4.9.25

WHY CHICAGO MIGHT GET A DOSE OF HOMELAND SECURITY.

Our President has been feuding with Chicago's mayor and his party comrade in the governor's office.
Chicago has given Our President two opportunities to appeal to the median voter on seriously skewed issues: its status as a sanctuary city, and its mostly peaceful summer weekends.  And yes, as CNN's Stephen Collinson notes, these United States are still a constitutional republic, and separation of powers is still a valid concept (if flung down and danced upon in the expediency of the moment by politicians).  "When Pritzker on [August 25] told Trump, 'Do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here,' he was echoing tensions fundamental to the American system of governance that were stirred at notable moments of US history — for instance, in the run-up to the Civil War and around federal enforcement of civil rights laws."

Cracking down on high-crime cities, though, is a winning issue for Our President, at least until some sort of opposition party can offer a competing bundle not burdened with the sort of thing that sails these days under the rubric of "woke."
Trump has long demonized Chicago — he mentioned the city’s murder rate in his 2016 Republican National Convention speech — and has frequently portrayed it in the most sinister terms. “As you all know, Chicago’s a killing field right now,” Trump told reporters Monday. A federal operation to use the military in local law enforcement would therefore fulfill a long-held political ambition. And it would be a strong fit with the image of a fix-it tough guy that is so appealing to his political base.
Mr Collinson recognizes the electoral logic.
[Chicago mayor Brandon] Johnson argued that Chicago was not in the 20 most dangerous cities in the United States.

But Trump doesn’t care. He senses political leverage. As he so often does, the president explained his thinking in his voluminous public comments. “I think this is another men-in-women’s-sports thing. I think this is one of those — you know, they call them 80/20 issues; I call them 97/3. I think the Democrats better get smart,” he said Monday.

In other words, Trump thinks he can exploit public perceptions that Republicans are tougher on crime while mining a seam to expand his own power.
Unfortunately for the Combine, the Labor Day weekend featured the kind of fine weather with low humidities conducive to enforcing the latest social norms, which apparently involve shooting up a house party you weren't invited to; to the dismay of the editorial board of Chicago's Tribune.  "Chicago’s gunmen did not get Pritzker and Johnson’s memo."
For Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Labor Day weekend spewed out an inconvenient truth: Nine people killed and 52 wounded in the most violent weekend of the Chicago summer.

Too many gunmen did not get the message that Chicago had crime under control. That might not constitute a “killing field,” to use the frequent Trumpian parlance about our city, but it sure was a long way from a peaceful urban meadow for a holiday picnic.

We’ve said from the start that the nothing-to-see-here, murder-rate-is-down, crime-is-under-control, we-know-best argument from local politicians was a loser.

A total loser.
There's something pathetic about the same order of politicians who told us that a decline in coronavirus infections meant the beaches had to stay closed and virtual schooling had to continue now telling us that the current decline in urban carnage since 2020 is sufficient cause for leaving things as they are.

And then the locals did what they so often do, and the editorial board was left to sputter.
A tempting loser, for sure, given that impurity of the presidential motivations in sending federal forces to Chicago, an act that all rational beings know is motivated far more by Donald Trump’s thirst for an ego-boosting victory than genuine concern for the well-being of the nation’s third-largest city. If the latter were the case, he’d be arguing not for a hostile takeover but for a cooperative plan. But that would require the man to have some genuine empathy and depart from his usual zero-sum game. Not gonna happen, at least without some bowing and scraping before his imagined throne.

But the plan was a loser nonetheless. And it resulted in a trap sprung shut over the weekend by the city’s young gunmen, with both Pritzker and Johnson now yoked together in its steel teeth, surely to the chagrin of the governor’s political advisers. Not to mention the rest of us, huddled here, wondering what we should do now.

Taking a cue from the Pritzker-Johnson news conference last week designed to showcase the city’s spectacular downtown, social media filled over the weekend with lots of folks posting pictures of great Chicago weekends at neighborhood festivals or astride the lake, all part of a big progressive campaign to argue that we inhabit an urban paradise, not a dystopian landscape for the Trump administration to invade and fix. The posts hardly were disingenuous: most of us did have an enjoyable weekend in a beautiful, sun-kissed city filled with residents and visitors and with cultural and sporting activities that were second to none. You just couldn’t be in the sights of, or even traumatically adjacent to, a killer or killers in Little Village or Bronzeville or Englewood or Humboldt Park or Riverdale or South Shore. One body was even pulled from the very same water wherein swimmers bathed and boaters cruised.
In order:  Whether Our President was serious in suggesting that the governor and mayor ask for help or not, in sending in additional immigration enforcement or patrolling tourist Chicago, he's appealing to that median voter on those seriously skewed issues, it being hard for an elected official to achieve an ego-boosting victory by going against the voters' preferences.  Yes, going against the voters might get you a profile in courage, but it might also get you voted out.  As far as that "urban paradise," doesn't that paragraph, dear reader, suggest those fifteen miles of privilege from Wrigleyville to the museum campus, surrounded by the third world?

That reality, slowly, dawns on the editorial board.
Once the Labor Day crime figures were compiled, though, rational thinkers came to the conclusion that the Chicago war zone actually did not require either inspiration or ignition from the president of the United States.

Some of us are living in one already.

Not everyone had jumped on the all-is-well bandwagon and by Tuesday more cracks were showing. Some of the regular contributors to this newspaper’s Opinion section were noting that, while crime may be down from its highs, it hardly had landed anywhere near tolerable levels. Aldermen such as Raymond Lopez,15th, took to Fox News to observe: “How many victims are we comfortable with? Because that’s ultimately the subtext of what the mayor and the governor are saying is that we are comfortable with the amount of victims we have right now.”

That’s an overstatement; we don’t question for a moment the deep concern both the mayor and the governor have for the victims of crime in Chicago this weekend, but the backlash is nonetheless a consequence of that joint strategy of minimization. At the news conference last week, only Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul offered any kind of nuanced argument, calling for meaningful federal cooperation beyond just “resources,” not repelling the potential invaders like the last barbarian at the gate holding off the Roman hordes from the “best freakin’ city in the world.”
No backlash, it's restoring a state of good repair, which Our President might want to do, while the Combine's continued incumbency in Chicago and Springfield depends on maintaining the current dysfunction.  Or having the strength to admit error.
We do not wish to see the National Guard wandering performatively around the streets of Chicago, a job for which they are not trained. Moreover, based on the examples of both Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, we see no point in troops wandering around relatively low-crime areas, scaring tourists and residents alike. We believe that stemming what happened this weekend takes local police and prosecutorial expertise, as aided by data and intervention experts at the University of Chicago and elsewhere and by community support and, yes, resources, especially for prosecutors and victims. If it were easy, this problem would not persist. We lament that no one in Trump’s administration has the guts to see this and say it out loud. Violence intervention gets results.

We want to see more cooperation between local, state and federal forces when it comes to stopping violent weekends in this city and in prosecuting the perpetrators of violent crimes. We restate: We have confidence that many of the right people now are finally in place to achieve real progress.

But the federal government can and should pull many helpful levers. Time to call a temporary political truce, gentlemen, and call off the insults without waiting for the other side to go first.
Alas, once the punishment cycles of the grim strategy outcome begin, stopping them is hard.  Meanwhile, Illinois remains a tax hell, the productive people continue to leave, and Chicago is increasingly inhabited by the sort of constituent who didn't get the memo.
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