can't go on forever, won't. Things will have to get a lot worse in Chicago, but they will fall apart. Which brings to mind the poem "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats. Find the whole thing after the break. One part of the first stanza is:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

Which seems apropos somehow. Civilization was nice while it lasted.

 

The Second Coming
  — W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It was written in 1919, after the First World War.