David Keene at the Washington Times offers a piece on how strict enforcement of existing gun laws could help Chicago.
President Trump threatened last week to send the “feds” in to clean up Chicago if the city doesn’t do something to reduce the escalating murder rate that has made the gang-infested Windy City among the most dangerous metropolitan areas in the world. What the president doesn’t seem to realize is that he has the tools to deal with the crisis without so drastic a step.
Chicago has turned into a free-fire zone for gangbangers and other thugs not because Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the U.S. Justice Department during the Obama years lacked the resources and tools to deal with the problem, but because they refused to use them. The mayor and his defenders respond to those demanding action by attempting less successfully every day by trying to pass the buck. Mr. Emanuel claims the city doesn’t have enough money to hire more police officers and that if Mr. Trump wants to help, he ought to find a way to give him more. At the same time, he doubts even that will work because the real problem isn’t that the city is overrun with gangs and criminals or that his police force is demoralized and unable to do its job. Rather, it’s because Congress hasn’t passed the “common-sense” gun control laws he and President Obama sought as a magical way to solve the problems of a crime-ridden city.
Before leaving office, Mr. Obama and his Justice Department released a widely heralded but poorly documented report of abuses by Chicago police officers, blaming much of the current crisis on such abuses and the “loss of trust” in the police by Chicago residents. The mayor, seeing yet another opportunity to pass the buck, has said he will sign a federal consent decree that will further sap the morale of a department already on the verge of collapse. Doing so will only make matters worse.
The Manhattan Institute’s Heather McDonald, who has spent as much or more time than anyone in the country studying the effects of the demonization of police on the situation in Chicago and elsewhere, observed correctly in a recent Wall Street Journal piece that what Mr. Trump ought to do is recognize the almost purely local nature of policing, and “tear up the Chicago report and declare that the federal government stands behind proactive policing.”
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jan/30/a-gun-crime-tool-that-works/
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