Understand Chicago and Understand What Is Happening to America

 Understand Chicago and Understand What Is Happening to America

For several years prior to 2020, violent crime in America’s major cities was on the decline. But since the riots that summer following the death of George Floyd, it is heading in the opposite direction.

Murders nationwide in 2020 rose a stunning 29.4 percent over the previous year, the largest annual increase since the FBI began tracking that data in the 1960s. The number of murders in Chicago climbed even more sharply, rising 55 percent. It was as if a switch had been flipped. At least ten major U.S. cities hit new murder highs in 2021, but Chicago led the way with 797, the city’s highest number in 25 years.

So, there’s violent crime aplenty in Chicago. But punishment? Not so much.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that in 2020, police made carjacking arrests in only eleven percent of cases. And Cook County prosecutors working for State’s Attorney Kim Foxx approved felony charges in less than half of that eleven percent.

Too many Chicagoans are dead due in part to a broken criminal justice system.

In addition to legal reforms and improved policing, it’s time to stop making excuses for what one brave Chicago alderman, called “the borderline collapse of the family unit in many of our neighborhoods” and the effects of “generational gang life.” Political leaders need to stop walking on eggshells when it comes to talking about the breakdown of the nuclear family in low-income black communities. Young men need fathers—without fathers they flounder.

According to City of Chicago data, in every year from 1999 to 2009, more than 80 percent of all black women who gave birth were single. Among Latinos, that figure rose from 45 to 55 percent during that period, while for whites and Asians the numbers were dramatically lower.

More broken homes are directly correlated with more violent crime. Annual Chicago Police Department reports show that the neighborhoods with the highest murder rates are the same neighborhoods in which births to single mothers are highest. Among children raised in households headed by two biological parents, regardless of race, studies find greater educational attainment, higher adult income, and lower rates of incarceration.

There is much more, however, the above is a disturbing from the list!

The following are the predictable legal reforms to remedy what is ailing Chicago as well as the Nation:

•        Reapportion the budget to build and operate more courtrooms with more judges for speedier trials.
•        Stop releasing people charged with violent felony crimes—including juveniles charged with armed carjacking—on low-cash or no-cash bail.
•        Repeal state legislation that will outlaw most cash bail.
•        Repeal the statutes that severely restricts the ability of prosecutors to charge juveniles with felony armed vehicular hijacking.

There is an old saying amongst those that study people; “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast”. Meaning, if one does not solve the cultural problems, nothing else one does will matter. That is the power of culture. Generational gang life, generational fatherless households and more!

Culture encompasses the social behavior, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups. If these do not change what is today will become the predictable future. Period.

There is a supportive role government at all levels can play. However, until the people in the cultures and sub-cultures do NOT look at themselves and say, “I’m disgusted with what I see and am determined not to be part of this from this day forward!” This action, followed by the influencers in the communities (sub-cultures).

The Left today has badly misappropriated the word “equity,” using it to mean equality of outcome—something to be achieved through affirmative action and economic redistribution (for victims from external forces). But real equity, in the old common sense meaning, cannot be given. Real equity requires the old-fashioned virtues. It is inextricable from full ownership of your own course in life. It is an inside out proposition.