Chicago

Cockburn found himself grimacing over his Monday morning mimosa as he watched a viral video of Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot “dancing” in the snow-strewn streets of the crime-ridden city she is supposed to govern. Lightfoot is under fire for her behavior at a Lunar New Year parade, as her lighthearted attitude contrasts sharply with the recent release of somber Chicago Police Department data showing crime reports have surged 59 percent this month compared to last January. Of course Cockburn is not surprised that Lightfoot would be so nonchalant in such a moment. Her city's crime problem is, after all, nothing new. According to the Washington Examiner, “the city has experienced an overall 33 percent increase in crime since 2019, the year Lightfoot was sworn in as mayor.

As President Biden’s team tried to put out fires regarding the Curious Case of the Corvette and the FAA fiasco, one Democrat must have been grateful for the White House’s sudden maelstrom of bad news. When it rains it pours — and Joe’s torrent of bad headlines overshadowed Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s latest scandal that is brewing in the Windy City. On Thursday, news broke that the mayor’s campaign had sent an email attempting to recruit Chicago Public School students to “help” with the incumbent’s reelection effort. The students would earn class credit in exchange for their contributions.

The father of a UCLA grad student, Brianna Kupfer, who was stabbed to death last week, is giving voice to the gut-wrenching human toll of the violent crime wave ravaging the nation — and the social and political forces enabling it. “What’s endemic in our society right now is that everyone seems oriented on giving back rights and bestowing favor on people that rob others of their rights,” said the grieving dad on Fox News. Brianna, a graduate student and design consultant, was found dead by a customer at the furniture store where she worked. On Wednesday, Los Angeles police identified her suspected killer, a 31-year-old career criminal named Shawn Laval Smith who was out on $1,000 bail for a misdemeanor.

Some people say that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. Nonsense. There is also the certainty that in America circa 2021 anti-black racist events are hoaxes perpetrated by left-wing whites or, more often, by blacks themselves. Right now, the world is mesmerized by the case of Jussie Smollett. Until he faked the “racist” attack on himself back in 2019, no one you knew had heard of Smollett. Now he is famous, not for being an actor, but for being a race-baiting hate monger. The fake-news, enemy-of-the-people, Trump-hating media slobbered all over that story. So did the slimy Democratic politicians sup daily on fifty-seven varieties of “racism” because they think it buys votes.

Former Empire actor Jussie Smollett appeared in court for the first time this week to defend himself against allegations that he fabricated an elaborate hate crime for attention. Chicago prosecutors say Smollett wasted police time and resources by sending them on a wild goose chase against his alleged attackers — resources which surely could have been better used elsewhere, given the city's astronomical murder rate. Early details shared during the trial don't help Smollett's case. Prosecutors showed the jury surveillance video of an alleged "dry run" of the orchestrated attack. The video, taken a day before the incident, shows Smollett walking around the area with the Osundairo brothers.

It’s not known when Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot experienced the first stirrings of her secret GOP gland, but knowledgeable conjecture puts it perhaps two nanoseconds after taking the oath of office in 2019. It’s then that Lightfoot, buoyant after having been swept into office with 74 percent of the vote, surely had an alarming thought: ‘OMG, I’m mayor. What do I do now?’ All Democratic politicians aspiring to executive office have a secret Republican gland, although it’s vestigial till they sit behind an executive desk. When it’s dormant they can sign up for any damn fool notion. During her mayoral campaign, Lightfoot had cheerfully endorsed both an elected school board and an elected police board.

Just before 11 p.m. on Tuesday June 1, 18-year-old Kennedy Hobbs of Jackson, Mississippi stopped at a gas station off of Medgar Evers Boulevard to gas up. She had graduated from Murrah High School in Jackson that same day and was on her way to a graduation party. While at the gas station, she made a phone call. While talking, she was shot multiple times by an unknown person and died on the scene. Details are murky and police are still investigating, but at this time it doesn’t appear that Hobbs knew the shooter. Like many other cities, Jackson, whose population is almost 82 percent black, has experienced a surge in violent crime over the past two years. Its murder rate is one of the highest in the country.

A cellphone video surfaced in Chicago last week showing three African American women twerking on top of a slowly moving Chicago Police Department SUV, as a crowd of night-time revelers urged them on. The clip quickly went viral. Although important details have yet to emerge, CPD officials have acknowledged the incident and stated that an investigation is 'ongoing’. To a fossil like me, twerking anywhere is distasteful, even disgusting — and to do so out in public is at once incivil and degrading. To do so on top of a moving police vehicle strikes me as borderline degenerate, but such paracoital gyrations will doubtless be read by some as ritualistic community expressions of both disrespect for and indignation over the po-po.

Give some credit to Lori Lightfoot. She’s really good at wrecking things. When America’s most Innsmouth-ian politician took over Chicago in spring 2019 (presumably for lack of any other volunteers), it was hard to imagine screwing up the city worse than it already was. The city was already losing population. It already had the most murders of any US city and a top-30 violent crime rate overall. But Lightfoot rose to the challenge and then some. She inherited a city with 563 murders the year before she took office. In the 365 days between George Floyd’s death and the one-year anniversary of his demise, the city clocked more than 800, including 105 in a single month and 18 in a single day.

‘I wonder if you might do a “notebook” on living in Chicago at the moment,’ my London-based editor inquired via email. ‘The latest crime figures are quite shocking.’ I asked which shocking crime figures he had in mind. We have quite a selection. More than 4,000 people were shot in Chicago in 2020 and a few dozen short of 800 were murdered — an increase of more than 50 percent on 2019’s tally. For the past few years almost as many people have been slain in Chicago as in New York and Los Angeles combined, although those cities taken together have four times the population. Then again, perhaps my editor was thinking of carjackings, up 283 percent in January compared to a year ago.

The causes of violent rioting and looting are complicated and often include real, unaddressed grievances. One thing is clear, though: looting has few winners and many losers. The losers in the long run are often those breaking the windows and making off with the bling. Many of us are trying to get a handle on the unrest we’ve witnessed in 2020. History doesn’t repeat itself, and, pace Mark Twain, it may not even rhyme, but sometimes a little context helps, if only to suggest possibilities. The considerable scholarly literature on the ‘race riots’ of the 1960s is mostly sympathetic to the rioters. It excuses or at least countenances violence because its authors share what they perceive to be the rioters’ goals: racial equality, social justice and the like.