Black America Rages as Murder Rate Soars | RealClearPolitics
CHICAGO - Inside the rectory of St Sabina Church on Chicago’s notorious South Side, Father
Michael Pfleger made no attempt to sugar-coat what was happening on the streets he walks each day.
“Every day, children pass by a corner where some person got killed,” he said, his hand striking the table as a group of visiting community activists listened rapt. “The landmarks in our neighbourhoods are becoming police caution tape and memorials of teddy bears and balloons.”
In one weekend last month
42 people were shot in Chicago, among them a great- grandmother aged 81 who was hit four times in a drive-by shooting two blocks from Pfleger’s Roman Catholic church.
The priest, who has ministered there since 1975, recently asked a girl of 11 what she would like to be when she grew up: she responded that she wanted to be alive.
In Chicago shootings are up 25% and murders have risen by 17% on last year.
...Across America gun violence and murders are up this year in what many see as the first alarming sign that a 20-year trend of declining crime is being reversed.
The number of murders has surged by 103% in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and 59% in Houston, Texas.
In New York murders have risen by 20%. In St Louis shootings are up 39%, robberies 43% and killings 25%.
Last year 57 police officers were murdered, up from 27 in 2013.
...Leading criminologists believe the upsurge in crime is due to what Sam Dotson, the St Louis police chief, has described as the
“Ferguson effect” — a reluctance by police officers to make arrests or confront criminals for fear of being prosecuted if they make an error.
One posting on a St Louis forum used by police officers stated: “I’ll continue to do my job, but that is all. I refuse to be a punching bag for the public and the press. Why should I do anything other than the bare minimum?
“If I make even the slightest mistake my career, my savings . . . and even my freedom are in jeopardy.”
In the first two weeks of last month arrests by Baltimore police were down 57% on 2014.
There were 42 murders, making it the deadliest month in the city since 1972, when its population was nearly twice the present size. During the protests over Gray’s death there was widespread looting and rioting.
George Kelling, of the Manhattan Institute think tank, was one of two academics who came up with the
“broken windows” theory of policing based on the idea that if a neighbourhood fails to fix small things such as broken windows, law and order will quickly deteriorate.
This became the core of policing strategy in New York in the 1990s under the mayor, Rudy Giuliani, and later in Baltimore under Martin O’Malley, a Democrat mayor elected in 1999 who left office in 2007 (and is now a contender for the party’s 2016 presidential nomination).
Kelling fears that a “media feeding frenzy” over killings by police, the ubiquity of mobile phone cameras and protests against action by law enforcement officers have led to “a lot of police now who are wanting to avoid doing police work and who are hesitant to be very assertive or aggressive”.
...Back on Chicago’s South Side, Lorraine Banks, 53, a city bus driver, said she did not blame the police for backing away.
“They can’t do their job no more. Every day they know it could be their last and now they’re being demonised just for doing that job.”
She laughed when told by The Sunday Times that the only police officer encountered within the few blocks around St Sabina had been dozing in his Land Cruiser, parked on a quiet side street.
“If I was him, that’s what I’d be doing,” she said.
“They’re clocking on and clocking off right now so they can go back home to their families.”
