LONG HOT SUMMER IN THE CITY

I love how the powers that be in our Democratic run urban areas are blaming the warm Spring for the 50% increase in murders in their cities. Classic liberal response. It couldn’t be the policies they’ve inflicted on their residents for the last 40 years. How’s that War on Poverty working out in Chicago, Detroit and Philly? If you were thinking about moving to Chicago, think again.

If they are blaming the surge in murders on temperatures rising to 60 degrees in March, imagine what will happen when temperatures hit 100 degrees in August. It’s going to be a long hot summer in the cities.

 

Fractured gangs blamed for Chicago homicide surge

CHICAGO — There are many theories about what has caused a recent spike in Chicago’s homicide rate, including a splintering of established drug gangs, the warm winter and high unemployment in some neighborhoods that seem a world away from the city’s beaches, lush parks and skyscrapers.

The numbers clearly show there is a problem, with eight killed and at least 35 wounded in a spasm of gunfire last weekend.

The violence is nowhere near its historical peak of the early 1990s, when Chicago recorded roughly 900 homicides per year. But from Jan. 1 through late May there were 203 homicides, an increase of more than 50 percent over the 134 during the same period in 2011.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made combatting gangs a priority and has stood with Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy to unveil a plan of attack. Among the new police tactics is the deployment of dozens of specialized undercover officers to units on Chicago’s West and South sides and then saturating those neighborhood streets with uniformed officers.

In addition, Gov. Pat Quinn on Monday signed into law the Illinois Street Gang RICO Act, which aims to dismantle gangs by boosting penalties for crimes performed as part of a criminal enterprise.

In Englewood, a roughly 20-by-20-block South Side neighborhood, homicides jumped from 40 in 2010 to 60 last year, which is more than half of the total 2011 homicides for cities such as Cleveland, Milwaukee, Washington, D.C., Oakland, Calif., and Kansas City, Mo.

Though police are loath to attribute this winter’s unusually warm weather as a possible factor, because it smacks of excuse-making, there were far more people on the streets in January, February and March — including gang members — than during those months in 2011.

Just as important have been dramatic changes within the gangs themselves.

“In the past the gangs were very organized from the top down,” said Sgt. Matthew Little of the Chicago Police Department’s gang enforcement unit. As more gang leaders are arrested, convicted and sent to prison, the gangs they left behind have become “very splintered,” he said.

Young men on the city’s streets agree.

“There is no one to control this, so it has become haywire,” said Devon Tims, who identified himself as one of the Chicago Vice Lords, making him one of the city’s estimated 70,000 gang members.

In interviews, McCarthy said the “fracturing” of larger gangs into smaller ones has doubled the number of factions and conflicts. “These kids have guns and they end up using them,” he said.

McCarthy said the gangs are far more territorial and rigid than those that operated when he was a ranking commander in the New York City Police Department and the chief in Newark, N.J. And that means trouble when a gang member simply crosses the street into rival territory.

“If we see a car with three of (one gang’s) guys three blocks over there (on another gang’s turf), they are probably going to shoot someone,” said Leo Schmitz, a gang enforcement commander who was redeployed in January to command Englewood’s police district.

The demolition of the city’s infamous public housing complexes in recent years also played a role. While the high rises long were considered a massive failure that warehoused the city’s poorest families and became magnets for gangs, tearing them down caused a new set of problems by scattering gang members to other parts of the city.

Some of them eventually settled in the thousands of houses that were abandoned during the nation’s recent financial crisis. There the battle for supremacy started anew.

Residents and activists from the most violent neighborhoods have seen similar campaigns to combat gang violence over the years and were both hopeful and skeptical about the latest one.

Jean Carter-Hill, an activist from Englewood, said she thinks the increase in officers patrolling the streets is helping clean up the area but that the city needs to do more, such as helping youths with conflict resolution.

“Every time there is a conflict, these young people get a gun,” she said. “And everyone seems to know where a gun is.”

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flash
flash

Gangs of boomers terrorizing the windy city.
God won’t those damn boomers die already!

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR7z0ct1FsTjxCh4VTn51-a6X-zZNjGjfgvTov5SHj4chVcBH8UIQwZ05ej

Chicago999444
Chicago999444

I live in Chicago, and it is by and large extremely safe. And I’m not one of those people who is insulated in a car when not at home or work- I am a middle-aged woman dependent on public transit and my own two feet, and am on the streets frequently at late hours.

However, I won’t deny we have a problem. Mainly, that Rahm Immanuel is tossing our money at plugged-in cronies and major corporations via the quilt of TIF districts that are mainly just pipelines to convey property tax revenues to the cronies and corporations at the expense of essential services, like police protection. Ten years ago, we had 13,000 police officers but now have only 9,000, who are spread far too thin, especially in the deeply troubled south and west neighborhoods where 95% of the violence takes place, and the violence is now spilling over into wealthy downtown neighborhoods that formerly had few problems, as thugs perceive new opportunities in areas that were formerly very well-protected.

Our cities are being destroyed by the Welfare State mentality, sucked dry by both Corporate Welfare, and ‘Po Folks welfare. Chicago has been very successful and has so far escaped the worst afflictions of places like Detroit and St. Louis, but it has become very complacent and is squandering its advantages while making life ever more difficult for productive businesses who are net taxpayers, while handing out billions in corporate welfare is lavished on other businesses who are net welfare recipients. The citizens are in denial about the economic damage the city has taken in the past 10 years as tax-paying businesses move or fold, and are replaced by businesses that had to be paid to be present, like Sarah Lee (beneficiary of $6M in TIF money) or United Airlines, which got a grant of $37M to occupy space in the former Sears Tower. These businesses are not net taxpayers- whatever tax revenues they contribute are more than offset by the gifts they’ve received from the taxpayers, yet the awards made them are justified because they “create jobs” or “bring money”. For whom and to whom? TIFs, which are nothing more than gifts to large corporations to begin with, and which are justified by the argument that they help build the tax base, are used to fund things that will never pay taxes, like buildings on a local university campus.

And among the people, the Welfare State is doing incalculable damage. The reason that 22% of this country’s children live in poverty is because we encourage the poor and feckless to breed, and have created a fabric of perverse incentives that enables welfare dependency while erecting obstacles to independence and the formation of small businesses. For example, a struggling person operating a small mom-and-pop business here as well as other ossified old cities, meets with massive obstruction and harassment from the city. For some reason, a woman with 5 kids by 3 different fathers, who has spent her life on the public dole garners a lot more sympathy than a woman struggling to keep her one-woman business afloat while working 12 hour days netting perhaps $23K a year for herself, and dealing with city bureaucrats who have the power of life and death over you and your business and can bury you just be stalling around about issuing a business permit, as well as self-appointed neighborhood busybodies who think they have the right to decide whether your business is good for ‘their’ neighborhood. A single consumer complaint, revolving around charges for alterations, shut down a friend of mine, her bad luck being that the complainant is the sister of a city attorney.

As Ayn Rand once remarked, when people who produce have to get permission to produce from people who produce nothing, your society is doomed. We now live in a society where the unproductive have the power of life and death over the productive.

flash
flash

Chicago999444 -“we encourage the poor and feckless to breed, and have created a fabric of perverse incentives that enables welfare dependency while erecting obstacles to independence and the formation of small businesses. For example, a struggling person operating a small mom-and-pop business here as well as other ossified old cities, meets with massive obstruction and harassment from the city.”

Well said….same deal here.If you’re business is not connected to the corporate/state money spigot, then you have no right to exist and will not get zoned.

Persnickety
Persnickety

I lived in Chicago for three years and visited it for many more, but have not been back in several years now and with stories like this I won’t be soon. I lived in the near north and worked in the loop, without a car, so I’m not some little suburbanite space traveler afraid of their shadow. I was there for almost the peak of its economic vibrance and it was decent but still had problems even then. So many stories like this make it out to be a hellhole.

You should read Chicago999444’s first post several times, it rings of great truth. You cannot understand the depth of corruption without spending some time there. The “neighborhood busybodies” are something to behold – basically a sort of freelance mafia that has formal offices and sometimes attains public office. Many of them are, I kid you not, “community organizers.” Yes, our asshole in chief went by the same title as the new organized crime of his adopted hometown. Hopefully anyone who had been naive can start connecting the dots on that one now.

Oh, and while the Daleys had a legendary reputation for corruption, it appears that Rahmbo is making them look like amateurs.

I find the story’s talk about guns amusing given that Chicago has the nation’s most oppressive gun laws. Which are apparently working as intended (to terrorize good people while empowering criminals).

I’ve also spent a fair bit of time in Detroit, and I actually find it safer than Chicago for a couple reasons:
1) you can legally carry a gun
2) you are almost always car-mobile
3) while >90% of the city is dangerous, at least it’s easy to identify the dangerous areas
4) there is no illusion of safety, security and social order, even right downtown, literally even on the sidewalk outside of city hall.

Chicago999444
Chicago999444

Fortunately, Chicago’s gun laws don’t stick anymore. Yet another elderly man in the Englewood neighborhood blew away one of the neighborhood choir boys who was attempting to break into his first floor apartment, and no charges were filed against him. Justifiable homicide. Another elder over on the west side did the same, and again, no charges were filed. So we’re making good progress.

I have not found Chicago’s corruption to be any worse than St. Louis (the worst) or any other old city I’ve lived in, because in almost every settled community, you have a lot of corruption. Ask the denizens of almost any city, and they’ll tell you their own city has the worst possible municipal corruption. But here, unfortunately, we have also the state of IL to deal with, with it’s business-killing state taxes and unspeakable corruption. While Chicago may not be the most corrupt city in the country that still has a functioning economy and mostly good, intact, safe neighborhoods, it is well down the road to hell.

Our largest problem in confronting municipal, state, and national corruption is that too many citizens have a major stake in keeping things exactly as they are. Either they are in some manner welfare recipients, or they are employed by the feds, the state, or the city. About 50% of our workforce is dependent upon the national, state, or their local government, for a paycheck, and it is usually a much bigger paycheck than they could ever hope to get in the private sector that pays for it all. These people see no benefit in changing things.

TeresaE
TeresaE

Maybe this explains why Philly went into Emergency! mode and kicked kids out when it got hot.

OMG, the fucking obviousness of the problem (idle hands and wasted minds) is lost on those connected to the government machine.

“…Jean Carter-Hill, an activist from Englewood, said she thinks the increase in officers patrolling the streets is helping clean up the area but that the city needs to do more, such as helping youths with conflict resolution…”

Yes, conflict resolution that’ll help a bunch of animals that can barely comprehend the mysteries of showing up anywhere (including court) on time, let’s spend a few billion trying to enlighten these same societal geniuses on the intricacies of human behavior as taught by Ivory Tower Academics, Liberals, Do-Gooders and Bureaucratic Unionists.

WTF.

We need JOBS. We need LESS “help” and more “get off your ass and do it yourself.”

We need personal responsibility, respect for self, skills training and small businesses.

Any “solution” that touts anything EXCEPT those small things is nothing but an excuse for Ob ama to roll out more government, do-gooder, bullshit, wasteful, future bloated, worthless, parasitic and evil departments to squash any real hope we have.

The last fucking thing that is going to “fix” our mess is Do-Gooders enlisting the likes of Rahm(sp?) to form another bureaucracy to “teach” a dumbass, apathetic, distracted, sick, citizen something.

We have coddled and excused and protected and seat-belted and helmeted this generation into believing that no work is required, showing up is enough and that life is supposed to be fair. Meanwhile we allowed the mass exodus of any chance for said kid to be productive, thus forming a perfect storm of a lazy generation that is facing the reality of having to work harder than the previous two generations just to survive.

When a middle class kid hits adulthood and figures this out, he becomes apathetic and uses our abundant technology to tune out while mom & dad continue footing the bill. When a poverty-stricken, urban youth finds out, he gets pissed, his mom can’t afford to keep paying for his $1000 Nikes, he has no clue how to find a job, nor keep it, and if he knows his dad odds are good daddy is teaching him how to survive without working (aka, rob, steal, cheat and have a harem of babies-mommas that you can sweet talk for a piece of ass, place to crash and full belly).

Grampa used to always tell me that you can’t fix stupid.

No shit.

Chicago999444
Chicago999444

You sure as hell can’t fix stupid when it originates with our elites and our middle classes.

Unfortunately, I find the same entitlement mentality in our middle classes and the same complaisance and unwillingness to confront certain hard realities.

On one local blog, I ranted about TIFs and other gifts to major corporations, the subject of the post being yet ANOTHER goddam $50M TIF to build two monster high rise condo complexes in a market and neighborhood saturated with unsold condos in the wake of the housing bust.

One guy, who described himself as a professional earning a 6-digit income, said that the gifts to corporations are appropriate because they “provide jobs” and “bring money to the city”.

Huh?

Bring money to WHOM? As far as I can tell, these deals are a major net loss to the city in almost every case, employ very few local people relative to the outlay of money, and bring money by the millions of dollars only to the back pockets of the crony developer and the local alderman it has in its pockets.

Provide jobs for WHOM? Chinese semi-slave factory workers and politician’s flunkies, as far as I can tell.

This man’s views are, unfortunately, typical of the professional middle class in this country, which is why I’m afraid that the Chicago taxpayers will ultimately give the giga-rich Ricketts family $200 M to redo Wrigley, and keep on handing multi-million dollar gifts to major corporations and cronies. Our 20%- the managerial upper–middle class- has bought heavily into the myth that corporate-government “partnerships” are the only way to build an economy. When you want to start a business, the first people you talk to are not your lawyers or local bankers, but your alderman or state rep. The control of business by local, state and national government bodies, by making lavish gifts of public money to some while denying others the right to exist even on their own money and by their own efforts, is the very definition of fascism, and this country got there a long time ago with the enthusiastic support of our middle classes.

ron
ron

Corruption helped bring down detroit.Now its doing in the usa.

DaveL
DaveL

It’s 107 degrees here in the southeast valley of Phoenix, and the only fucking thing I’m thinking of killing is a few cold beers.

fwiw imho
fwiw imho

Chicago999444 says: “deeply troubled south and west neighborhoods where 95% of the violence takes place”

Isn’t that the community that Obama organized?

Persnickety
Persnickety

“Isn’t that the community that Obama organized?”

Close enough. I think he was mostly on the south side. It’s a big city and a lot of square miles. Both south and west sides are predominantly black, with some other minorities, and a teeny tiny enclave around Hyde Park that is mixed. In the space of just two blocks, south of U of C, you go from relatively safe to insanely dangerous.

@Chicago999444:

1) While it’s good they haven’t prosecuted people for shooting in self defense, that’s a far cry from having decent gun laws. Decent would be it being perfectly legal to own and carry a handgun with no restrictions other than not being a felon and being 21+ years old (or even 18+). Having a good state law on self defense, and having prosecutors who respect that law. I don’t see that set of facts in Chicago or anywhere else in Illinois. I believe that Illinois is now the only state in the US where it is not possible for an ordinary citizen to legally carry a handgun under any circumstances whatsoever – WI went shall-issue last year. NY and CA are very restrictive but do allow CCW licenses in some cases.

2) I understand the attitude you describe, and I find that it is significantly less dominant in other states I’ve lived in. Not absent, but not predominant. At some level it is another form of corruption, and goes back to my comment about the layers and complexity of corruption in Chi town.

Chicago999444
Chicago999444

Persnickity, I’m neutral on the matter of carrying a handgun, concealed or not. I support the right to do it but I’m not sure it does anything to improve crime, as witness the horrific crime rates in my native city, St. Louis, which still at the top of the list of the most dangerous and violent cities in the country, where it has been since the early 60s.

In fact, police shootings of innocent civilians have increased as cops there assume that everyone they encounter is armed and ready to shoot them. One officer shot a man in north St. Louis in his own home, because the guy answered the door with a newspaper in one hand and a cellphone in the other, which the officer assumed was a weapon, and so opened fire on this older guy in his own house.

Given that most of the violence here in Chitown is between gangs, my biggest danger is being caught in the crossfire. That has happened to a few innocent civilians here, who were going about their business when they caught stray bullets intended for someone else. As one who has been mugged (in St. Louis) a couple of times, I discovered my best defense against the common street thug is to be extremely vigilant on the street and not let anyone get too close to me unawares. I see a crowd of unruly looking people (of either sex), I get across the street. If I see something that looks like it might be trouble walking head on toward me, I stare it down. Amazing how a hard stare makes people back off you.

Regarding the middle class attitudes I’m speaking of, I have encountered them among all middle class people everywhere. Is there a city in the country that will not bend over and pick up the soap for some corporate sports team, it’s oligarch owners, or retard overpaid prima donna players? I never saw one city that would refuse a major sports franchise a new stadium, or any other major corporation eminent domain rights on other people’s property, or a $40M tax abatement or TIF, for some shopping mall or Big Barn store, or a new highway just for some new gigantic sprawl development 70 miles out of town. In some remote places, highway branches have been built just to accommodate Walmart or some other Big Barn.Every major industry in this country is the beneficiary of massive subsidies, starting with the auto industry, for whom we destroyed our cities while subsidizing (HUD, FHA, DOT) the construction of auto suburbs in the 50s and 60s. This was done with the applause of the population that considered itself anti-communist and anti-socialist, never apprehending how much the ability of common workers to buy all those new houses and drive those cars depended on policy and massive inputs of taxpayer’s money.

At some point, probably soon, we are absolutely and completely not going to be able to afford to subsidize the Big Pharma dominated “health” care system, or the interstate highway system, or the massive agra subsidies for NOT GROWING CROPS in order to support higher prices for farm products, or evermore sports stadiums and shopping malls and 3% down mortgages and 0% car loans or NATO summits with their billions of dollars worth of security, or any of the other things that are not legitimate civic necessities but boons for private corporations. It will be interesting to see what kind of economy will emerge in the absence of taxfunded “gimmes” for our plutocrats.

Stigmation
Stigmation

I have no doubt in my mind, that our noble politicians are working hand in hand with our benevolent corporations, to bring a end to this problem. I have no doubt, if we can just crush unions, Big Brother.. err our glorious leaders and corporations would shower wealth upon the masses. I mean, well, concentrations of corporate wealth and government power have worked so well in the past. Look at Rome… sorry bad example.. maybe the British empire, no that won’t work either. Italy? Nope. Spain. Nope. Well I’ll be damned!

They all seem to have the same problem. Concentration of wealth and power. I suppose America was a real failure in the early 1900s when it became the predominant manufacturing nation with strong labor unions a thriving middle class and wealth distributed more evenly among the population.

Its obvious that a shitbag at GS programming a computer to complete HFTs is much more valuable than a plumber, or a cab driver. The system we are in today has really worked out well for the vast majority of people in America. Just ask the 47 million on food stamps. I am sure they are having a bang up time.

Until the problem of concentrated wealth and power in the government and corporations is addressed, it is nothing but a big circle jerk. Nothing will ever change until it blows up, then you are looking at a dictatorship. We will all look back on these days with great fondness at how great we had it, if that comes to pass.

Man is inherently flawed. A creature of fear and greed. Given a greedy and evil enough person, he will dominate the world. As I remember, we are a Republic. We are not in a government of men, but a government of LAW! That is the foundation and the purpose of a Republic. To rule by LAW.

Of course we are no longer in a government of law. We have the rule of law for the destitute and the rule of men for the privileged. So without a counter-balance of a well informed population, a strong labor union, the good Lord himself. Who will safeguard the Republic? Who speaks for the people?

So if you think it;s not getting better, just worse, remember Winston, 2 + 2 = 5

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