Mayor Rahm Emanuel Has Let the 'Ferguson effect' Destroy Chicago

The windy city’s crime rate is out of control this year with the “Ferguson effect” having a detrimental impact. There has been nearly 3,000 people shot and 516 have been murdered in 2016. Not to mention, gun homicides and non-fatal shooting have seen a 47% spike compared to the same period last year.

August was the worst month in homicides for Chicago. A police officer’s son was killed. A 71-year-old man was attacked while watering his lawn. A 10-year-old boy was shot while playing outside in front of his house. An 8-year-old girl was shot in the arm crossing the street. And the list of brutalities just goes on.

“The streets are gone,” said Dean Angelo, president of the Chicago police union to the Wall Street Journal. “There is no way out of this shooting spree.”

The lack of policing due to criticism and fear from the Black Lives Matter movement has made the city a much less safe place to live.

So how is Mayor Rahm Emanuel dealing with this problem? By surrendering to it.

In October 2015, Emanuel told U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a crime meeting in DC that the Chicago police were in a “fetal” position.

Evidently, things have gotten much worse in 2016. Angelo has said the police have lost control and criminals are ruling the city. Cops are now only “driving by people on the corners,” according to the police department president.

Ironically, Chicago is Obama’s hometown and Emanuel was his former White House Chief of Staff. But, Obama has only contributed to the problem by consistently accusing police of racially profiling blacks and Hispanics.

Because of this, police officers are being aggressively harassed on a regular basis. A Chicago Tribune reporter caught a group of teens taunting police officers for over an hour while investigating a shooting on the West Side.

Multiple gangs, including Vice Lords, Black Disciples and Four Corner Hustlers made a pact last month to assassinate Chicago officers.

“Where does this end?” said Angelo. “We’re in an unknown environment. We don’t know at what point in time the people in this city and the city council will stand up and say: ‘Enough is enough,’ so that cops feel that they have the support to be the police again.”

Angelo asks a good question and it should be directed to Mayor Emanuel whose poor leadership has cause Chicago to be in this position. Emanuel, a former senior advisor to Bill Clinton, should be taking action to reduce the crime, while motivating his police department. Instead, the department only feels a sense of hopelessness.  

In contrast former two-term New York City mayor, Rudy Giuliani was in a similar situation in the 1980s but his “get-tough” policies encouraging aggressive policing attributed to the major drop in crime rates in the 1990s. He is widely considered to have saved New York and brought it to greatness once again.

Emanuel “needs to make his police proactive, rather than reactive. He needs to have his police trained to prevent crime rather than just to react to crime after it’s over. To do that you’ve got to support them. To do that you have to have their back,” said Giuliani in July. “‘Cause what you’re telling them to do is you’re telling them to put themselves in the middle of extremely dangerous, complex situations where sometimes they can make a mistake. And he needs to do what I did, which is to tell all my police officers, I have your back. If you get in trouble, you are not going to be presumed guilty until you’re found innocent the way Barack Obama does.”

If Emanuel wants to save his city, he is going to have to take this advice. Unfortunately, this most likely won’t be the case, especially as long as democrats following Obama’s lead continue to side with the Black Lives Matter campaign.