Violence in Chicago: You Need To Do a Lot More Than That, Mayor Lightfoot

Here is an article about Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot’s plan to deal with violence in Chicago. It is of course ridiculous, with plenty of buzzwords that add up to nothing. (Empowering perpetrators? They already have too much power. Reclaiming neighborhoods ... by directing resources...? That’s just throwing money at the problem, which has already been done.) And here is a comment from someone at Instapundit named BillyS:

It sucks to be those kids [in the inner city], but you cannot fix the current system without a major upheaval and no one is ready for that now.

Exactly. We need a major upheaval to deal with the situation of blacks killing blacks, but the sort of upheaval we’d need is not at all what people like Lightfoot might imagine. Everything liberals and leftists want to help the situation – like defunding the police – is the exact opposite of what is needed. Basically, we need our elites to discourage blacks from engaging in criminal behavior, and this, of course, is never going to happen. Wanting the underclass to be criminals is what leftists push for, until (of course) they themselves are victimized by it (and sometimes not even then). They think that criminals are striking a blow against the system, when instead they are simply degrading and destroying their own neighborhoods.

Britain, as I understand it, eventually dealt with the soccer hooligan problem by threatening ten-year jail sentences for those arrested for such behavior. It soon enough dried up. The same could be done in Chicago. Simply say that anyone committing a crime with a gun gets an automatic ten-year jail sentence. My understanding is that the Dems don’t want this. (In particular, attorneys general in Democratic-run cities don’t want this; they want to be able to release these criminals back onto the streets as fast as they can.) They somehow think that gun-control laws would help the situation, even though Chicago already has them, yet gun violence still happens.

But regardless of whether my suggestion about ten-year jail sentences would work, discouraging criminal behavior is crucial. We know this will work because it works for Asian-Americans. But there is no Dem who wants to urge such a thing.

Comments

[John T]

Have you ever considered how, after sixty years of a Great Society where we've thrown tens of trillions of dollars at social inequity within our society we are now worse off then when we started?

What is the difference in the level of inner city violence today then in the '60s? Although I was only a youth, and perhaps influenced by a lack of reporting back then, it is my sense the destruction of inner-city families is really the root cause of the growth of violence.

If my assumption is valid, then no amount of money or jail time will actually make a difference. Gangs will grow to replace the loss young people feel during those critical formative years.