News

Trump’s DOJ announces real help for Chicago, and a first blow to failed Obama-era ‘consent decree’

October 13, 2018 | | Print Article

The Department of Justice launched two initiatives this week that could potentially resolve Chicago’s violence epidemic, assuming liberal politicians don’t interfere.

Announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Friday, the first initiative involves funneling additional law enforcement resources to Chicago to enhance “public safety, security and order.”

These resources include five additional violent crime prosecutors who will serve on a still-to-be-formed Gun Crimes Prosecution Team that’ll be dedicated to “investigating and prosecuting gun cases from the most violent neighborhoods in Chicago,” according to a DOJ statement.

“Working with state and local law enforcement, this new unit will help ensure that Chicago’s most dangerous criminals are charged quickly after arrest and prosecuted, disrupting the cycle of violence in the neighborhoods most in need.”

The second initiative pertains to a widely criticized “consent decree” reached between the city and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois in 2015 that forced local police to restrain their activities and halt “stop-and-frisk” patrols on the basis that enforcing the law was abusive and racist.

“At a fundamental level, there is a misperception that police are the problem and that their failures, their lack of training, and their abuses create crime. But the truth is the police are the solution to crime, and criminals are the problem,” Sessions said Friday.

“The results of the ACLU settlement in November 2015  established this fact dramatically, conclusively, and most painfully for the City of Chicago. When police are restrained from using lawfully established policies of community engagement, when arrests went down, and when their work and character were disrespected, crime surged.”

True. A study by two University of Utah researchers published last spring revealed that homicides in Chicago spiked by 60 percent from 2015 to 2016 because of the “consent decree.”

“We conclude that, because of fewer stop and frisks in 2016, a conservative estimate is that approximately 236 additional homicides and 1115 additional shootings occurred that year,” the researchers wrote.

“A reasonable estimate of the social costs associated with these additional homicides and shootings is about $1,500,000,000. And these costs are concentrated in Chicago’s African-American and Hispanic communities.”

When then-U.S. Attorney in Chicago Zachary Fardon resigned from his post last year, he penned an open letter that seemed to confirm these findings.

“So cops stopped making stops,” he wrote of the decree’s aftermath. “And kids started shooting more — because they could, and because the rule of law, law enforcement, had been delegitimized. And that created an atmosphere of chaos.”

Yet despite these findings, leftist politicians and news leaders in Chicago remain fervently opposed to rolling back the Obama-era changes that had caused violence in the Windy City to escalate.

“Chicago doesn’t need or appreciate your drive-by assessment,” the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune wrote condescendingly to Sessions in an op-ed this week, adding that his initiatives would “sabotage” the trust that’s allegedly been built between local cops and minority neighborhoods because of the decree.

The facts on the ground and common sense both point to the board being wrong. So does the limited assessment on social media:

The assessment on social media is limited because barely anybody has actually read the column. The reaction to the DOJ’s announcement, on the other hand, was loud and unequivocally positive, save for a few select haters:

DONATE TO BIZPAC REVIEW

Please help us! If you are fed up with letting radical big tech execs, phony fact-checkers, tyrannical liberals and a lying mainstream media have unprecedented power over your news please consider making a donation to BPR to help us fight them. Now is the time. Truth has never been more critical!

$10
$15
$25
$50
Other
$
Success! Thank you for donating. Please share BPR content to help combat the lies.
Vivek Saxena
Latest posts by Vivek Saxena (see all)

Comment

We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.

PLEASE JOIN OUR NEW COMMENT SYSTEM! We love hearing from our readers and invite you to join us for feedback and great conversation. If you've commented with us before, we'll need you to re-input your email address for this. The public will not see it and we do not share it.

Latest Articles