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| Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel |
Dan Riehl from Big Journalism:
MURDER IN CHICAGO:
WHY RE-ELECT THESE PEOPLE?
Murder [in Chicago] is so out of control that, to the extent Emanuel discusses it at all for the camera, he's reduced to talking about reprisal killings. In short, we can't stop the killing; however, if we stop the killing that happens because of the killing, we can start making progress. Progressives have a knack for rationalizing their way out of actually dealing with any problem.
It's a revealing and sad look at the problems of the community our community-organizer-in-chief spent the largest amount of his time organizing. The result of his efforts appears to be a skyrocketing murder rate and a community that lives in fear every day--one in which women are afraid to talk on camera or cross the street to buy groceries.
I imagine both Emanuel and Obama would offer the same answer to the problem: namely simply re-elect them in their respective offices. How is that going to solve anything after years and years of liberal and progressive Democratic Party solutions that can't seem to deal effectively with any of America's problems, when they aren't making those worse?
Watch the video and judge for yourself whether these progressive Democrats are worthy of being re-elected to lead cities like Chicago down the same dead end road, over and over again.
Virtually every war-zone-charnel house municipality-- Chicago, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Detroit-- is run by, and has been run by, generations of liberal Democrat hacks. The most fundamental responsibility of any city government is to keep the peace. Progressives claim to hold the solutions to our nation's problems, yet our most violent dysfunctional cities invariably have "progressive" governments.
I lived in New York City during the crime waves of the late 70's and early 80's. We had a series of idiot liberal mayors-- Lindsay, Beame, Koch, Dinkins-- crime exploded and you took your life in your hands to ride the subway to go out to dinner. One of our surgery residents at Columbia Presbyterian was robbed and shot to death walking back to the hospital after having dinner with his wife, who was pregnant with their first child.
Finally, the idiot NYC electorate elected someone competent-- by definition not a liberal Democrat-- and the transformation was astonishing. I couldn't believe the change when I returned to the city. Law-abiding people had taken back the streets. Even now it remains a safe and beautiful city. My 17 year-old daughter is (as I write this) watching a show on Broadway, and will return to us alone by train tonight. I don't fear for her safety.
We need to do simple diligence as citizens and hold local elected officials responsible for public safety. And we need to hold ideologies and political parties responsible for the social consequences to which they give rise. The Democratic party, where it has governed cities, has left a swath of murder and urban mayhem and desolation. Republicans have problems as well, but they are much much better.
When will we learn?
Egnor's theory of why crime in NYC fell down sharply in the mid-1990s is cute, but it is patently wrong.
ReplyDeleteTrends in violent crimes followed the same tendencies all over the US, not just in New York. Crime rates more than doubled in the late 1970s and then fell back to the original levels in the 1990s. The universal character of the trend suggests that it has nothing to do with the election of Rudy Giuliani to the post of the NYC mayor.
Economist Steven Leavitt, the author of Freakonomics, crunches some numbers here (PDF file). His conclusions?
Crime fell sharply and unexpectedly in the 1990s. Four factors appear to explain the drop in crime: increased incarceration, more police, the decline of crack and legalized abortion. Other factors often cited as important factors driving the decline do not appear to have played an important role: the strong economy, changing demographics, innovative policing strategies, gun laws and increased use of capital punishment. In stark contrast, the crime experience between 1973 and 1991 is not well explained by the factors identified in this paper. The real puzzle in my opinion, therefore, is not why crime fell in the 1990s, but why it did not start falling sooner.