Leftism’s dire consequences, Chicago edition

Earlier today, I wrote about how Philadelphia’s sanctuary city policy caused a child to be raped. Philadelphia authorities refused ICE’s request to detain a previously deported illegal immigrant. Instead, they released the man, who then committed rape.

This was clear case of the left’s agenda trumping concerns for public safety. The consequences were dire for the illegal immigrant’s victim.

But leftism is also producing dire consequences for entire communities. Areas ravaged by gangs like MS-13 are among them.

With the possible exception of Baltimore, there is no city where the consequences of leftist policies in terms of law and order are more dire than Chicago. Most of our readers are aware, I’m sure, of the wave of murders sweeping through the Windy City. Consider these numbers: Between last Friday afternoon and Monday morning, 74 people were shot in the city, 12 of them fatally. In one seven-hour span, from about midnight Saturday to about 7:00 a.m. Sunday, 41 people were shot. Five of them died.

Jack Dunphy at PJ Media ties Chicago’s ongoing killing spree to the liberal policies of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Dunphy explains:

If the city is plagued with a cohort of dangerous young men, what’s to be done about them?. . .[T]he short-term solution is well known but politically fraught: You encourage your police officers to identify and arrest the lawbreakers, and you encourage your prosecutors to bring appropriate charges and seek appropriate sentences.

To those who are troubled by the specter of “mass incarceration,” a question: Given the blood running in the gutters of Chicago’s streets last weekend (and most weekends, especially in summer), are there too many people in jail or too few?

Liberal dogma holds that there are too many. Mayor Emanuel either subscribes to that dogma or is a slave, politically, to it. Either way, his policies are too blame for the killing sprees:

[T]o address this crime wave requires a police force that is fully staffed, suitably equipped, and well led, none of which describes the Chicago Police Department in its current state. Incredibly, Rahm Emanuel acquiesced to allowing the ACLU and the socialist front group Black Lives Matter to participate in the crafting of a consent decree soon to take effect in Chicago, a measure that will divert vast amounts of police manpower and resources from fighting crime to complying with the minutia the decree will demand.

The ACLU was already successful in foisting on Chicago’s cops the “Investigative Stop Report,” the two-page form completed on every person detained, however briefly, in the course of a cop’s work day. If your goal is less police work, just add to the paperwork requirement and soon you’ll get what you want.

The result of all this in Chicago is clear: the city’s thugs are less fearful of the consequences for their predations than are the police for the consequences of trying to oppose them. If the cops do what must be done, it will result in more violent confrontations between them and the lawbreakers, including more officer-involved shootings, even the most plainly justifiable of which brings protests and accusations of racism. This is how you get 74 people shot in one weekend.

It doesn’t help that, in Dunphy’s estimation, the Chicago police department is poorly led. But this is also due to the doctrinaire leftism of the city’s top politicians:

It is an accepted but lamented fact of life among police officers that in order to rise on the promotional ladder, one must endorse the political fashions currently in favor among the city’s politicians. And the higher one ascends on that ladder, the more convincingly one must do so. As a consequence, reflecting the governing principles of almost any city you can name, most police chiefs are liberals, or at least pretend to be with a passing level of feigned sincerity.

As a result of this, the upper levels of most police departments, most certainly those in large cities, become clogged with men and women who can recite leftist pieties as confidently as any MSNBC host, the better to curry favor with politicians whose sponsorship is essential to further promotion. All of these men and women believe themselves qualified to be the next police chief, but the one selected will have proved himself to be the most proficient panderer.

But this creates a problem within a police department, to wit, a division in the rank structure between those at or near the top who adopt the leftist nostrums of the politicians, and those at the bottom who must go out onto the streets each day and confront the very real problems engendered by those very same leftist nostrums.

As discussed above, the division too often is resolved in favor of cutting back on going into the streets and confronting the thugs. That’s a resolution that suits Democratic politicians fine, thugs having become part of the Democratic Party’s constituency.

As more Americans realize this, the consequences for Democrats might become dire.

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