IN CHICAGO EVEN YOUR DOG MIGHT BECOME A VICTIM OF 'SOCIAL JUSTICE'

No Safety in Chicago 

 

A daylight robbery highlights danger in urban crime wave. 

 

 

by Robert Stacy McCain

 

 

The American Spectator 

December 15, 2022

 

 

Chicago police Superintendent David Brown with Mayor Lori Lightfoot 

 

 

A 70-year-old woman was walking her dog in one of Chicago’s most affluent neighborhoods Wednesday when she was confronted by a masked stranger who pointed a pistol in her face and shouted, “Give me your f***ing purse or I’ll kill you and your f***ing dog, too.” She instantly complied, whereupon the robber grabbed her purse, reached in and took her car keys, flung the purse aside, and got into a blue Honda with three other accomplices. They rolled up the block to where the woman’s Jeep Grand Cherokee was parked, then two of the thieves exited the Honda and climbed into the woman’s Jeep, and both vehicles sped away.

 

 

It was all over in a matter of seconds, and this brazen daylight robbery in the Lincoln Park neighborhood took place at the exact same time that the chief of Chicago’s police department was downtown giving a media briefing about the arrest of four other criminals who were apprehended and charged in a recent spree of dozens of robberies. A few hours later, the son-in-law of the Lincoln Park victim called to tell me the story of the robbery, which was captured on surveillance video that was soon broadcast on local news programs on several Chicago stations.

“That’s it — we’re moving out of the city,” the son-in-law told me. Crime in Chicago is now so completely out of control that even in his neighborhood — where every home on the block is worth $1 million or more — nobody is safe. And the city’s relentless wave of terrifying violence will almost certainly get much worse next year, when the ironically named “SAFE-T Act” goes into effect.

Among other misguided “criminal justice reform” measures in the legislation, the SAFE-T Act (Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today Act) eliminates cash bail for nearly all felonies in Illinois. Rammed through the state’s Democrat-controlled legislature last year, the bill was hailed by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker as “a substantial step toward dismantling the systemic racism that plagues our communities, our state and our nation and brings us closer to true safety, true fairness and true justice.”

The SAFE-T Act, like other such “reform” measures advanced by Democrats across the country in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd riots, reflects a bizarre logic in which public safety must be destroyed for the sake of “social justice.” The first premise of this progressive syllogism seems to be that all criminals are black, and, because all black people are oppressed by “systemic racism” (the second premise of the syllogism), therefore turning criminals loose is “true fairness and true justice,” as Pritzker proclaimed. Notably omitted from this crude logic are the victims of crime, who in cities like Chicago are mostly black. Our own Chicago native R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., observed on a visit to the Windy City a few months ago: “Crime both petty and capital is 24/7. People are fleeing the city in a mob exit, and murder numbers last year were the worst in 25 years. Most of the killings are black on black. Where is the Black Lives Matter crowd when we need it?”

Of course, BLM evaporated amid a cloud of financial scandal, and its leadership was always too busy fomenting anti-police hatred to bother noticing the victims of criminal violence, black or otherwise. Yet, according to FBI statistics, of the nation’s nearly 15,000 homicide victims last year for whom race was reported, 58 percent — more than 8,500 — were black, even though black people are just 14 percent of the U.S. population. Further research demonstrates that black people are disproportionately overrepresented among victims of nearly every other crime — robbery, assault, etc. — and that the vast majority of those perpetrating these crimes against black people are also black. Confront any BLM-friendly “activist” type with such statistical evidence, however, and you will be told that black-on-black crime is a hateful myth. We are therefore required to ignore 8,500 black homicide victims annually, according to the warped logic of progressivism, and the grisly death toll continues to increase daily, while Democrats congratulate themselves on “dismantling the systemic racism that plagues our communities.”

Meanwhile, my friend in Chicago texted me Thursday morning to say his mother-in-law just got an inquiry from the nationally syndicated Inside Edition TV program. Why was she of such widespread media interest? She’s a Chicago native who moved to Wisconsin after her retirement and was visiting the city to do some holiday shopping with her daughter (i.e., my friend’s wife). She brought along her dog and, after parking down the block from her daughter’s home, decided to walk the dog before going inside. This was when the gang of robbers struck. My friend speculates that the gang must have been staking out the neighborhood, “looking for an easy target,” when they spotted her parking her $50,000 Jeep SUV.

Caught on video from the neighbor’s surveillance camera, what made this a story that the media couldn’t resist was simple — the dog. If you watch the video, you see that, at one point, the gunman pointed his pistol at the woman’s dog, and concern for an elderly woman’s pet has a built-in audience appeal that TV producers spotted immediately. More than 700 people have been murdered in Chicago this year, and another 2,800 wounded by gunfire, a crime wave ignored by most of the national media, but let a robber point his gun at a woman’s dog — hey, that’s news!

Well, my friend doesn’t intend to stick around Chicago much longer. He’s now planning to move to the suburbs, although he won’t rule out relocating to Florida, where his parents are retired. Better to live anywhere else than to be murdered in Chicago, a city where even your dog might become a victim of “social justice.”