For yet another year, the black Democratic mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, has proven again that she doesn’t really believe that “Black Lives Matter.”
The Windy City, under her ‘leadership,’ finished 2022 with another staggering pile of dead bodies, most of whom were victims of black-on-black homicide, as well as lawlessness on the city’s streets.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, “Chicago will end the year with at least 723 people murdered, a 13% decrease from last year but still more than any other American city.”
What’s more, “Overall the number of reported crimes has risen by more than 12% from last year, unnerving residents, sending some businesses packing and complicating the city’s efforts to recover from the economic crisis brought on by the COVID-19 outbreak.”
Oh, and carjackings were up 95 percent in 2022 when contrasted with motor vehicle theft in 2021, while theft was up 50 percent, burglary was up 10 percent, and robbery was up 10 percent.
So much for Lightfoot’s ‘successful’ crime initiative, “Our City Our Safety.” Obviously, feel-good slogans don’t protect people.
Lightfoot spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on “anti-violence efforts,” according to the paper, while also deploying more police officers to the city’s most violent beats. But nothing worked.
Why? Maybe it’s because criminals don’t really fear being caught in Chicago, given that Cook County prosecuting attorney Kim Foxx is a George Soros “soft on crime/criminal justice reform” plant who, like all other Soros plants, refuses to get tough even on career criminals because it’s “racist” (yes, she’s black).
The paper added:
Thefts, including those targeting vehicles, have spiked while burglaries and robberies have also climbed. Carjackings, which pushed police to launch a specialized task force, fell by 14% but are still being committed at a near-record clip after surging in 2020.
Federal money that has helped fund many of the city’s public safety initiatives is expected to dry up in the coming years. That means the winner of next year’s mayoral election will have some tough decisions to make: How to keep addressing the root causes of violence while also funding a police department that is facing serious staffing issues and costly court-ordered reforms.
“We have a much longer way to go,” Susan Lee, the former deputy mayor for public safety who was the architect of Lightfoot’s signature initiative, told the Sun-Times.
You think?
Incredibly, Lee implored Chicagoans to take what they get in terms of good news, saying that they should at least be thankful that gun homicides are trending downward. However, she had to admit that whatever progress had been made was quickly reversed as violence from historically troubled neighborhoods in Chicago’s south and west sides spread to other, traditionally calm and productive parts of the city, such as the Loop.
“[We] should not be patting ourselves on the back when the … absolute number of shootings and homicides is so high that people are afraid to do their daily functions,” said Lee, who now serves as the chief strategy and policy officer for the violence prevention group Chicago CRED. “We are still in a crisis.”
Other left-wing ‘experts’ were quick to credit Lightfoot despite the fact that more people were killed in her city last year than in some war zones around the world.
“It’s a decline, and it’s significant,” crime data analyst Jeff Asher, whose Datalytics website tracks homicide data from cities across the nation, told the Sun-Times. “Not every city saw declines. Not every city saw declines as big as Chicago, which still has a lot of murders and shootings.”
Translation: ‘Be glad that murders, as bad as they are in Chicago, didn’t get worse. Take what you get. Be happy with that.”
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Lightfoot will leave behind a city in worse shape than when she inherited it. But because she is black, gay, and a Democrat, she’ll never be held accountable for failing by the political and media establishments.
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