As Chicago backs off policing, its murder rate skyrockets ever higher

Bystanders convene near the scene of a shooting in Chicago. AP

Chicago’s yearlong shooting rampage picked up steam over Christmas weekend, leaving 61 people shot, 11 fatally. Seven were killed on Christmas Day alone, more than on the three previous Christmases combined, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Gangbangers targeted each other’s holiday gatherings as if in deliberate mockery of the season. Two young girls were shot while sitting in a van at 11:30 p.m. Monday by a presumed gang rival of the younger one’s father.

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This live-stream murder was one of the most notorious Chicago shootings this year

So far this year, 4,334 people have been shot in Chicago: one person every two hours. Almost all the victims have been black. The police have shot 25 people, virtually all armed or otherwise dangerous — less than .6 percent of the total. That disparity between civilian and police shootings hasn’t stopped local Black Lives Matter activists from continuing to claim that it’s the cops who are the biggest threat facing Chicago’s young black men today.

If there’s any silver lining to the violence, it will be if it acts as a wake-up call regarding the de-policing and decriminalization movements sweeping the country. Chicago is Exhibit A in what happens when the police back off from enforcing public order, having been told that maintaining control of the streets constitutes racial oppression.

Arrests are down 28 percent this year in the Windy City, the lowest since at least 2001, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, and less than half what they were in 2010. Drug arrests are down by half. Pedestrian stops were down 82 percent by early fall.

If the anti-cop activists and academics were correct, this drop in enforcement should have been a boon for minority areas. Those activists maintain, after all, that cops gratuitously harass residents there for insignificant behavior and throw harmless sad sacks in prison for possessing a joint’s worth of weed. The anti-cop forces particularly vilify Broken Windows policing — aimed at quality-of-life offenses like disorderly conduct, street drug trafficking and loitering.

These critics insist cops should focus instead on “serious crimes.” And they seem to have convinced Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson.

The department is de-emphasizing Broken Windows policing, Johnson told the Chicago Sun-Times over the weekend, to target what’s “really hurting Chicago right now, and this is the gun violence.” Making low-level narcotics arrests likely wouldn’t affect the gun violence, he said.

But that distinction between serious crime and an allegedly less urgent breakdown in public order is specious. The best way to get gangbangers under control is to maintain street order.

In Baltimore, drug arrests plummeted after the Freddie Gray anti-cop race riots in April 2015. Shootings exploded as a result. After the Obama Justice Department blasted the Baltimore Police Department in August 2016 for its practice of “clearing the corners” of large groups of teens, small business owners and residents in West Baltimore begged the cops to clear the corners again, because crime and drug-dealing had spiked so much.

And in Chicago, violence is at its highest level in years as cops second-guess themselves about questioning someone hanging out on a known drug corner at 1 a.m.

When cops walk past low-level forms of disorder, they send the message that the thugs control the streets. That’s why law-abiding residents of high-crime areas routinely beseech the cops to intervene.

Ideally, mothers and fathers would rein in their children and instill discipline and self-control. But in the absence of two-parent homes, it falls to the police to maintain civil society. Chicago will not put a lid on the growing violence until the police believe they’ll be supported in their mission of bringing public order to the thousands of upstanding, hard-working residents of the South and West Sides.

And if other law enforcement agencies continue the de-policing trend, which has produced a 14 percent spike in homicides this year in the 30 largest cities, Chicago levels of violence may become the new norm.

Heather Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “The War on Cops.”